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Extend Mac OS X's Screenshots

Mac OS X has a variety of built in screenshot methods. Here's a look at a few that offer more versatility than the basic full-screen capture (Command-Shift-3):

• Press Command-Shift-4 and you'll get a crosshair cursor with which you can drag to select and capture a certain area of the screen.

• Press Command-Shift-4-Space to select the entire window that the cursor is over, clicking on the window will then capture it. The resulting screenshot will even get a nice drop shadow.

• Hold down the Space bar after dragging out a selection window to move your selection rectangle around on the screen.

• Hold down Shift after dragging out a selection to constrain the selection in either horizontal or vertical orientation, depending on the direction of your drag.

• Hold down Option after dragging out a selection to expand the selection window around a center point.

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Networking | 09 Jun 2009 | Listen  | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

iPhoto2Twitter Simplifies Tweeting Photos

by Adam C. Engst Send Email to Author

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All the Twitter clients for the iPhone that I've seen make it easy to take a photo and post it to Twitter (via a service like TwitPic). Many of the Twitter clients on the Mac have features for posting photos too, but they often revolve around selecting files, which isn't easy if all your photos are in iPhoto. And it's a bit silly to import your normal digital camera's photos to iPhoto, and then sync them to the iPhone just to post to Twitter.

(Tip: In iPhoto, to view a photo's file in the Finder, Control-click it and choose Show File from the contextual menu that appears. You can then drag the file's icon into an Open dialog to upload it to TwitPic, for instance, but whatever you do, don't move or rename that file!)

Blue Crowbar Software has just come out with another simple solution to this problem: iPhoto2Twitter, an iPhoto export plug-in that posts a selected photo to Twitter via TwitPic.

Once iPhoto2Twitter is installed, select the photo you want to post to Twitter, choose File > Export (Command-Shift-E), click the iPhoto2Twitter button, enter a message, choose an export size, and click the Export button. iPhoto2Twitter posts your photo to TwitPic and the message, with a link to the photo, to Twitter.


Of course, the first time you use iPhoto2Twitter, you must click the Setup button to enter your Twitter login credentials; it can also pull Twitter login credentials from your keychain, making it easy to switch among accounts.

That's really all there is to it - iPhoto2Twitter is a one-trick pony, but if you've avoided posting photos to Twitter because of a lack of integration with iPhoto, or if you just prefer to think about photos when you're already in iPhoto, iPhoto2Twitter is ideal.

iPhoto2Twitter requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and works with iPhoto '08 and iPhoto '09. It costs 4.95 euros and is a 566 KB download. Blue Crowbar Software also offers Aperture2Twitter, which provides the same functionality for Aperture 2 and costs 5.95 euros.

 

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