As mommyhood moves into high gear I find one thing perturbing. Some of what I used to be able to remember I can’t remember.
How about all those handy keystroke combinations for various Mac apps? Sorry. Those memory brain cells fell out onto the floor and got trampled on by dogs or carpet crawlers. What’s the keystroke to capture your Mac’s screen? Beats me.
Easier Said Than Done Keystrokes
Most Mac apps have a bunch of keystroke shortcuts which help us reach for the mouse less, and keep our tired old hands and fingers glued to the keyboard where God intended.
You remember how to Save files, right?
How about Quitting an app, or printing something? Command-key-S for save. Command-key-Q for quit. And so it goes. What about the keystroke combination to capture a portion of your Mac’s screen?
Aha. That one isn’t so easy, is it. Fortunately, Apple, our Digital Benefactor™, knows that Mac users age and so they provide us with handy tools to help the forgetful.
To Grab Or SnapNDrag?
Apple’s Grab utility usually resides in your Mac’s Applications folder inside the Utilities folder. It replaces the keystroke combinations you can’t remember with a handy menu system to grab and save various parts of your Mac’s screen.
Click capture selection from the Menubar and you get choices—Selection, Window, Screen, or Timed Screen. Those are self explanatory. Click Selection, then use your mouse to grab a selection of the screen.
Ditto for the Window, the whole Screen, or the handy timer so you can find what you were looking for (obviously a feature added to help those who quickly forget what we wanted to capture on the screen).
There’s no shortage of Mac screen capture tools, though there might be a shortage of tools with more features that also don’t cost anything.
That’s SnapNDrag.
This handy utility doesn’t cost a dime, but does even more than Apple’s Grab tool. You get a floating window with buttons for Selection, Window, Screen, and Timed. You can also set the amount of time.
And, you can change the type of file that gets saved—JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or GIF. You can also change the quality of the image, the size of the image, add a border to the image (of varying widths), and even add a file name.
SnapNDrag also has a toolbar which can be customized with options, icons that do this or that, including usage of other Yellow Mug Software apps.
You also get a small thumbnail of the image grabbed and can then drag it wherever you want it to go.
What if your brain isn’t rotting from too much exposure to children? SnapNDrag also has hot keys which give you quick keyboard access to the tool. What’s not to like? More functional than Apple’s built-in offering. Easier to use. Less to remember. And free.
In an odd bit of irony, I couldn’t use SnapNDrag to take an image of itself and had to rely on Apple’s Grab utility instead (SnapNDrag’s window kept disappearing behind other windows).
All in all, SnapNDrag is decent. Good functionality. Very handy. Great price. Fewer memory cells to use.
