Are you tired of all of those icons from screenshots you've taken cluttering up space on your desktop? If you would like them in a different place when you snap them, here's a command to change the location.

Using the Terminal, enter the following command to change the location:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures

This snippet will change the default location of saving the screenshot to the Pictures folder. You can also set this location to any folder or volume on your Mac, just substitute ~/Pictures in this command to whatever you want. Once you've run this command, you'll need to restart the SystemUIServer (used to control certain interface elements in Mac OS X), by entering killall SystemUIServer in the Terminal.

If you don't want to use the Terminal, many of the popular Mac maintenance utilities, including OnyX (free). TinkerTool (free), and Cocktail ($14.95), will allow you to change the location of snapped screenshots.

If you're snapping a lot of screenshots, changing the location can be very useful, especially if you're on a portable Mac with limited disk space. Each screenshot can sometimes be over 1MB in size, so if you're tight on space it can be a good idea to store your screenshots elsewhere, like on an external hard drive.

There's also a handy suggestion from our own TJ Luoma: redirect your screenshots to a cached/synchronized folder, like the Pictures folder on your iDisk (if you have iDisk Sync turned on) or a folder in your Dropbox, Live Mesh or SugarSync directories for instant screenshot sharing among multiple machines.

Michael Flux has posted some pictures of Snow Leopard build 10A380, and there are some interesting things worth pointing out.

The stack frame now has a attractive border between it and the shadow which looks quite nice. Also, an option for folder actions now appears in the Finder's contextual menu.

There's a cool feature in Safari that lets you create a note from any selected text. I'm also happy to see that the Image Capture app no longer looks completely out of place and matches the other apps. Also, Preview's "Contact Sheet" view is very cool. Think of a PDF's pages being displayed in a big grid.

What's very nice to note, and what I'm most looking forward to, is the list of apps that Michael describes as looking the same but operating much faster, including Address Book and Font Book. I love what Apple's doing with this update in tidying up Leopard and making it tighter, faster and more efficient. I can't wait to buy this.

Well! Our tips line has certainly been a beehive of activity with WWDC just around the corner. We've gotten several purported iPhone images, which range in quality from meh to ludicrous. Particularly interesting: the iPhone Blog's 16x9 widescreen model.

As for availability of the rumored phone, GearLive is laying it on the line for an on-sale date of Monday, immediately after the announcement. Technologizer responds with four reasons we wouldn't see the new device in stores right after the keynote.

Interested to see what everyone else has cooked up for Apple to release on Monday? Check out the gallery for pictures galore.

Thanks to everyone who sent these in!

Touch Arcade has a slew of new screenshots from an upcoming free update for a game I've been coming back to more and more lately on my iPhone: Zen Bound. When I first installed it, I thought of it as more of a tech demo than a game, but as you load it up more and more, you really do start uncovering layers of competition -- "if only I twisted the statue that way I could cover more ground, or maybe if I started from that leg I could wrap around closer on that side." It's pretty addictive, and it's one of those games that starts tugging at your mind even when you're not playing it.

The update probably won't help free my mind -- not only will it have a whole set of new objects to wrap up (featuring some fun retro-gaming themed pieces), but it's getting some bugfixes and some performance tweaks as well. The paint spread by the rope will be smoother, and the problem of the rope crossing through objects should be better (while that happened from time to time, it wasn't a huge complaint).

Still, especially for free, it sounds like the update will only make a great game better. Zen Bound is available right now in the App Store for $4.99 (with the free update available "soon"), and there's a lite version to try out as well.

Way back in September, our friends (including former TUAW blogger Nik Fletcher) at Realmac Software started trickling out details about their newest Mac app: LittleSnapper. Now after a thorough beta process and lots of hard work, the application is finally available! I have been using the application since its first alpha and I have to say, it is a strong contender for my favorite Mac utility of the year.

LittleSnapper was developed to solve the problem of organizing, sharing and notating screenshots -- especially screenshots from web pages. LittleSnapper does this, and more, effectively and beautifully.

