Being a site for hackers, and given that Android's source code is available, this is actually a challenge rather than just another internet dick-waving contest, right?
Non-savvy users really get lost at how screenshots work.
I have a buddy who's a programmer at publishing house, specializing in niche magazines, and they deal regularly with non-savvy older users. He's got this story about one such customer who was complaining that something wasn't working on the website and when asked to send a screenshot he proceeded to:
1) Press PrintScreen
2) Paste it into Word
3) Print it out,
and finally,
4) Fax it to the company.
I thought that was kind of related, and rather humorous.
I REGULARLY receive photos from cameras of someones computer screen when asked to supply a "screen shot". It was kinda funny the first few times...now its just sad.
One time, my kernel was crapping out and endlessly printing stuff I couldn't read because it was scrolling WAY to fast and ctrl+s did not work either, so I photographed my screen to be able to read what the kernel was trying to tell me (hardware defect).
Once, we had an issue with a single board computer that seemed like a hardware issue so we called support, and they wanted the output of a logical analyzer. Unfortunately, we didn't have an interface for our old analyzer, and so we set up a webcam to show the analyzer screen to the support guy over NetMeeting. It was kind of funny, but worked great.
The best one I saw, though not really a screenshot, was a photo on Craigslist... someone had used his cell phone to take a photo of a car he was selling, then used a web cam to take a photo of the cell phone screen, and then uploaded that.
I am surprised at how useful what a seemingly superfluous feature is on the iPhone. I often find myself grabbing screenshots of things and sending it to friends, Twitter and Facebook. My location on a map. An amusing article I just saw. An SMS conversation. It's not obvious, but once you know how to do it, it's very handy and I'm surprised it's so difficult with Android.
Often I find myself using it as a "cropping tool." For example, if I save some image from the web and I want to only save a certain part of the entire image, I just zoom into whatever area I want and take a screen shot and voila I have a cropped image. ;)
I love screenshots from the iPad maps application imported into SketchBook or some other drawing app. Very useful for whipping up driving directions to forward to a friend.
Why wouldn't you just forward them a link to the driving directions page? You lose all the functionality of the awesome Internet we have in 2010 by sending someone a static map. Anyone who can receive that would be in front of a computer connected to the internet, or if they are on the go, would be on a smart phone with internet access so they could look it up themselves. Might as well just carry around a paper map.
Unless you want to be a doormat like that guy in the commercials whose friends call him to ask him for driving directions and movie show times because your phone lets you browse the web while you're in a call at the same time. Let your friends look up their own directions.
I typically send all three. I send the link for the driving directions, I send my own summary which makes sense to local people, and a screenshot of a map, with my scribbles on there. "There's this landmark, here's where you turn, this is Xyz Lane which you'll see on your left just before the street you turn into, so be ready when you see it, here's our house on the left. If you're coming from the south instead of west, this is where you'll be coming from." As far as I know, no one's ever gotten lost this way.
I can't speak for the others, but I have lots of friends who have phones with no data plans (probably 90% of my friends, in fact). I can't send links to their phones, but I can send them screenshots via MMS. It's come in handy on many occasions.
Except that there are hooks in the OS to share all of those things natively in a data format that is useful to other people with phones... I'd be annoyed as shit if someone with an iphone texted a god damn picture of where they were instead of a mobile link that would open my maps application to your location allowing me to navigate there, etc.
Windows 7 actually comes installed with a Microsoft-developed 'Snipping Tool', which allows the user to drag a semi-transparent box (or free form, or windows size, or full screen) over whatever part of the screen the user so desires. You can annotate, paste, or save the image wherever you like!
Sadly though it still pails in comparison with fastStone capture. It is impossible to take a screenshot of a menu such as file >> Save As with the windows 7 too because focus goes to the tool when you select it, where as in fastStone it does not...plus you can annotate, add drawings, and when you save it automatically timestamps the filename for you so you don't have to rename all your freaking files...
In the interest of fairness i take a HUGE number of screenshots (tech support) so the win 7 tool may be adequate for most, i still find it sub par ( also for a mac shift+ctrl+cmd+4 saves a snippet to your clipboard...better than the windows 7 equivalent IMHO shift+cmd+4 to save as a file to your desktop)
From the help for the Vista version of the Snipping Tool:
Can I capture a snip of a menu, such as a shortcut menu or the Start menu?
Yes. Here's how to do it:
Click to open Snipping Tool.
On the Snipping Tool toolbar, click the Minimize button, and then open the menu that you want to capture.
Press CTRL+PRINT SCREEN.
Select the type of snip you want, and then capture the menu.
