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Scribble on your PC/Mac screen with these annotation tools

     While you are in a presentation or hosting a webinar, you might want to write/highlight a part of your screen to draw the attention of your audience on something important. Although you can use the tools from powerpoint to scribble in the PPT file, you might want to write something on other apps as well.
     That's where these awesome apps come into play. Although these apps have similar features, you might prefer one above the other.
  1. ZoomIt:

          ZoomIt is an application developed by Microsoft which can be installed from the following link. It is a free tool with features like Text, Shapes, whiteboard, blackboard, zoom. When activated, the tool converts the current screen into a static image and allows you to draw/write on it. One the tool is activated, you can also choose to create a whiteboard/blackboard screen on your PC to draw on. Although the colors are limited to 6 colors: Red(R), Green(G), Blue(B), Orange(O), Yellow(Y), Pink(P), it should be more than enough in a normal scenario. You can change the thickness of your line or height of your text simply by using the scroll.

         In addition to the drawing tools, ZoomIt also allows you to zoom in to a particular portion of a screen. I personally do not use this feature a lot as it pixelates the screen while zooming. But this definitely can be useful at situations where you have small text/images. There are 2 types of zoom abilities, 1-fixed zoom, 2-live zoom with scroll button.

  2. Epic Pen:

         Epic Pen is a tool similar to ZoomIt. There are both free and paid versions of the tool. The free version is limited with pen and eraser tool. The paid version has all the features which include Text, Shapes, and whiteboard. Epic Pen has almost all the features of ZoomIt except the zoom and break features. With Epic Pen, you can switch between drawing mode and windows cursor mode.
         Although I personally prefer ZoomIt over Epic Pen. But one of the features that ZoomIt is missing is the ability to switch between the draw mode and regular cursor.
  3. FlySketch:

         FlySketch is a screen annotation tool for Apple users. It works only on Mac OS X 10.6 or later. This is a free tool developed by Flying Meat. I have a windows PC, so I'm not very familiar with the features of this tool. But the video on their website should give you a good idea of the capabilities of this tool. In addition to all the features of ZoomIt and Epic Pen, it also has features like shadow, stroke and more.
        I think Flysketch is the best tool out of all the three, but I wish it was available for Windows users.

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