I'll be posting a more in-depth review soon, but here are some of my favorite features:

• Take snaps from any browser, without installing a plugin. Regardless of the browser you use, you can take a snap by invoking the LittleSnapper keyboard shortcut or clicking on the LS menubar icon.
• Save and view the web archive of the site you snap. You can view full web archives within LittleSnapper and access the code (using your choice of editor). This is really useful for development work.
• Use DOM selectors to snap specific portions of a web page. Within LittleSnapper's built-in browser, you can use the DOM selector (think Web Selector for Safari) to capture a specific element. I love this feature.
• Edit images non-destructively within the program. You can add blur, highlight specific parts of the screen, add text and callout arrows within LittleSnapper and export the image with annotations on or off. The blur feature especially is sure to save me lots of unnecessary Photoshop time.
• Open a snap directly in Photoshop.
• Share snaps via the web using either QuickSnapper, Flickr or your own FTP or web server.
• Organize snaps into collections and set rules to automatically file snaps in place based on content or tags.
• Import your existing screenshots into your LittleSnapper library

Realmac's page has more detail and case studies (full disclosure: I'm one of the users they profiled). If you take a lot of screenshots, especially of web pages, I really encourage you to give the app a try. The unregistered version lets you take up to 30 snaps to try out all the features.

LittleSnapper 1.0 requires OS X 10.5 Leopard and is $39.99 US for a single license (5-user Studio licenses are available for $129 US). All LittleSnapper licenses include full access to the QuickSnapper service.

Video link

Last month, our friends at Realmac Software teased us with some screenshots of their newest application, LittleSnapper. LittleSnapper is a program that will let you take screenshots of full web pages, with adjustment and sharing features similar to Skitch.

The Realmac team has now produced a video (above) showing off how you can capture a web page, select a specific element from that page and quickly upload the image to Flickr. The video also shows off how LittleSnapper can be used to organize web screenshots into collections -- kind of like iPhoto -- complete with metadata.

For me, the DOM selector (it looks similar to what CSSEdit uses) is the most intriguing aspect of LittleSnapper. It isn't uncommon for me to want to grab a specific section from a web page, only to find that the image is embedded within the stylesheet. I can manually select that section with Snapz Pro or Skitch, but that can lack precision and will ultimately require me to spend more time prepping screenshots.

LittleSnapper is expected to be released at the end of the year.

Are you obsessed with taking photos using the built-in screenshot utility (or by pressing command + 3/4)? Chances are you might have a ton of files left over on your desktop after a long screenshot session.

If you don't need the files piling up on your desktop and just want to paste a picture somewhere, pressing Control + Command + Shift + 3 for a full screenshot (or 4 for cross hair selection tool).

The screenshots will be copied to the clipboard where you can paste them into a document.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section today!

Rob H. was playing Wurdle on his iPhone when he came across what we'll appropriately call a bug -- apparently the program doesn't actually recognize us as a word (maybe it needs the accent mark over the U?). But we appreciate him trying anyway. Maybe we'll contact the SOWPODS people and see if we can't work this thing out.

And by the way, this is the perfect time to show you one of the new features here on TUAW -- over on the sidebar just above the Featured Galleries, you'll find our TUAW Flickr pool. This is a set of images on Flickr that you, our terrific readers, can add to: just put the "tuaw" tag on your Flickr photos or screenshots, and they'll be put right into the pool and appear here on the page.

So you can share great TUAW-related stuff like this, or anything else all the Mac folks reading the site might enjoy.

Our friends over at at Realmac Software, makers of the popular RapidWeaver website creation app, have just posted some information on their next Mac app, LittleSnapper. From what I can glean from the promo page, LittleSnapper -- which is expected sometime at the end of 2008 -- is designed to be the ultimate mash-up of screenshot applications like Skitch and Paparazzi.

Back in May, I tested and reviewed various (static) screen capturing programs and options for OS X. Although I did not have a chance to actually address the issue of full web page captures in that article, I was, and continue to be frustrated by the lack of a good, Leopard-friendly program that can capture an entire web site, and not just the portion that appears on the screen. Stitching together screenshots in Photoshop is time consuming and unfortunately, Paparazzi's Leopard support is kludgy (.43 works with Leopard, but .5 won't even open). I demoed Web Snapper, but it is a Safari plugin (or InputManager for the semantically correct), which is not always ideal.

From the Realmac website, it looks like LittleSnapper is really designed to take the best aspects of a program like Skitch, the ability to capture portions of the screen and annotate and share with other people, with the ability to work with web browsers and also organize screenshot libraries. They even show off a DOM-highlighter, so you can instantly capture a specific element of a site, much like Safari's WebClip and CSSEdit's Inspector.


We'll let you know more about LittleSnapper as the details eke out. You can sign-up for updates at Realmac's website. LittleSnapper will be a Leopard-only application.

On your iPhone or your iPod touch, when you press the Home button, there's a nice little animation that takes you back to the home screen.

To create that animation, your iPhone takes a screenshot of whatever it is you're doing, and uses it for the transition. Sounds innocent, right?

