Posts Tagged ‘utility’

Creating multi-layered screenshots (a BarCamp London hack)

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

I’m on a slow (gah, engineering works!) train back from an awesome BarCampLondon. I’ve got a ton of notes from so many fascinating talks and sessions, but not quite sure how to share them… they would make for the world’s longest blog post!

But as I have a little time to kill, I thought I’d quickly share a little hack that I pulled together overnight. An old idea, but a fun one – and it’s amazing what beer and interesting people will do for your creativity. 🙂

The hack is a little Windows utility to capture more useful screenshots.

By way of background, when you press the “Print Screen” button, it copies an image of your desktop to the clipboard. Very useful. But it has limitations.

What if a window you want to see in the screenshot image is obscured by another window? Or minimised entirely? That information is lost.

Not with my hack! 🙂

My tool captures “interactive” multi-layered screenshots – a picture of each window is captured separately on it’s own layer. This creates a screenshot that (even after you’ve taken the screenshot) will let you move windows around, hide/restore windows, and change the z-order of windows.

It creates a sort of simulation-like snapshot of what your desktop was like at the time.

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