Screenshots

8 comments

Doing a screenshot is a very useful tool where you can use the captures to show off your friends your desktop, showing where things are, and especially here on deafmac.org where I do screenshots to show the power of Macs.

Of course it has to be easy otherwise we don’t bother using it (yes, I’m eyeing at you, Mr. Sano).

With a Mac, there are THREE (3) favors to do a screen capture:

[COMMAND] – [SHIFT] + 3
Your entire desktop is captured.
[COMMAND] – [SHIFT] + 4
Your mouse cursor becomes a crosshair allowing you to pick any area to capture.
[COMMAND] – [SHIFT] + 4 + [SPACEBAR]
Your mouse becomes a crosshair then a digital camera icon where it allows you to capture any windows (it perfectly captures its height and width).

For the first capture, it gets saved to your Desktop as “Picture 1″ in PNG format. For the second capture, it will be saved as “Picture 2″ and so on.

EDIT: Starting with Snow Leopard (10.6), it changed the file naming conventions where pictures will be saved to your Desktop as “Screen shot 2010-01-09 at 1-9-10 – 9.16.37 AM”

Have fun!

8 comments

8 Comments

Comments

Nov 21, 2007
3:10 pm

#1 Tayler :

Not a week passes that I don’t use one of the above commands. I agree, it’s quite useful :)

Side note: it was surprising to learn recently that a long-time Windows user didn’t know about the application switcher. I wonder who in the Mac world doesn’t know about this nifty and useful productivity feature? I cannot imagine life without it :)

Nov 21, 2007
7:18 pm

#2 csano :

I hate you guys. :)

Nov 23, 2007
3:28 pm

#3 Tayler :

csano, you have a MBP :)

Nov 24, 2007
10:42 pm

#4 DeafNYC :

Well these are actually very common capture commands that many Mac users are familiar with – I have used them since Mac OS 8..

Nov 25, 2007
12:35 pm

#5 Chad W. Taylor :

@DeafNYC: You will be surprised that a lot of people, even long-time Mac users, weren’t familiar with the capture commands. In most cases, they knew about the commands but never knew about the Window capture command.

Additionally, a lot of people are switching to a Mac and this Screenshot will confirm that they made the right decision to use a Mac. :)

Nov 27, 2007
2:34 pm

#6 Aaron Stribling :

@Chad: Don’t forget to mention about the Grab.app (located in /Applications/Utilities). :)

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh364.html
(This link is for 10.4– odd I couldn’t find the manual for 10.5)

Dec 7, 2007
4:12 pm

#7 ursula :

this qq has nothing to do with the screenshots…my old roomie had a mac that wld snap pic of whoever tries to break into your laptop…i was amazed at the idea but i cldnt figure how i cld set that up?