Mac Switcher: Three ways to take screenshots

The word on the street these days is that switching to a Mac will give you a bunch of new stuff - all sorts of fun software to play with, a CEO with his own Reality Distortion Field™ and a small, rabid cult following that we don't necessarily recommend you join up with. One thing you lose, however, is that Print Screen key; setting up a Mac desktop or notebook will reveal that the key is nowhere to be found, apparently leaving us out in the cold when it comes to capturing that golden moment on your display.

Fortunately, this isn't the case. In fact, Apple built two great screenshot tools into the Mac OS X software (in other words: they're free, and if you're on a fairly recent Mac, you already have them installed). One is a dedicated app, while another is a handy set of universal keyboard shortcuts that are always right at your service.

First up are those keyboard shortcuts, since they're the handiest and are fairly versatile. Pressing Command-Shift-3 is quick 'n dirty - it snaps your entire screen and saves it as a .PNG file on the Desktop (.PDF if you're on Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar or 10.3 Panther). Command-Shift-4 offers a bit more flexibility, as it turns your mouse cursor into a set of cross-hairs, allowing you to click and drag over just the region you want to capture. An even cooler trick of this second shortcut is that, once you have enabled the cross-hairs, you can press the spacebar to enable a window capture mode; mouse over any open window and it will glow a light transparent blue. Click, and just that window is captured, with no background images or extra border padding. Again, it is saved as a .PNG to the Desktop (and for the record, there are free and commercial utilities available that can edit the location to which screenshots are saved).

Next on the 'you already have it' list is Grab, a dedicated screenshot app that Apple keeps in /Applications/Utilities. Why they virtually hide it from the common user by stuffing it in that folder we don't know, but it's a useful app nonetheless. Grab does a lot of the same things the aforementioned keyboard shortcuts do, but it has a few handy tricks up its sleeve. First, in addition to the various capture modes (entire display, window, custom, etc.), Grab can also take a delayed screenshot, in case you need time to set things up just right that you can't catch otherwise. Also, instead of blindly saving everything you snap to the desktop, Grab immediately opens whatever you just captured in a preview window, allowing you to chose to actually save or simply discard the shot. Strangely, the Grab app uses .TIFF - not .PNG - to save screenshots, though the utilities for tweaking screenshot behaviors can also adjust these default screenshot format preferences as well.

Finally, we thought we'd toss in a 3rd party (private) beta app - Skitch - that we've been testing both here and at TUAW for a while, as it's proven to be an incredibly useful screenshot and editing tool that brings some great innovation to the table. While it won't be free once it hits the big 1.0, we can already tell you that this is a killer app for anyone who needs a little more horsepower for more serious screenshots and basic editing. Skitch has its own set of tools for selecting custom regions or entire windows (with adjustable preferences for what should be displayed in the background), a strong set of drawing tools like arrows, lines, paint buckets and even a typing tool for adding fun or instruction to your screenshots, as well as powerful integration with two of the biggest photo organization apps on the Mac: iPhoto (free on every Mac) and Aperture (Apple's professional competitor to Adobe's Lightroom); you can view your entire library from either of those apps in Skitch, pull in a copy of any image to edit and crop, and then save out a copy to your desktop, or instantly upload to a variety of FTP and photo community sites, including Flickr. We don't have a price on Skitch just yet, but we can tell you that we've been using it for a few months now, and thinking about all of its features still makes our mouths water. Currently, plasq offers a mailing list you can join if you'd like to eventually jump in on the beta, as Skitch should be going public fairly soon.

That's it for our intro to taking screenshots on the Mac, but by no means are these your only options. Mac download sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker offer an incredibly broad selection of screenshot + editing + sharing tools that should have just about everyone covered, with plenty of free and commercial versions to go around. If Apple's built-in solutions don't cut it for you, one of these other options is sure to get the job done. Happy screenshot-ing!

Tags: capture, Grab, Mac, mac switcher, MacSwitcher, os x, OsX, PNG, screenshots