by on October 1, 2010 Leave a Comment

Screen Captures and Annotations easily in OS X

I’m a big fan of taking screenshots as a form of communication. It’s generally way easier to take a screenshot of an error message and paste it into an email then type it in.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s pretty simple to do this with Grab and the built in keyboard shortcuts in OS X. Grab is great for taking a screenshot. Often times, I need to make some markup in the screenshot to highlight a particular area. Grab doesn’t let me do this.

I just came across a new application called Skitch which allows me to take screenshots, add comments to them and easily share them online. Best of all, it’s free. Rather than have me try to explain how cool it is, check out this quick 3 minute video they created showing how powerful this tool is.

by on July 12, 2010 3 Comments

Saving System Screen Shots to a Specific Folder

When you use the keyboard shortcuts to take screen grabs in OS X the default is to save them to the Desktop. If you are like me and you use these keys a lot, your desktop will quickly become crowded. What you need to do is change the default folder for screen shots.

I don’t know why this isn’t a System Preference but it’s pretty simple to change the defaults with a little Terminal-fu.

1. Open an OS X Terminal (Go to Utilities->Terminal)
2. Inside the terminal, issue the following command

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /DESTINATION

where DESTINATION is the directory you wish to save to.

3. Logout and Log back in.

So, for example, if you create a Screenshots folder inside the Pictures directory your command would look like this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots

That’s all there is to it. If you have any interesting system tweaks, let us know in the comments.

by on July 12, 2010 Leave a Comment

Easily grab screen shots from your screen

OS X Grab Screen CaptureThere are two ways you can grab screen shots from OS X. Through the use of built in shortcuts and by using the Grab utility.  I use this feature all the time when taking screenshots for Learning OS X. I’m also constantly using it to send images of error screens to customer support. It’s a great utility, it’s free and once you make it part of your arsenal, I guarantee you will use it on a regular basis.

The system short cuts for taking screen captures are

  • Shift+⌘+3 to take a picture of the entire screen and save to a file
  • Shift+Ctrl+⌘+3 to take a picture of the entire screen and save to the clipboard
  • Shift+⌘+4 to take a picture of a rectangular area and save to a file
  • Shift+Ctrl+⌘+4 to take a picture of a rectangular area and save to the clipboard

When they images are saved to a file, they are saved as a PDF or TIFF file to the desktop

I generally use the Control modifier to save them to the clipboard and then open Preview, paste them into the preview window and save the file.

Grab on the other hand is a Utility that you launch to allow you to take screen captures. There are a few cases where Grab is better for making screen captures then the system shortcuts.

  • Grab lets you decide whether or not to include the cursor when you take a screen capture. If you are using the OS X system screen capture, the cursor is hidden
  • Grab also lets you take delayed pictures of your desktop. This is useful if you need to setup a state before grabbing the image. You can do this by pressing Shift+⌘+Z

There you have it, two simple ways to grab beautiful screen captures from OS X. If you have any cool uses of Grab, let us know in the comments.