New – Native Screenshot App for iPhone
One thing that I have sorely missed on the iPhone so far is a good screenshot program. I know there have been a few options around thus far – but those which involve a command line and / or a need to invoke them from your computer are just not handy enough in my book. I want to be able to quickly and easily grab a screen capture at any time without any need to go to a PC.
I have been using Dock’s screenshot utility in order to be able to g
et screencaps right on the iPhone itself, but it has been horrifically erratic in my experience.
So I was very happy to see a new native and standalone screenshot application last night in Installer. The new program is called Screensho t, and is from Robota Softwarehouse, who also just brought out the very useful SysInfo application this past weekend.
Screenshot is simple to use directly on the iPhone. All you need to do is launch the application, set a path for where you want your screencaps to be stored (or leave it at the default of /tmp), and use a toggle button to ‘enable’ it. Once enabled it shows the floating buttons you can see in the screenshots here – Snap and View. As you would expect, Snap will capture the screen wherever you are, and View will let you browse your snaps, and delete any you don’t want.
Here’s a few things I’ve noticed and things to be aware of with this first version of Screenshot (which may be unique to my system, but just in case):
If you leave the screenshots directory at its default of /tmp, then your screencaps will not survive a restart of the iPhone – so you’ll want to make sure you transfer them before a reboot if you’re wanting to keep them
Enabling (or turning on) Screenshot is not working as soon as I click ‘Done’ in the program as it should. I’ve found that I need to restart Springboard in order to make the two floating buttons appear.
So far, Screenshot does not seem to like any path other than the default for me either – not sure yet whether this is my error in providing the correct path though (trying to switch it to store the screencaps in the Camera Roll).
So far, I like Screenshot – and if I can get past a couple of the issues noted above I’ll be liking it a whole bunch.
You can find Screenshot in Installer now, in the Utilities section, and you can get more info on it at the Robota Softwarehouse site.
well, you’ve had way more luck with this application than I have. I wanted to try out the things you said were wrong, and geeze! Long story short:
-Had the same problem as you where it didn’t show the buttons until I restarted the spring board.
-It froze my phone 3 times, flashing fragments of images all over, and had to use the super emergency double restart.
-Had the same problem where it lost the screenshots I had before my phone restarted only in the tmp folder.
-I managed to get the app to except the path to the camera roll, but it wasn’t too successful after that. The screen shots don’t show up in the photos camera roll, and when I tried to view them through the screenshot app it freaked because it tried to load my whole camera roll in a list as large pics instead of thumbnails.
I have a theory for this tho, I noticed the pics still stay in the folder specified unlike the tmp folder. But they are .png files, not .jpg, and dont create thumbnails for themselves.
Sooooo I’m going to keep using the dock snapshots until this gets some updates.
Hey, I was trying to find a Destination Path to put the screenshots into Photos. I found the path by doing some research. The path is…private/var/root/Media/DCIM/100APPLE
The only problem is that they won’t show up in the Photos app because they are .png for some reason. So I have to use MobileFinder to go and find them and then email them to me. A little complicated but they hopefully will fix that. For more info visit my blog at yournewfavoritevideogameblog.blogspot.com where I posted about it and other iPhone topics.
I’ve also had a lot of crashes and freezes in the process of using this application.
Wow – sorry you guys had crashes / freezes with it. I have not seen that so far. I do have some good news though – I asked the developer about paths and camera roll as a destination – they say they are working on a new version that will support that, and it should be out very soon