Tencent Challenges Skitch with a Free Screenshot and Annotation App for Mac

Chinese web and social giant Tencent (HKG:0700) is showing the Mac some serious lovin’ these days, launching its second app for OS X this month. This time it’s a screenshot and annotation utility called Snip.

The free Snip app – which supports both English and Chinese – combines some of the screen-snapping usefulness of premium apps like LittleSnapper, with the nice-looking annotating and writing tools of something like Skitch (now owned by Evernote).

The Snip page says it supports “Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher” but my machine, running that exact version of Snow Leopard, was unable to install it, so it seems like it’s actually for 10.7+ only. For that reason, I wasn’t able to test it out, and had to make do with Tencent’s video demos instead.

Snip touts itself as doing three principal things: allowing you to make notes on screenshots with colourful text and shapes (pictured above); autodetecting windows so that you can easily screenshot just one particular app (though hitting command-shift-4-space in sequence does that natively in OS X anyway); and it can cleverly auto-upload a screenie into the QQ Mail web app if it’s open already (both those pictured below). Perhaps in future it’ll get some better social sharing support, but for now version 1.0 looks pretty strong with those three core features.

Earlier this month, Tencent brought its popular QQBrowser to the Mac, making it the first Chinese-made browser to ever hit OS X.

Grab Snip app, so long as you’re on Mac OS 10.7 or even 10.8, from its new homepage where there are also three demo videos. It’ll be added to the Mac App Store soon, but hasn’t landed there yet.

Tencent's free Snip app can auto-detect a window/app (above); and it can auto-upload into the QQ Mail web app (below):