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macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

sal.dev

201–210 of 332 posts

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#201

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…

I never found screenshotting on macOS intuitive. Using ShareX on Windows is like night and day. No need to memorize different shortcuts for each kind of screenshot. Just a single shortcut to enter screenshot mode. Then it's * left click to capture full screen * hover over a window and left click to capture a specific window * click and drag to capture a region * right click to cancel There's also annotation and drawi…

> No need to memorize different shortcuts for each kind of screenshot. Just a single shortcut to enter screenshot mode

You don't need to memorize any shortcuts on macOS to take a screenshot. Just open up "Screenshot.app". It's in /Applications/Utilities/

That's a single entry point to all of the screenshot features as well.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#202
I thought this was going to about pranks

My favourite:

Take a full screenshot of your coworkers desktop - icons and everything. Include the taskbar.

Now rotate the screenshot left

Now set the taskbar to auto hide and rotate the screen settings (either on your monitor or the computer) to the right

Set that screenshot as your background

If you do it right it will LOOK like a normal desktop with taskbar and everything but the mouse will run in reverse and nothing of course will work well.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#203

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…

My reaction when I discovered these shortcuts as a Mac user coming from Plasma was the same as yours, 'what a bizarre, undiscoverable way to do things'.

When macOS finally got a flexible screen capturing app (now bound to Cmd+Shift+5) Mac users were rightly very pleased. But we'd had that as the default, highly discoverable behavior on Plasma for more than a decade, and the equivalent on Windows was already old news, too.

Maybe it was just hyped too much, and maybe the similarities to Linux just put it in a sort of uncanny valley for me that spoiled what could have been fun. Maybe it was the pressure of trying to learn an OS while onboarding at a new job that stopped me from learning macOS at my own pace that really drove my frustration. But I was left feeling very disappointed by the much fabled UX and design of macOS.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#204
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never found screenshotting on macOS intuitive. Using ShareX on Windows is like night and day. No need to memorize different shortcuts for each kind of screenshot. Just a single shortcut to enter screenshot mode. Then it's * left click to capture full screen * hover over a window and left click to capture a specific window * click and drag to capture a region * right click to cancel There's also annotation and drawi…

> No need to memorize different shortcuts for each kind of screenshot. Just a single shortcut to enter screenshot mode You don't need to memorize any shortcuts on macOS to take a screenshot. Just open up "Screenshot.app". It's in /Applications/Utilities/ That's a single entry point to all of the screenshot features as well.

iirc that just shows a toolbar with the different screenshot modes. You still need to manually select a mode, which is not as fast and intuitive as ShareX which combines most of the modes into one

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

And on Mac you just press Cmd + Shift + 5. You get every option you want. Send to clipboard, documents, desktop, Preview.app (to annotate, make changes, whatever), Photoshop (if you have it). Draw boxes of what you want, select individual windows, select the whole desktop, even record video.

On Mac you can have exactly the same (and actually more feature rich) workflow.

Edit: Oh and I forgot one feature which is actually incredibly useful, you can even set a timer until it takes the screenshot. This is great if you need to interact with the window or show state with a highlight for example.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#207
post #160

Related trick for changing an image's size, aspect ratio, or combining multiple images: 1. Open Preview.app. 2. Select the whole image and copy it [⌘-a ⌘-c]. 3. Menu bar > Tools > Adjust Size then click the lock icon. Set to desired dimensions and save. 4. Paste the image over the distorted image. Do what you will with the extra space.

Many people do not use the power of Preview enough. It is pretty powerful to get most simple editing done easily - Crop, Mark/Scribble, Highlight, edit/arrange/fill in PDFs.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the option key do in this case? I'm familiar with all the other steps, but the option key's purpose eludes me.

Apparently it hides the shadows when you screenshot an individual window. Neat trick, although I think I'm going to apply the trick from the article, since I don't think I ever actually want the shadows.

I think the shadows look better when adding the screenshots into a document, but are a little much when sending a screenshot to someone via chat.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it hides the shadows when you screenshot an individual window. Neat trick, although I think I'm going to apply the trick from the article, since I don't think I ever actually want the shadows.

I think the shadows look better when adding the screenshots into a document, but are a little much when sending a screenshot to someone via chat.

I tend to prefer to add the shadow in the doc itself rather than have it as part of the image
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