Screen Shots With Panache

On Monday, I talked about various ways to take screenshots in OS X. I have to admit, I’ve been holding one back on you. Both Grab and the screenshot keystroke techniques are useful, but they do have their limitations. You need to remember keystrokes, or go find Grab and open it, you have to be willing to use .png images, etc.

My all-time favorite screenshot technique is actually a Dashboard widget called Screenshot Plus.

This glossy little widget has buttons (left to right) for taking a full-screen shot, a timed full-screen shot, a window shot, a shot of the Dashboard, and a section shot - all the same techniques from Monday in a petite, convenient widget. The real magic, however shows when you flip the widget around to the back by clicking the little “i” button.

This widget has a lot of powerful options hiding out under the hood. Each of the triangles you see here is actually a drop-down menu. In order from top to bottom:

• You can select to save files to the hard drive or the clipboard after they’re taken.
• If they’re saved to the hard drive, you can select which folder they are saved to. (This option is grayed out if you have selected the clipboard option)
• You can also have an image imported directly to the application of your choice.
• If you’ve selected to save an image to the hard drive, this option allows you to choose whether to display it as a preview before saving, save directly to your chosen directory, import directly to your chosen application, or save it and import it. If you’ve chosen to save the screenshot to the clipboard instead, this line just reminds you that command-V will paste it for you.
• You can choose whether images are formated as .png, .tiff, .jpg, .jp2, .pdf, .gif, .bmp, or .pict

If you’re not already downloading this widget to play with, I’ve got one last feature to make you drool. When you’ve got the widget set to preview an image before saving it, the widget changes to look like this (note my lovely screenshot of Apple’s calculator widget!):

After you take the screenshot, the widget morphs into this preview mode. The icons across the top allow you to reject the screen shot, try again, save the screenshot to the designated spot on your drive, or import it to your designated application. That circle hovering above the calculator and distorting the image is actually a magnifying glass. You can move the magnifying glass around with your mouse to inspect the mini-preview of the shot you just took. To change the magnification level, just click in the middle of the glass and scoot your mouse around to make the magnified preview bigger or smaller.

That wraps us up for the week - have a great weekend!