Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

layersapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#21

Post by showerst »

tholder wrote: post #18
picnichouse wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - not a lot of utility in this (for me at least), but I'd pay $100 for something that did this for webpages.

is the ScreenGrab! Firefox extension no good?

The difference between this and various screen shot addons is that it outputs each piece as a photoshop layer, so they can be easily hidden/moved around.

If you take a screen shot then load it into photoshop and move around a window, you'll get a big white box where the window was, because the screenshot app didn't record any information 'underneath' the window.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#22

Post by tlrobinson »

trapper wrote: post #20
andr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking it would be the easiest to do this via DOM manipulation. Sequentially set visibility: hidden to all elements except one, take screenshot, continue on to the next one. Not the most elegant solution, but it's quick and you don't need to understand WebKit or Gecko's source.

That would be seriously cool. Imagine one-click then rearranging a site on the fly.

I wrote a bookmarklet that would capture all mouse events and let you rearrange elements on the page... I'll see if I can find it.

edit: I can't seem to find it at the moment, but it was fairly simple. Intercept all mouse events, determine the clicked element, record the initial position, start dragging, etc. I think it did some fanciness for non-absolutely positioned or non-block elements too.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#23

Post by ja2ke »

m_eiman wrote: post #8
river_styx wrote: post #5

This is cool and all, but what's the utility? You can already isolate individual windows and arbitrary screen regions with the built-in OS X screenshot grabber.

Agreed. While I can see that it's a clever thing and nicely done, I can't think of anyone who routinely needs to screenshot all (or at least multiple) windows at once but separately. Someone who saves a ton of time using this, please tell us what you're using it for!

As someone who does a lot of UI mockups, something like this would be extremely handy. As someone else pointed out, if this saved me an hour of my life, it would pay for itself. If it saved me two hours, it would be saving me money. And an hour of set-up time occupied by taking and assembling selected separate shots of various tool palettes, settings windows, and main editor screens, for instance, would not be out of the question.

It's the "one fell swoop" aspect that is appealing. Just being able to open every possible window in an app and then hit "capture this to Photoshop" when starting on a UI clean-up pass mockup, or for creating a master document of all windows when taking a desktop app from 1st pass programmer art to shipping resources, and sorting them into Photoshop layers and folders, would skip a lot of currently requisite document setup/prep time.

The suggestion to use this to more quickly build manuals and tutorials is also spot on. Grabbing the current state of all windows in an app at "step 3" of a tutorial, and then being able to nudge them around to best facilitate the required tutorial/manual text, without having to manually capture all elements separately, is pretty sweet.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#24

Post by redorb »

m_eiman wrote: post #8
river_styx wrote: post #5

This is cool and all, but what's the utility? You can already isolate individual windows and arbitrary screen regions with the built-in OS X screenshot grabber.

Agreed. While I can see that it's a clever thing and nicely done, I can't think of anyone who routinely needs to screenshot all (or at least multiple) windows at once but separately. Someone who saves a ton of time using this, please tell us what you're using it for!

showing the non-technical owner what you mean when you want a navigation like 'x' or what 'x' would look like on our current site

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#26

Post by showerst »

yan wrote: post #2

This is actually brilliant. Is wrapping a web rendering engine and exporting the web page as a PSD file the next step?

I just spent a few hours looking into doing this, and all I can say is kudos to them for decoding the psd file format =P.

None of the big graphics libraries (GD, Image Magick, etc) support writing of layered PSD files (Imagick can read them, and export non-layered's, but that's it as far as I can tell.), and the format specs require you to sign an NDA/non-compete with Adobe.

Taking the screenshots is doable if a bit of a pain, but short of reverse engineering the psd format, the second part seems to be a roadblock. Shame, i'd use this too =P.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#27

Post by kajecounterhack »

fizx wrote: post #16
picnichouse wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - not a lot of utility in this (for me at least), but I'd pay $100 for something that did this for webpages.

why?

Take/learn from designs.

Though theoretically it could be used to steal designs also... I mean that already happens today but it'd be easier.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#28

Post by fhars »

pclark wrote: post #17

very clever. Now give me an example of this being useful?

You're right. A true hacker never writes user documentation for his software, so this is definitely not hacker news. (Ignore this comment if you only ever use MDI applications).

Edit: My bad, MDI interface is as stupid as LCD display.

Post reply on HN