Scott Hansleman talked about Cropper during his GrokTalk at TechEd. It is also listed on his Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List now. The video of the GrokTalk should be available soon at the GrokTalk site. There are also a number of other good videos posted there. Some are live on the site, the others should be there soon.

First off, wow, thanks for the recognition Scott. I had no idea this thing would be so popular. Second, I still give props to Jeff Key. Besides being a great guy and local fellow developer, he writes some great apps and Cropper was originally inspired while using his Ruler app.

Now I guess this means I need to devote a little more time to finishing up the next version. It has remained in beta for a while now with a number of different ideas and suggestions floating around in my head. A few good ones have come from users and others are features I wanted to add or change. One of which is making it a bit more configurable since not everyone uses it the way I was using it when I wrote it.

Another area I plan to improve on is performance. I liked the idea of capturing a section of the screen to AVI video, but I have not had the time to really do it right. I also do not want to stray to far from its original, simple purpose.

I am also looking into making the painting of the main window more performant. I have seen that it can be a little jerky when resizing on slower PCs. The opacity of the form is the main culprit.

A new feature I am working on now is post capture processing. It is also plug-in based and will allow (at release, with more to come) adding a drop shadow to the image, suitable for posting to the web with a smart looking drop shadow already built in.

I also have a few other super-secret ideas…

More info on Cropper >>