Monosnap is a free utility for OS X and Windows that can quickly and easily capture screenshots and save them for editing and annotation, ideal for grabbing images for documentation or publishing to social media streams.

The included editing tools are basic but adequate with the usual circles, rectangles, crop, line capability but also and importantly for screen capture a blur tool for obscuring passwords or other areas with sensitive information.

Example Screenshot showing editing tools

Unlike most of the apps of this type though Monosnap has a power feature for bloggers and potential YouTubers, the ability to record a video of the screen including a lower thirds capture of your webcam to add narration with video to give your video tutorials a personal touch. The area captured can be adjusted to cover just the window or application required or expanded to record the whole screen if required.

Monosnap supports a variety of options for storing images to a number of cloud storage services including Amazon S3, Dropbox, Box.com but this requires a $4.99 in app purchase. Depending on your needs and workflow this might be something you would find useful but personally I am happy to save to my desktop for subsequent upload to Wordpress and don’t see much benefit in this facility. YMMV.

All in though this is a decent app and if you are looking for a way to dip your toes into creating video tutorials its really a no brainer to try out before spending on the more complex and costly solutions such as Screenflow and Camtasia.