Screenshots in OS X. 2 Different Ways.

While writing this blog, I often times will need to take pictures of what I'm doing to demonstrate how something needs to be done.  These pictures — known as screenshots — are easy to take, although the process for taking them is not obvious in any way.  In OS X,  there are two different built-in ways to take screenshots.


The first is the program Grab, which can be found in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder on the root of your hard drive.

Grab does nothing more than attempt to "grab" what's happening on the screen.  Note that Grab only works for still pictures.  If you want to record motion, you'll have to use Quicktime, which I'll go over in a future blog post.


Once you open Grab, it just sits there waiting for you to tell it what to do.  Go over to the Capture menu item, and select it.  You'll see the following:

The capture menu of Grab.

There are 4 different kinds of screenshots you can take with Grab.  The first is "Selection," which allows you to select a portion of the screen to capture.  Once you have made your selection, Grab instantly takes the picture as soon as you release the mouse button.  Use this option if only need to select a small section of the screen.  The "Window" menu item allows you to capture entire windows, and nothing else.  "Screen" takes a picture of the entire screen (everything that's currently visible), and "Timed Screen" waits ten seconds to take a picture of the entire screen.  Timed Screen is useful if you need to get something ready before taking the screenshot, as in the screenshot above.  I needed to get a picture of the Capture menu, but needed to have it open to take a picture of it.  Timed Screen helped me do that.


The other way of taking screenshots in OS X doesn't require you to open any program.  Press Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot of the whole screen (exactly like "Screen" above), and Command-Shift-4 to take a screenshot of just a selection ("Selection").  When you do Command-Shift-4, your cursor will turn into crosshairs, and you can then select whatever portion of the screen you want to capture.  A neat trick here, is that after you press Command-Shift-4, if you then press the Spacebar, your cursor will turn into a camera.  This is the equivalent of the "Window" option above.


There you have it: screenshots in OS X.  Simple.

Where are you? How to find the location of an open document.

There's nothing more frustrating than working on a file, and not knowing where it is in your filesystem.  Sure, you probably know how to save files to a location you specify, but what if you are already working on a file, and need to know where it is?


An example of this might be a mail attachment you've downloaded.  Someone sends you a file that you need to modify, and then you need to send it back.  You open it, work on it and save it, without knowing exactly where you've put it!  It's happened to me before countless times.


Or, maybe you are using the "Open Recent" menu option provided by many programs.  You open the file, work on it and save it, but you have no idea where on your hard drive the file lives.  It's there somewhere, and it's already open!  Where is it?


OS X has a simple way to show you where a document is, no matter what program you are using.


Simply hold down the Command key, and click on the document's icon in the title bar of the current window you are working on.  If you are not working on a document (say, if you are browsing the web) no icon will appear in the window's title bar.  If you are working on a document however, you will see something like this:

If you are working on a document, an icon will appear in the window's title bar.

Hold down the Command key when you click on the icon to see a path to the file.  

Ready for the really cool part?  The menu that displays the filepath is clickable!  Yup.  Once the menu is open, select any one of the folders to instantly open that folder in the Finder.  Once the folder is open, you can manipulate the file as you see fit.  You can even move an open document to another folder, and OS X will keep track of it for you in real-time.


This feature is insanely useful, and something I use all the time.  You'll never need to go hunting for an open document ever again!