Or you can use cmd+shift+4 instead of cmd+shift+3. This allows you to select a region on the screen or you can press
spacebar, mouse over the window you want to copy and press enter.
As far as I know you're right. Depending on what you're doing, Automator or the command line screencapture tool combined with a shell script or QuickSilver might be worth looking at to speed up your workflow.
You can also hit 'space' after cmd+shift+4 to get a little camera icon that takes a screenshot of only the window you click on. It works for any window, the desktop, the menu bar, any menu, and interestingly enough: all of the icons sitting on your desktop independent of anything else.
I did't know how to take a screenshot on the iPhone but this would be useful. So I searched for other iPhone tips I'm missing, and here is a pretty nice collection:
I find it interesting that this is so easy on iPhone and so hard on Android.
For some reason, I think of taking screenshots as a poweruser feature (which might or might not be the case), and that Android would make it easy, while Apple wouldn't make it available to regular users.
I wonder what the thinking behind those decisions were. Did his Steveness demand the easy screenshot functionality to capture UI feedback on the go?
It is interesting considering the limited number of physical button combinations on the iPhone. It was definitely more than an after-thought. They introduced the feature in iPhone OS 2.0 at the same the SDK was released so I'm guessing they intended it mostly for developers then realized it was pretty handy for all sorts of things.
"that Android would make it easy, while Apple wouldn't make it available to regular users"
What would ever give you that impression? Before I went full-geek (I wasn't always this way), I considered myself a Windows power user. The first thing I ever published online (back in the nineties) was a short article titled "How To Be a Power User". It included what I thought was an exhaustive list of shortcuts that I used in my everyday computing life. I couldn't understand how other people got by using their mouse for everything. I once used my Windows PC for three weeks without a mouse, just so I could force myself to learn more keyboard shortcuts. I was in to it.
Fast forward 15 years and I'm a Mac convert. OS X contains a lot more "power user" features than most people would think. Your perception of a platform has a lot to do with familiarity, and I'd argue that the view summarized as "Apple doesn't make tools for power users" is wholly based in a lack of familiarity of their products.
It is a bit of a power user feature, but it's important to two groups of power users in particular: reviewers and developers. These are two groups that it pays to help.
Apple certainly doesn't make third-party developers its first priority, but they are decent at helping developers when it doesn't get in the way of Apple's desired user experience. One way they do this is by providing good developer tools and workflows.
My prob with using a Mac for he last two years is instructions that use the alt and cmd keys (which are labelled on my MacBook keyboard as alt and cmd) as something else - one is called 'option', the other 'apple' but there is no key labelled either 'option' or 'apple' on the MacBook.
The option/apple keys are the alt key - until a couple years ago, there was no 'alt' and the option/apple key was called 'open apple option' by most people.
There are four modifiers on a Mac keyboard: command, option, control, and shift. (Fn isn't a real modifier, but it likes to hang out with them on laptop keyboards.)
Option is also sometimes labeled "alt".
Command usually has a four-leaf-clover symbol on it, and sometimes also has an Apple logo on it. You might also hear it called "open-Apple" by people who remember the Apple II, which had open-Apple and closed-Apple keys which mapped to the joystick buttons.
All four of these modifiers have been on all of Apple's keyboards for over 20 years. (Control, the newest one on the scene, appeared on the Apple Extended Keyboard in 1987.)
I agree. Calling the command key apple is falling out of use though. Most people these days call it command or use the cloverleaf symbol, and it says command and has the cloverleaf symbol on it. People have started calling option alt and I'm not 100% sure why that's so, but they key says option and alt, so it shouldn't really be confusing (except that some people might think you hold Fn to make it alt instead of option, or something like that).
Oh, must be a recent change. I don't like that they removed the text on the arrow keys as well. They used to say page up/down and home/end since fn-left is home, fn-right end, fn-up page up and fn-down page down. That's not obvious to switchers from any other OS.
I get that they want to be all zen and remove unnecessary stuff but some of this stuff is necessary. Not good for users.
You have to realize that the android platform is years behind the iPhone. Developing for the iPhone was a nightmare when the SDK was first released to developers. APIs that did not work as described. Talk to iPhone developers that went through that stage of the evolution and you'll know.
It isn't a big deal, but it's a fair shot at a silly limitation of Android. Of course it's noteworthy exactly because it's an exception to the usual pattern; compare using USB storage or Pandora on Android vs iPhone.
No idea what the Android team's rationale is, but from a security perspective, I'm pretty happy that random applications don't have access to things written to the screen by other applications.
Not sure why it's not an OS level built-in, though.
I find lack of universal copy (as in copy and paste) more disturbing. I wish I was able to select and copy text in just any application, or at least in browser and mail!
Edit. Like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1406553