The Visual Lounge lets you find out about TechSmith behind-the-scenes. Watch screencasts and videos from other customers, meet up with your fellow TechSmith users and staff, and get more tips and tricks!

You may have noticed that almost every blog post I write includes a picture, screenshot or some sort of graphic. And, I've used SnagIt in some way for just about every one of those images for the blog. Blog posts with images are more interesting and enable better communication. One of my favorite bloggers, Kathy Sierra, talks here about the value and science of why words plus pictures help with effective communication. And, Kathy talks here about why you should add graphics to your blog, book or presentation plus why people pay attention and respond to graphics.

I think we're all in agreement about how valuable visual communication is. On those lines, I was so happy to see that Rick Strahl (that's his pic below) has built a SnagIt Screen Capture Plugin for Windows Live Writer (Windows Live Writer is an app for composing blog posts)! He even makes the plugin and code available on his blog. He's done all the work so you don't have to!

Here's a pic from Rick's blog showing what the SnagIt plugin looks like inside of Windows Live Writer.

Rick used SnagIt's COM Server which makes it easy to incorporate SnagIt functionality into your application. You can out more about it here.

You can read more from Rick on his blog here. Looks like he's out in Hawaii. I think I need to head out there to do a screencast with him! :-)

Has anyone else used SnagIt's COM Server to add SnagIt's screen capture functionality in your app?