Built-in OS X Functionality

• Command + Shift + 3

  This keystroke results in a full screenshot and saves the resulting file as a PNG, to your desktop. The file is named with the date and time it was captured.

• Command + Shift + 4

  Pressing these keys initially brings up a cross hair on screen that displays the coordinates of the cursor. Click and drag to select the area you want to capture. When you release the mouse button, the capture will be saved to the desktop as previously mentioned.

  If you press the spacebar while the crosshairs are visible, it changes into a camera icon that you can position over a specific window that you may wish to capture. (That window must be visible when you initiate the keystroke.)

  During both modes you may hold the Control key at the time of capture. Doing so will save the resulting shot to the clipboard rather than a file on the desktop.

Grab

The Grab application resides in the /Applications/Utilities folder. It’s pretty simplistic, and essentially duplicates the functionality of the built-in OS X feature, albeit, with a couple of small differences. After you’ve taken the screenshot, it is displayed for you to review at which time you must explicitly save it, if it is indeed what you wanted. This also allows you to choose where you’re going to save the file. There’s a Preferences window where you can choose from eight cursor images to be captured in the resulting image. Otherwise, things are pretty much the same. The keystrokes are different, as you’ll see next.

• Command + Shift + A

  This keystroke results in a crosshair on screen that displays the coordinates of the cursor. Click and drag to select the area you want to capture.

• Command + Shift + W

  This keystroke allows you to move windows around to select the one you’d like to capture.

• Command + Z

  This keystroke results in a full screenshot.

• Command + Shift  + Z

  This keystroke results in a full screenshot after a 10 second timer elapses.

Skitch

Skitch is developed by the rockstars at Plasq. It’s super powerful and really easy to use. You get to edit size, crop, draw nondestructively, there’s multi-format export, web upload, copy to clipboard, review history and much more. The best part is, it’s 100% free to use!

• Command + Shift + 5

  Pressing this keystroke brings up the (now familiar) crosshairs to select the region of the screen you wish to capture. The image is then opened into Skitch for further editing and use — this is the same for each key combo.

• Command + Shift + 6

  This keystroke results in a full screen capture.

• Command + Shift + 7

  This keystroke brings up a frame that you can resize to capture a portion of the screen. Initially this may seem to be the same as the crosshair — the difference is, the frame retains its dimensions each time, allowing you to capture uniform shots multiple times.

LittleSnapper

LittleSnapper is developed by RealMac Software. It approaches screenshots from an iPhoto perspective, allowing you to catalog, group, and tag your shots for later use. There’s a built-in browser for grabbing all or a portion of a webpage. The export feature allows you to save a webpage to a PDF file, or any screen capture to multiple image formats. There’s also an editor for tweaking the shots once you’ve captured them. With all this functionality comes a price — it’s $39. There’s also a free trial to see if it’s a good fit for you.

• Command + Option + 3

  This keystroke produces a full screen capture. Once captured, it is loaded into the LittleSnapper gallery for further editing and use — this behavior is consistent with all key combos.

• Command + Shift + Option + 3

  Similar to Grab, this gives you a short timer before the full screen image is captured.

• Command + Option + 4

  This keystroke gives you the crosshairs to choose the region of the screen to capture.

• Command + Option + 5

  This keystroke captures a specific window on screen. At least a portion of the window must be visible before initiating the keystroke.

So depending on your screenshot needs, there’s an app for that (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). The built-in tools are great and produce nice results. I personally opt for Skitch almost daily as it provides the level of control I need, but can see where something like LittleSnapper would be ideal for the designer types. There are plenty of other options out there too, if you want to get your Google on. But hopefully we’ve armed you with a little more knowledge today, to get that perfect screenshot the next time you need one.

The screens show a number of usability enhancements, such as the “Put Back” feature that’s been added to the trash bin (similar to “Restore” for Windows users), improvements to Quick Look, and the new, much-talked about QuickTime X interface, mock-ups of which have been posted before by sites like AppleInsider. The concept graphics proved to be fairly accurate representations of what it really looks like, with more of a chrome-less black viewer interface, so that even in windowed mode, videos now look more like they do during full-screen playback in version 7.6.

As mentioned, Quick Look improvements are also upcoming. It looks like previews will appear directly in the Finder window, and will have advanced options for some more interactive file formats like PDF documents and videos. The Finder will also get an icon size slider in the bottom right-hand of all windows, which is a lot more convenient than going through an options menu like you have to do right now, speaking as someone who takes a lot of screenshots of app icons.

Finally, a number of new “Services” menu options are available, which, judging by their names, will have me actually using it for the first time ever. “Look Up in Dictionary” and “Search in Google” are two in particular which I predict will be very handy. “Reveal” to locate a file in Finder is another nice trick that should’ve been there to begin with. They may not reveal much, but these screens are definitely whetting my appetite for the real 10.6.

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ScreenSteps goes even further by creating a place to share your work with the community at ScreenSteps Live (something aking to “Flickr for Lessons”). A quick example is this brief lesson on how to create/update a Pages table of contents. Lessons can be tagged (gotta love this semantic web of ours) and can be made private (feature coming soon).

Despite the application being available for both Mac and Windows platforms, the developers did a great job making ScreenSteps 2 “fit in” on both, though they seem to have a definite affinity for OS X.

ScreenSteps 2 comes in Free, Standard ($39.95) and Pro ($59.95) options and ScreenSteps Live is completely free, with a paid/ad-free option coming in the near future.

If you have any experience with ScreenSteps 2 or ScreenSteps Live definitely drop a note in the comments.

[Via Sean Sperte's Geek & Mild blog.]

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Jing’s image editor is lightyears away from being as awesome as that of Skitch, so beyond the ability to grab a screen capture, there’s little similarity. However like the MySkitch service, you can quickly upload your pictures and video to an online storage service. The video capture function seems slightly limited, in that you select a part of your screen, and [from what I could tell] it doesn’t allow the option to follow your cursor around. Additionally, the video is compressed into a .swf Flash format. That’s ok for embedding in websites, but limiting if you want to do much else with it.

Limitations aside, Jing is a really nice collection of tools and services for those who want to produce screencasts and take screen captures to share easily. Jing is available for both Windows and OS X. For now it’s free, but based on this quote,

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else.

I’m weary of a bait-and-switch down the road. Ok, maybe bait-and-switch is a bit of a harsh term. Likely this method of product offering is just a good way to determine product and service placement for future projects. But I read it as the service not remaining in this format forever, but only for the data-collection period. Anyway, my conspiracy theory be darned, it’s worth a try.

On a side note, I’ve got a handful of Skitch invites if anyone wants them. Email me. I’ll post whenever I get more, but for now they’re all gone.

Oh, and incidentally, I still used Skitch to grab/post the Jing graphic for this post.
hahaha

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UPDATE: I guess in my excitement, I jumped the gun a tad:My apologies! The update and goodness I wrote below is – at the moment – intended for the private beta users only. But hang tight, as a little birdie has told me that good news on a more widespread basis is not far off…

One of my recently most favorite things, Skitch, received an update today. There are some interface enhancements and a new application icon. I’ve just begun playing with it, but as I’ve mentioned before, it’s nearly perfect, so I don’t expect the updates to be glaring.

The bigger news is that Skitch is soon to be in Public Beta, but until then, will be in Semi-Public Beta, meaning current users will have the ability to pass out the love. I haven’t seen this on my end just yet, but that’s the news from Colin Devroe, so I’m waiting patiently…

Check out the website in the meantime for an updated video demonstration of Skitch.

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