Not so much, says data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski (thank you, clipboard). The screenshot is presumably erased from the iPhone after the application closes, but is any digital file really gone after you delete it? Survey says no.

Forensics experts have mined for these screenshots, successfully recovering evidence against criminals accused of rape, murder, and drug deals. They can also recover data from the iPhone's keyboard and web caches, too.

In his presentation, Zdziarski also demonstrated how to bypass an iPhone's passcode in order to own the device and access personal data. Time-consuming? Sure (it took JZ about an hour and involved a custom firmware build). Impossible? No.

As with all things digital (and networked), your privacy is largely illusory. Time to go Don Draper on this one and just use Field Notes books, my stack of business cards, and the rotary dial.

[Via Wired.]

Thanks, Kenny!

Whether you use Leopard's native screen grab tool, or a specially designed app like Skitch, there's more you can use it for than just snapping a shot of your desktop. Here are three of my favorites:

No more cut and paste - I often have to replicate several pages of a content management system (CMS) that require me to enter tags in a field one at a time. I used to enter them on the first page, then copy the text, open Text Edit or Stickies, paste the text, then move on to the next page and flip back and forth between screens while re-entering tags on each page. Now I just snap a screenshot of the tags I've entered and use it as a reference on the remaining CMS pages.

File those registration receipts - After I've bought an app, I snap a shot of the receipt screen and store it in Evernote. Of course I also keep the copy the vendor emails me, buts it's nice having a backup in case my email client flakes out.

Make audio editing easier - While editing podcasts in Audacity, I often need to note the exact time of a clip. While it's easy enough to make a note with pencil and paper (remember those?), a screen grab lets me see at a glance exactly what other settings I was using at the time.

What are some of your more unconventional uses for the screen grab tool?

Last week, Dave mentioned that you can change the file type used system-wide for screenshots. However, some people are afraid of using Terminal.app to muck around with their Mac. In this week's AppleScript article, I am going to show you how to take screenshots and change their file type using an AppleScript.

The AppleScript
property N : 0
set N to N + 1
set picPath to ((POSIX path of (path to desktop)) & "Picture_" & N & ".png") as string
do shell script "screencapture -tjpg " & quoted form of picPath


Using the AppleScript
Open the ScriptEditor (/Applications/AppleScript/ScriptEditor.app). Copy/paste the AppleScript into the script edtitor and click the run button at the top. You will hear the camera shutter sound and a picture will be taken and saved to your desktop.

This script comes in handy when you want to take a screenshot in a different format. To do this, just change the ".png" file type to whatever you might want (say, .jpg, .tiff, etc.). When you re-run the script, the new file type will be associated with the capture image.


Continue reading to learn how to save this script.

Our friends over at Freeverse have been working on a racing game (undoubtedly going to be one of a few released by different companies) for the iPhone called Wingnuts Moto Racer, but various NDAs, game mechanics secrets, and developer confidentialities have kept them from being able to talk about it too much, with us or anyone else. Still, demand has apparently pushed them to release something, and so they have posted this heavily-edited- with-red ink "review" of how the game plays.

It sure sounds like, as expected, you use the accelerometer to drive, and while their intern says that it controls beautifully, of course he'd say that -- he's their intern. The art looks good, though -- there's a highway at sunset, some Oriental and Forest style racing, and even a Miami-style tropical cityscape. Unfortunately, that's the extent of news here -- no idea how many tracks or vehicles there are, or if there are any other iPhone-specific innovations.

Not that the game still doesn't look like fun -- it does, and if you're a racing game fan, you'll definitely have plenty of games to choose from in the early days of the App Store. But NDAs aside, we'd sure like to hear something new about Freeverse's iPhone games.

Whether you want to post something to a web page or blog, or show off an application element in a presentation, taking quality screenshots is becoming an increasingly common task for lots of different Mac users. Although OS X comes with its own built-in screenshot utility, Grab, and onboard F-keys for the task, there are lots of third-party options as well. Contrary to popular belief, not all screen capture applications are created equal.

So what program is the best for taking quality screenshots off of your computer? To find out, I put five screen capture programs through their paces to try to find the "ultimate" screen-capture program.

The programs I used:

• Grab - built into OS X
• Skitch - free (at least while in beta)
• Snapz Pro X - $29 for image capture only, $69 for image and motion capture
• InstantShot! - free
• QuickSnap - $14.95

Read-on for my analysis and take a look at the gallery for screenshots from each program, as well as head-to-head comparisons.