AppleScript: Taking screenshots

I randomly found GrabUp one day! Limited in functionality; however, very quick to use. Hit http://www.grabup.com. You'll find a very quick summary there.

I'm going to use my old iPhone as an e-mail server for my small business/family. We don't get _that_ many e-mails a day so it makes the perfect system to leave on all the time plugged in in the basement. It's power requirements are a fraction of that of a real server. I think it'll rock!

Shocking how much investigating into the most difficult ways to take a screen shot is done at this site.

There's an apparently COMPLETELY UNKNOWN program called G R A B. It comes with your Mac. Investigate this.

Hey, since you're on a screenshot mood, is there a way to take a timed screenshot of a window?

I currently have a script that activates the window I want, takes a screenshot then crops it with core image. There has to be an easier way.

I want to use it to monitor apps with big progress bars from away, like when I leave something huge downloading and want to check the progress from a pc with just IE (lol).

Why go to so much trouble? I use a lot of screenshots, mostly in the default .png format, but sometimes I want .jpg; so I just installed the Screenshots Pref Pane, which allows me to switch the format instantly, take the shot, then switch it back. The Macintosh way, no Terminal or AppleScript acrobatics needed.

"However, some people are afraid of using Terminal.app to muck around with their Mac."

But these same people are not, apparently, "afraid" of using AppleScript to "muck around with their Mac". Why the disjunction?

I can't fathom why these "some people" about whom we hear so much on Mac sites are so frightened by shell scripts and yet completely comfortable with AppleScript. What a bizarre attitude! These are both just ways of interacting with the machine.

If anything OS X's AppleScript capability ought to give people who are liable to fear, and even those who aren't, more pause for thought - because of the nature of the open scripting architecture. This is what recent malware that exploits the ARDAgent's unfortunate default permissions relies on:

"OS X's implementation of AppleScript has a problem. ... The problem is: Applications that are running as root can accept AppleScript commands from applications that are not running as root. And since every Cocoa application automatically gets some basic AppleScript support, this means that any time a Cocoa application runs as root, anyone else can send it a 'do shell script' command and pretty much run anything they want as root."

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/370693/huge-crazy-ridiculous-os-x-security/

Or you could use the free Onyx program to handle this plus a variety of other changes in OS X.

Or. Use TinkerTool. It works wonders.

Use TinkerTool. Works wonders for me.

There's a great utility -- Cocktail -- that lets you save screenshots in 1 of 11 different formats -- from BMP to TIFF (through GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA). It's very useful for other things as well (cleaning caches, running CRON (maintenance) scripts, repairing permissions).