{"id":7821,"date":"2016-04-28T09:41:12","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T08:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=7821"},"modified":"2016-04-28T09:41:12","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T08:41:12","slug":"mac-screen-capture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2016\/04\/28\/mac-screen-capture\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac screen capture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am continuing my evangelistic journey through the world of Mac and OS X and I have <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/blog\/2016\/04\/07\/six-of-the-best-more-great-os-x-features\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">previously written<\/a> about some of the particularly useful &#8211; dare I say cool &#8211; features of the operating system. I realized that there was one feature, that I have failed to mention before, which I use, if not daily, several times a week &#8230;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I am surprised by how often it is useful to capture all, or, most commonly, part of my computer screen to share or document something. In Windows it always seemed a rather roundabout process using <strong>ALT-PRNTSCRN<\/strong> to put the image on the clipboard. Then it was necessary to paste it somewhere in order to save it. Over the years a variety of utility programs became available and I used quite a few. I suspect that Windows 10 has an improvement in this area, as this version seems to be the answer to a maiden\u2019s prayer [if you believe what its fans have to say].<\/p>\n<p>OS X has screen capture built in and it works very straightforwardly. There are two hot-keys available:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>SHIFT-CMD-3<\/strong> is the simple one. This captures the whole screen and stores the image in a PNG file on the Desktop.<\/li>\n<li><strong>SHIFT-CMD-4<\/strong> gives more options. Initially, the mouse pointer becomes a cross-hair which can be used to make a rectangular selection on the screen, by click and hold on one corner and drag to the other. When you release the mouse button [or trackpad click], the selected area is saved as an image in a PNG file on the Desktop, as before. Alternatively, instead of dragging the cross-hair, you can tap <strong>SPACE<\/strong> and the pointer becomes a camera icon. Any window you point to becomes highlighted and, if you click on it, an image of just that window is saved.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The use of PNG files to store the screen captures is ideal, as this is a well-recognized file format, which can be opened in Preview for any necessary modifications [like cropping] and may be saved in a different format [like JPEG or PDF] if that is needed. The use of the Desktop makes good sense, as there is no head-scratching to figure out where the file has been saved [unless you have an untidy Desktop, in which case it is your own fault :-)].<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/colinwalls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6579\" src=\"http:\/\/s3-blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2014\/01\/linkedin.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"40\" height=\"40\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/colin_walls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6583\" src=\"http:\/\/s3-blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2014\/01\/twitter.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"40\" height=\"40\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/colinwalls.author\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6591\" src=\"http:\/\/s3-blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2014\/01\/facebook.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"40\" height=\"40\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/116301748426290440139\/posts?hl=en%3Fhl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6587\" src=\"http:\/\/s3-blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2014\/01\/google.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"40\" height=\"40\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/ColinWalls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6595\" src=\"http:\/\/s3-blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2014\/01\/slideshare.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"41\" height=\"41\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-6599\" src=\"http:\/\/s3-blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/files\/2014\/01\/wordpress.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"44\" height=\"44\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am continuing my evangelistic journey through the world of Mac and OS X and I have previously written about&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[368,616,302],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-7821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-apple","tag-mac","tag-off-topic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7821"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=7821"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=7821"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}