gInk is a quick and easy screen annotation app

GInk is an open-source Windows application which allows drawing and annotating your screen, then saving the results. The program is a handy way to highlight elements of a screenshot for presentations or demonstrations, or maybe to attach a quick note to a particular area of the screen.

Getting started is easy. There’s no installation required, you can run the program, tap the system tray icon and draw on the screen immediately.

A toolbar at the bottom of the screen enables choosing alternative pens and colors. This looks basic -- there’s no interface to set colors or line widths -- but there’s more here than you’d expect. Drawing works with touch screens and has pen pressure support, and you can tweak colors by editing an INI file.

Made a mistake? GInk has you covered. There’s an Undo tool to remove the last step, an Erase button wipes a specific element, or tapping Clear wipes the entire canvas so you can start again.

Screen annotation tools generally work by displaying a transparent form over the screen, blocking access to the windows underneath. This can be a problem, but gInk makes it easier to handle by offering a click-through mode. Turn this on, the annotations remain, but you can click on buttons or links on the screen and they’ll work as usual.

When you’re finished, tap the Snapshot icon, draw a freehand rectangle around the area you’d like to capture, and it’s automatically saved to the destination folder. There’s no option to save the full screen, or to choose the export file name or folder (other than by another INI file), but that does at least keep operations simple.

Overall, gInk doesn’t have many features, but that’s what you’d expect for version 0.41 and a 282KB download. The functions on offer work well, there are already options you don’t always get elsewhere -- Undo, Eraser, click-through mode -- and it’s so easy to use you’ll have it figured out within five minutes. Take a look.

GInk is available for Windows 7 and later.