MICE Scribble

The desktop is a lot more than just a place to store all shortcuts, and handle windows. Your workspace can also become a writing pad, or canvas in order to exemplify specific situations a bit better. Sure enough, specialized applications are required to draw on your desktop, and with MICE Scribble you can do this in an effortless manner.

On the bright side, the application skips you the whole effort of pressing a few “Next” buttons to make it work, giving you a chance to check out the set of features from the moment download is done. This allows it to be used on multiple computers directly from a USB flash drive, without having any impact on stability, since registry entries are not modified.

When launched, the application minimizes to the tray area, but a prompt shows up on your screen to let you know it’s there. In fact, it doesn’t really come with its own interface, but merely quickly turns your cursor into a brush so you can draw directly on anything that’s on your screen, without messing up your work.

Drawing needs to be enabled from the corresponding tray icon, and it’s not triggered automatically on launch. The left mouse button is used to draw, while the right one changes colors, with a tag letting you know what tone you’re using.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any preset shapes, or objects you can quickly add, and it would have been useful to at least be able to use arrows to create tutorials, or point out to specific parts of the screen.

Note that the only way to disable drawing mode is to hit the Escape key, but once you turn off drawing mode, all of your work is discarded, with no option to save. In case you need to export a picture, this needs to be done in correlation with the default Print Screen function.

Bottom line is that tools like MICE Scribble are neat ways of creating tutorials, or simply turning plain presentations, into interactive ones. Unfortunately, the set of features here leaves more to be desired, with no possibility to save pictures automatically, and all changes discarded when drawing is turned off.