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macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

sal.dev

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Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#172

I swear, I have zero understanding of why Mac users are so delighted when they discover previously-unknown features. These features should be easily discoverable . But maybe I'm missing a trick. Maybe there's a deliberate effort in Apple to make only a minimal viable subset of features easily discoverable. Maybe some features have their documentation hidden a little deeper. And maybe accidental discovery gives Mac us…

Easy to use technologies are simple. Powerful technologies are not.

Apple’s trick is to make powerful things seem simple. They do this by, basically, hiding a lot of features. This makes it easy for unsophisticated users to get going. And power users are willing put in the effort to learn more (that’s what defines a power user).

Apple is hardly alone in this. The “full-page screenshot” feature of Chrome is hidden like 3 clicks deep inside the inspector.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#173

windows has the best screenshot shortcut and it saves to clipboard it's so much faster

1) Are you going to share the shortcut? 2) macOS does the clipboard thing (helluva chord): shift + ctrl + cmd + 4

Win+shift+S brings up the screenshot tool, then you can just box around whatever you want and it auto-throws that into the annotation tool. You are also able to paste either the pre-annotated screenshot or the post annotated screenshot from the clipboard into other apps without any fiddling about. No need to change default behavior for this extremely common use case. If you are doing it over video, it conveniently freezes the output for the purpose of the screenshot at the exact moment you hit the key combo (without pausing the video or game in real time). It's miles better than the macOS workflow.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#174
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…

I think Mac OS has the most inaccessible hidden hotkey shortcuts out of every OS I've used. Even essential functions like showing hidden files in a directory is uniquely done through an hidden shortcut in Mac OS.

There should be a compilation of every hidden tricks and shortcuts.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#175
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…

I think Mac OS has the most inaccessible hidden hotkey shortcuts out of every OS I've used. Even essential functions like showing hidden files in a directory is uniquely done through an hidden shortcut in Mac OS.

Perhaps, but the aforementioned screenshot shortcut I learned just like OP because I wanted to take a screenshot, and it's muscle memory for me as well. I even thought to myself before I clicked on the article "I'm pretty sure they are going to have CMD + Shift + 4 or CMD + Shift + 5 as the focal point of the article". I would call it "inaccessible" in terms of natural discovery, sure. But it is definitely not "inaccessible" in terms of ease of use and memory when you do know about it. I had to google "how to screenshot on mac" once in my life and I've used the keyboard shortcuts on a near daily basis for more than half a decade.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using this to visually demonstrate features in pull requests. Combined with Gifski for gifs, it’s really nice.

Gitlab and GitHub both let you upload videos (and probably more). I still use ffmpeg to convert .mov to .mp4 to get a better file size. But either run circles around the quality and size of .gif

do they show them inline and play automatically?

the thing I love about gifs is that they play automatically so as soon as you open the issue you are seeing the animation of what the problem is.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#177
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…

I think Mac OS has the most inaccessible hidden hotkey shortcuts out of every OS I've used. Even essential functions like showing hidden files in a directory is uniquely done through an hidden shortcut in Mac OS.

Some of them are obscure but there's a big list of them somewhere in System Preferences and you can change them. You can also change keyboard shortcuts in your programs too. Definitely something I miss from Mac OS X.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#178
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on macOS 12 or iOS 15, you can also use the built in live text functionality in Safari, Preview or Photos

This only works on M1~ macs. Intel mac don't have OCR for some Apple-ish reason

It does work on Intel Macs. I've used it plenty of times.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#179
post #30

If you need to do any image manipulations/highlight on your screenshots, two of the best tools I found are: 1) Monosnap (freemium) - https://monosnap.com 2) Cleanshot ($29) - https://cleanshot.com Both tools also include large amount of extra functionality for taking screenshots and recordings.

Worth noting however that just switching to Preview and Cmd-N will open it up with your screen shot from the clipboard, and then cmd-shift-a gets you annotation tools. So this is a pretty streamlined workflow already.
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