5
Screenshot app for designers (mac) (shotr.cc)
almost 3 years ago from Max K, UX Designer
10 comments
Arun Pattnaik, almost 3 years ago
This is super useful! I'm glad I logged in to DN today :)
Max K, almost 3 years ago Thank you for the warm feedback! Appreciate it a lot : )
How's the experience so far? all works good? Any suggestions?
Seymour Butz, almost 3 years ago Congrats! This is pretty cool, but I work on an ultrawide monitor, so the portion of the screen I want to capture is usually pretty small relative to the entire screen. In particular because this tool opens the fully captured screen in a scaled down window, it means I have to zoom in to then capture the thing I actually want.
If there was a shortcut like cmd-shift-4 on mac that let me drag to select the area I wanted to then shot up in Shotr, I might add this tool to my workflow.
Max K, almost 3 years ago Thank you for the feedback!
As it stands right now, the logic is reversed: you grab the entire screen first, select the area after. But I get that it could be a nuisance to deal with the zoom. One thing I could recommend at this moment is to roughly select the area of interest and press cmd+2 (shift+2 would also work) to zoom in on it quickly. Or, if the area is small, press Z and click on it.
If there was an option to bring up Shotr zoomed on the area around your cursor automatically (without you selecting the exact region, say 600px around the cursor), would that help?
Seymour Butz, almost 3 years ago Before I press anything, I already know the area on my screen I care about. Today, I press cmd-shift-4, then drag to select that area, and I'm done. With Shotr, I also know what I want to select, but when I press cmd-shift-2, I now have to reorient myself to what I'm looking at on the screen, because it changed (made worse by the fact that my monitor is large, but true regardless of monitor size), then drag to select it (again, tougher because I’m on a larger monitor but true even on my laptop), then press another hotkey to save or copy it. This is something I do multiple times a day, so the fact that it takes longer to do in Shotr means I probably won’t use it. Cropping it to an area 600px around my cursor is arbitrary and I’m still going to need to crop it after pressing cmd-shift-1. Maybe it’s slightly easier because it’s not zoomed out as far, but doesn’t really save me that much time.
Your tool is cool because of the extra stuff like measuring color and spacing, and the fact that you can copy to clipboard OR save (OS X makes you set one as the default and it’s a bit clunky to change back and forth). I would use it if it worked like this:
Cmd-shift-2 lets me drag to select a region. When mouse up, Shotr opens with the same region I selected, and I can measure colors and distances. I can also use a hotkey to copy or save. I would also love it if I could set copy or save as default actions when I press cmd-shift-2. That would make it possible for me to have the same speed of workflow to save a screenshot as with cmd-shift-4 today, but with all the extra nice stuff your app does too.
Take it with a grain of salt, it may not be the use case you’re trying to solve, but I would use a tool like that! But I’m sure there are folks who have a different need from me for whom this would already be pretty useful.
Max K, almost 3 years ago Yeah, I see. The workflow of preselecting the area with a separate shortcut is going to take a bit of time to implement, can't give any promise here. But I'll definitely look into this.
I can also use a hotkey to copy or save You probably already figured, but just to make sure — you can press Cmd+S to save, Cmd+C or Esc to copy.
There is actually a third action, Upload to web (Cmd+E), but you need a token to do that. Let me know if you're interested, I'll get you one.
I wonder about the auto-save setting. The image gets saved once you select the region on the screen, so the app won't even show up, that's right? Like a checkbox in the toolbar, if you check it, the next time you grab a screenshot it's quietly saved, unless you open the app manually and unselect this checkbox — is that the idea?
Seymour Butz, almost 3 years ago What I'm picturing is that I can press cmd-shift-2 and drag to select the area of my screen I want to select, then immediately that thing is copied to my clipboard or saved or uploaded. This is what I can already do today (well not upload, but I don't use that personally), so any solution I switch to would need to be as fast to do that.
What Shotr would allow is that if I for some reason this time I want to copy to clipboard instead of saving to my desktop, I can do that with just a single additional keystroke, versus the default screenshot mac on app which is way more work. This is something I'm frustrated by today. Your app also lets me do stuff like measure color and distance, which isn't a major pain point for me, but I could definitely see being useful. (Particularly the measurement tool, since I already use ColorSnapper which lets me pick a color with one keystroke without having to select anything first).
So pretty much I'm trying to imagine something that is as quick as my cmd-shift-4 workflow today but with the extra utility your app provides.
The image gets saved once you select the region on the screen, so the app won't even show up, that's right?
I think if the app doesn't open after I drag, then it eliminates the ability to take a different action (e.g. default is save to desktop, but this time I want to copy to clipboard instead). I imagined that the app would still come up, but if I was good with the default action, I could just hit esc to close it, which wouldn't feel like a major addition to the workflow.
Take it all with a grain of salt like I said, don't make some major undertaking because of some rando on the internet, I guess my main point was just that the functionality in your app seems useful to me, but my main use case is taking screenshots of part of my screen and then either saving them or copying them to the clipboard, and if it takes me longer to do that in Shotr then I probably wouldn't use it. But maybe that's just not a scenario you care about, and the scenario of interacting with your screen (color picker and measure tool) is what you want to focus and improve on, which seems totally fine too, I just probably wouldn't use it myself.
Max K, almost 3 years ago The more I think about this approach, the more it makes sense. I always thought of the reversed logic (grab first, crop later) to be more advantageous because it allows for zoom and greater precision. If the user has to select a region on the screen and re-select it in app, it kind of doubles the effort. But then again, if the user don't care much about precision and wants to have a slightly better cmd+shift+4 experience, why not?
Anyway, I created a test build that works this way: [link removed; the new version with this feature is available on https://shotr.cc/]
The workflow is as follow: Cmd+Shift+1 → Select a region → [window pops-up] → press Esc (the window goes away, the image is copied) OR press Cmd+C (the window goes away, the image is saved).
Give it a try, I'm interested in your thoughts.
Max K, almost 3 years ago Hey, just so you know, the new version is out and the feature you asked about (screenshot of an area by Cmd+Shift+2) is included in the release.
The fullscreen mode got a bit faster, hope the default workflow will feel snappier too.
Max K, almost 3 years ago Hey everyone!
As a designer I'm making a lot of screenshots not to share them, but rather to put in Sketch or Photoshop to take a closer look at pixels. Zoom in on a neat little icon, or inspect a button that doesn't look right, or measure some size, or pick a color.
I created a simplistic app that facilitates this workflow: on a hotkey (Cmd+Shift+1 / F12) it grabs the entire screen and shows it in a window. You can zoom, crop and select things to check their sizes. If you hit Tab, color under the cursor will be copied to the clipboard. If you press arrow keys, it will show the distance between two objects closest to the cursor.
Check it out: https://shotr.cc/
DesignerNews is the first place I published it to, you guys are my first beta testers! I appreciate any feedback. Like if you downloaded the app and it launched fine, please tell me that — at least I'll know it works not only on my computer, haha. Thanks!
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