Welcome back.

The team here at NigelBlackwell.com have been working night and day to bring you these last blog posts. Yeah, I can tell your heart is bleeding, right? Well, that wasn’t the point.

Ohhhhh, Nigel, you’re going to get to the point and not ramble on for a thousand words in the vain hope that we’ll figure it out for you and let you know in the comments.

Er, well, something like that. Boy, you guys can be cutting.

Ok. The point. Writing is the easy part of Blogging. All of those who leapt up waving their arms in the air can sit down right now. Because, really, text is the easy part of a blog.

So, you’re going to tell us some deep dark secret about how complex the whole WordPress thing is, right?

Wrong. Very wrong.

The reason it’s been such hard work for the whole team at NigelBlackwell.com is the screenshots.

Screenshots?!?!

Yes, and don’t act all surprised, I think using “Screenshots” as the title of the post is fair warning.

Taking screenshot can be tricky. To start with you have to find the right combination of key strokes. Here are a few

• For Mac OS X
  • To capture a rectangle
    • Shift-Command-4.
    • The cursor changes to a crosshair.
    • Drag over the area of the screen you want captured.
    • You’ll hear a camera click and the captured image will be placed on you desktop.
  • To capture a window
    • As above, but when you get the crosshair cursor, press the spacebar. The crosshair changes to a camera.
    • As you move the camera it highlights the window underneath it in blue.
    • Once over the desired window, click, and the image will be placed on the desktop.
• For Windows
  • To capture the whole screen
    • Press the Print Screen key. I know, staggering isn’t it? There’s a whole key dedicated to this one function.
    • The image is captured in the paste buffer.
  • To capture a window
    • Press Alt-Print Screen.
    • The image is captured in the paste buffer.

There are some variations, but let’s start simple.

But that’s only half the problem. If you’re going to point things out to your readers on these artistic masterpieces, you’ve got to annotate them. On the Mac you have a bunch of options, but the one I’ve found best is Voila.

(This is a shot from their website, because one of the catch-22s of screen capture tools is that they’re shy and hide themselves as soon as you start a screen capture!)

Voila will perform screen captures in a variety of ways. Rectangles, circles, freehand areas, windows (which it calls objects) and even menus. When it captures the image it stashes it away in it own library. You can edit the image to add text, arrows, balloons, and lots of other things including blurring sections of the image. Blurring the image sounds weird, but it’s useful if you want to cover up your world domination plans, or something less critical, like a password.

Yeah, yeah. I can do that. I use Paint on my PC.

Uh huh. But Paint creates a file that is a bitmap (bmp, jpg, png etc). All your annotations are mixed in with the original image. You can’t open the file up the next day and change the text you put on it.

In Voila, annotations are kept as separate objects. So if you decide that you do want those world domination plans to leak out (you know, to spook the odd government or two), you can open up the file, click on the blur and change its size or even delete it completely.

Once you’re happy with your image you can use drag and drop to place the image into a document (eg in ecto or similar). Voila converts the objects to a bitmap file (PNG by default) on the fly. You can do this in lots of other programs, but Voila is optimized to fit into a blogging workflow.

Voila can also capture video screencasts (audio included). I haven’t got into these yet, but maybe one day. Soon.

And Voila is simple. And simple’s good, right? Or at least it’s not a complex as things that are not simple.

Nigel, you’re getting off the point.

Yes, but you’ll be glad to know I’m at the end of this post. And you are too. Wow, what a coincidence! Spooky.

Do you use an image editor? Creates screenshots? Hate Voila because (fill in the name of an Adobe product here) is so much better?

I hate to admit it, but you might be right. So put me straight and enlighten the world (or at least the few people who’ve read this far).

Cheers