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macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

sal.dev

81–90 of 332 posts

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#81

Oh my goodness thank you so much macOS for giving us a set of awesome screenshot tools and a way to edit them immediately in Preview.app. (Capture to clipboard, then command-N in Preview defaulting to new-from-clipboard.) It’s so blisteringly effective to grab a portion of the screen, draw on it, copy the whole thing again and paste it to a coworker in chat or a task tool. I recently discovered that with my trusty Lo…

It’s so blisteringly effective to grab a portion of the screen, draw on it, copy the whole thing again and paste it to a coworker in chat or a task tool. You can make it even faster by cutting out the Preview step. When the thumbnail of the screenshot appears in the lower-right corner of the screen, click it, and then you can use Markup to annotate the image right there, and then share it as needed. Since I don't hav…

You say share as needed, but I’ve not found a great way to just grab it to the clipboard or get the file handle from there.

My go to workaround is to screenshot, annotate, screenshot the annotation tool into clipboard and paste that. (I know)

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#82
post #45

Here is a key sequence I use very often. It takes a screenshot of a chosen window without the window's shadow. - First, type command + shift + 4 (the mouse pointer turns into crosshair). - Then type the space bar (the crosshair turns into a camera icon). - Hover the mouse pointer (a camera icon now), to highlight the chosen window. - Finally, hold the option key and click. This sounds like a lot of steps but it becom…

What does holding option do?

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literally the definition of "hidden behind a keyboard shortcut" - you have to be told or lookup CMD+Shift-5 before you can get to the full screenshot UI. It's been a while since I first used MacOS, but I don't remember it telling me how to do that.

How do you want them to inform you other than RTFM and word of mouth? Do you want constant buttons on screen at all times for every possible OS-level functionality?

are you not familiar with the concept of onboarding? Many websites and apps have this tour thing that highlight things that user haven't used, when appropriate.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#85
post #45

Here is a key sequence I use very often. It takes a screenshot of a chosen window without the window's shadow. - First, type command + shift + 4 (the mouse pointer turns into crosshair). - Then type the space bar (the crosshair turns into a camera icon). - Hover the mouse pointer (a camera icon now), to highlight the chosen window. - Finally, hold the option key and click. This sounds like a lot of steps but it becom…

What does holding option do?

It removes the shadow around the window.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#86
post #45

Here is a key sequence I use very often. It takes a screenshot of a chosen window without the window's shadow. - First, type command + shift + 4 (the mouse pointer turns into crosshair). - Then type the space bar (the crosshair turns into a camera icon). - Hover the mouse pointer (a camera icon now), to highlight the chosen window. - Finally, hold the option key and click. This sounds like a lot of steps but it becom…

What does holding option do?

I think that's the part that removes the shadow.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#88
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so blisteringly effective to grab a portion of the screen, draw on it, copy the whole thing again and paste it to a coworker in chat or a task tool. You can make it even faster by cutting out the Preview step. When the thumbnail of the screenshot appears in the lower-right corner of the screen, click it, and then you can use Markup to annotate the image right there, and then share it as needed. Since I don't hav…

You say share as needed, but I’ve not found a great way to just grab it to the clipboard or get the file handle from there. My go to workaround is to screenshot, annotate, screenshot the annotation tool into clipboard and paste that. (I know)

The two ways I do it are:

1. If the program I'm trying to share with is available in the Share control, I use that.

2. Since I already have a Screenshots folder in my dock that displays as a fan, and is sorted by most recently added, I click "done" on the annotated screenshot, then I can click on that folder in the dock, and it's right there, ready to be dragged into any other application.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#90
post #25

I recommend against changing the format from png to jpg. The sample shows a picture of a dog, but most screenshots should be of applications (having a limited color palette) and must of the time the goal is readability (jpg compression drastically reduces text clarity relative to png)

> (having a limited color palette) With translucency and soft gradients everywhere I’m not sure how true that is anymore.

PNG should be just as good at gradients as it is at constant color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Filt...

It can encode the difference to the previous pixel either up or above (or some combination). In purely horizontal or vertical gradients that's just as efficient as encoding constant color (and in fact, the Wikipedia page shows an example). For gradients in other directions, it depends on how homogeneous the slope is (because it will zip the diff to the previous pixel, i.e. the slope).

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