If you ever do presentations or demos where you are displaying your screen to others, a really useful feature is the ability to mark up or write directly on your screen to draw attention to certain areas. While a lot of commercial programs offer this functionality, a lightweight alternative which does basically the same thing is ZoomIt.

ZoomIt is a free utility which allows you to capture an image of your screen (via customizable hot-keys) and in real time, draw, type or zoom directly on the captured screen image. The really handy part is the capture process is seamless as no external program is opened. By pressing ESC you “unfreeze” the screen and all the markup disappears. This is extremely handy for doing presentations, especially if you use a tablet PC.

ZoomIt also offers a timer function where your computer can have a countdown. This would be useful if you wanted to do a presentation with interactive user exercises.

Either way, this is an extremely handy utility which doesn’t even need to be installed to run. Just double click it and go.