TW Blog :: Archives for October 2007

Quicksilver Tips 1. Screen Grab and Email

Relates to Software and OSX

A bit to much grumbling recently - especially when today is my smile a while day! So time to get back to some informative blogging. When I was blogging first time round, a popular topic of conversation was choosing Firefox extensions and my favourite Firefox extensions but I think this particular topic has been well and truly saturated now. So instead over the next few weeks I will discuss a number of productivity tools I use on a day by day basis to help me get things done.

Where better to start than one of the stalwarts of any developer's arsenal on the OS X platform - Quicksilver (the art of acting without doing). I have a pretty exhaustive set of Quicksilver plugins installed on my all conquering iMac 3 gigabyte machine. Some of these rarely see the light of day, others I use on a regular basis - without thinking twice. One of Quicksilver's greatest strengths is it's ability to adapt to any task I wish to accomplish. One thing I do regularly is send visual scamps to collaborators during the CSS build stage of a job. Thanks to the Apple Mail Module and Screen Capture Actions I can complete this in three simple steps.

1. Fire up Quicksilver (I use Option + Space) and call up the Capture options (typing CAP is normally adequate but I have set Capture Window as the default for C to bring it up by default)
2. I choose Capture Window and then click the little camera on the window I want to grab.
3. Voila! The captured image appears in the first pane with focus on the second pane where I type E to bring up Email to…, hit TAB and start typing the name of the collaborator the scamp is going to. When their name appears hit ENTER and the the an e-mail will be prepared with the scamp in ready to go.

Of course, this can be extended further using the comma trick to add additional collaborators' addresses to the e-mail.

And since the captures are saved to the desktop could even capture a selection of screens and add them all to the same message using the comma trick. I guess I could take this one step further by introducing a trigger for step 1 but I actually find trigger overload weighs heavy on my short-term memory so avoid assigning too many short cut keys.

So that is my first little Quicksilver tip. More to follow…

Posted on Thursday, Oct 04, 2007 at 18:04:09.