GrabIt

Screen Capturer for BeOS R4^TM on Intel PCs

This is the first alpha release of GrabIt, released on 27^th Feburary, 1999. This version provides some of the limited functionality we thought of for this release. More features are planned, and are described later in this document.

If you have any queries, suggestions, or comments, then feel free to contact us at grabit@silentsw.com. In the quest for new versions, seek out www.silentsw.com.

Overview

GrabIt is a small screen capture program for the BeOS R4. It enables you to grab the contents of the current workspace as a bitmap, select an area of your choice, and then save the selection to your hard disk using any image format supported by the BeOS.

All the screenshots in this documentation (OK, there's only one!) were grabbed with GrabIt, and we'll be using it for the screenshots in forthcoming pieces of software, such as the next release of VuBe.

Grabbing Your First Screenshot

When you first open GrabIt using the Tracker, it automatically takes a screenshot, and displays it in the GrabIt window. That's it! Your very first screenshot.

Of course, at any time you can click the Capture button and another screenshot is taken. Whilst the capture takes place, the GrabIt window is hidden. Normally it takes about a second before the GrabIt window returns.

Zooming and Panning

To examine your capture, or to find the exact area you want to save to disk, you may need to zoom and pan around the image.

To zoom, use the Zoom In, Zoom Out, and No Zoom buttons, which suprisingly enough do exactly what they say. You can zoom out to as little as 12.5%, and zooming in almost forever. (There probably is a limit but each magnified pixel would be bigger than your monitor before you reached it).

You can pan around the screenshot, by dragging on the image whilst holding down the secondary mouse button (normally the right one). Panning is quite fast, and you only need to move the mouse a little before the image starts to pan. Move the mouse more, and you can be on the other side of the image in a fraction of a second.

Selecting and Saving

To select an area to save, simply drag over the image with the primary mouse button (normally the left one) held down. The area that you have selected will invert. To clear the selection, which effectively makes the entire screenshot selected, click the Clear Sel button.

Having chosen your selection, click the Save button to save the selection to the hard disk. You will be prompted for a filename, and the file format to save in. Having saved, you can select a new area of the screenshot to save, or capture another screenshot!

Questions and Suggestions

Software can only get better from feedback, and we'd appreciate yours. Send any feedback and/or bug reports to either grabit@silentsw.com or steve@silentsw.com. We can't promise anything, but we'll do our best :)

License

This software is freeware, and is freely distributable. Neither the source code or object code (which you don't have), nor the documentation, binary files or additional files (which you do have), may be modified or distributed separately.

We do not warrant this software fit for any purpose, because, yes, we also write software for Windows, and so expect everything to fail just by moving the mouse <g>

Version History

27-Feb-99 - 0.9.0.1 Alpha 1
This is the first alpha release.

Planned Features and Bug Fixes

The following is some known bugs we plan to fix...

When selecting a large area, the selection flickers a little, which is a bit annoying, and we'll sort it out!
If the computer is busy doing stuff when you choose to capture, some windows do not get time to redraw properly when the GrabIt window is hidden, and so the capture looks awful. A workaround for now is to start GrabIt from tracker, which will automatically capture the current workspace.

We plan to implement the following features.

Drag and drop selections to other applications, such as VuBe (also by us!)
Capture Preferences, such as whether the mouse is included in the screenshot, and whether to delay between hiding GrabIt, and capturing the screenshot (so that menus can be captured, etc).
Make the buttons on the left of the window look better, and generally improve the UI.

Let us know if you think of something we didn't!