Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘ScreenShot’

I wrote ShotGlass, for various reasons …
It does lots of things …
It’s licensed for free...

And there’s a new version … make sure you have beta 2 of the .NET Framework Version 2.0 then, download ShotGlass build 1.1 and unzip it wherever you want it.

The changes from the last version are mostly minor, they relate to the way the form and the thumbnail window behave when you’re resizing them or moving them. The big news, however, is that I’ve included a new plugin for uploading images to Gallery2 using their HTTP POST API (the one that their Gallery Remote uses) . It won’t work with the old Gallery 1.x galleries, but it works a treat with RC2 for Gallery 2, which is what the GeoShell site uses for our screenshots gallery … which was half the reason I wrote this whole application anyway. I also added a JPEG output plugin, so you don’t have to upload those huge uncompressed PNG’s to your webserver’s gallery…

I’ll publish the simple API tommorrow, but for now, the source is here under the MIT License... if you make improvements, please be kind enough to send them back to me

I wrote my own screenshot app called ShotGlass, which does all sorts of things and is released for free under the MIT License, which basically means that ShotGlass is free for you to do pretty much whatever you like, as long as you don’t expect me to guarantee it or provide service, or in any way be responsible for what might go wrong.

The official license is as follows:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Here’s the download …

I wrote about why I wrote my own screenshot app called ShotGlass, here’s what it does:

ShotGlass takes screenshots!

• Crops screenshots!
  • Optionally, it crops the screenshot to the ShotGlass Window.
  • Optionally creates thumbnails
    • When taking a “cropped” shot of just the area covered by the ShotGlass window, the thumnail is created from a positionable sub-window.
• When taking an uncropped screenshot of the full screen, uses the main window as the thumbnail cropper.

• Can automatically resize the screenshot crop area to match the size and shape of the window you want to take a screenshot of. Just put the top left corner of the ShotGlass window over the window’s title bar.

It also uses plugins to enhance functionality:

1. Image processing “Mixer” plugins. I’ve provided a watermark plugin which does images and text, and a highlight plugin which uses the thumbnail area to highlight a portion of the screen in the shot. But anything you can imagine in image processing can be done with an extremely simple interface.
2. Image output “Glass” plugins which control the file output. The default one is to output to the clipboard, but I’ve already included ones for Png and Bmp output, and I’ll put one in later for Jpg with compression.

1. File handling “Drinker” plugins which can upload the file, or basically do whatever you want to do with the screenshot files once they’re saved. I’ve already included one for FTP uploading, and I’m working on Gallery uploads for my original geoShell purposes.

And finally, it has command-line features:

• Named configs, so you can specify a config (which is saved on-exit) using /config:configname This allows you to set up different types of shots which you can take later, because …
• Take a cropped screenshot “instantly” (without ever showing the UI) if you pass the parameter: /instant

• Take a full screen shot instantly using: /fullscreen

I’ll put up more information here later, including screenshots of the very nice configuration panel and the right-click menu (which includes documentation of the hotkeys), but for now I want to get on with getting this beta release out so I can get some feedback.

Here’s it’s release license...
Here’s the download …

I’ve been using Cropper for a while to take simple cropped screenshots, but when I want to take a screenshot of my whole screen, I keep having to go back to my old screenshot script which uses ImageMagick and commandline ftp, because I need to upload the screenshot. Recently I realized I want to upload the images to Menalto gallery on the geoShell site and I wanted to share that ability with other people, but my script requires ImageMagick and Perl to be installed and properly configured, which seems a bit to ask of your average Windows user

I started out to write a plugin for Cropper but ended up deciding there were just too many things I didn’t like:

• The plugins are rather more complicated to write than they need to be, partly because they have to handle ALL the output…
• The thumbnail window is locked at the center of the screenshot window
• There’s not really any way to take a shot of the full screen

• There’s no command-line ability (you have to bring up the cropper window to take a screenshot)

The end result is that I’ve written myself a screenshot application. Now, I wrote it mostly for myself, at first, so I wrote it in C#, using Beta 2 of Visual Studio. Eventually I decided to “fix” the shortcomings I saw in other implemenations, but I don’t really want to back-port it to .NET 1.1, so in order to use it, you need to have beta 2 of the .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed.

Here’s it’s release license...
Here’s what it does …
Here’s the download …