Great tip. Please, more of this stuff, less hardware review fluff for non-Apple product, and build a separate sub-site for all things iPhone IMO.

This is a discussion better carried on in the Website Feedback area. Please, let's keep the comments here on topic.

I've been inspired to write an Applescript based on this. I'm sure others could write cleaner scripts, but heck, I'm an amateur, so sue me!

I put it in QuicKeys and tied it to Command + Option + F16 and now I can do screen captures as either jpg, png or pdf with or without shadows at the press of a button. I wrote it in Script Debugger, but paste it into Script Editor (or QuicKeys) and enjoy!

Past all text below this line:

(*

Applescript written by Eric Welch © 2008 (just kidding) to automate capturing sceenshots using Terminal commands with the camera tool. Choose the extension you want to determine the format of the final capture. Do NOT type in the extension when naming the capture.

*)

set selectedButton to button returned of (display dialog ¬
"Would you like your screen capture to have a shadow?" buttons {"Shadow", "No Shadow", "Cancel"} default button "Shadow")

--you could set tiff by changing one to tiff - this dialog only allows three buttons
set fileExtension to button returned of (display dialog ¬
"What format?" buttons {"jpg", "png", "pdf"} default button "jpg")

set fileBody to the text returned of (display dialog ¬
"What would you like to name the screen capture? (Don't include extension!) ¬
of the screen capture?" default answer "capture" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK") as text

set fileName to fileBody & "." & fileExtension

if selectedButton = "Shadow" then
set captureTheScreen to "screencapture -iw " & "-t" & fileExtension & " ~/desktop/" & fileName
else
set captureTheScreen to "screencapture -iwo " & "-t" & fileExtension & " ~/desktop/" & fileName
end if

do shell script captureTheScreen

Message was edited by: leicaman

---

Eric

There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence. - Will Rogers

I have used the great freeware "Shadowkiller" by Unsanity software for some time now, and it provides the functionality of Mr Griffiths' tip without having to access terminal:

http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller

Hope this helps.

Sam

Sam, I should point out that the Web site says "ShadowKiller currently does not work on Mac OS X 10.5.", unless they have an update somewhere.

I'm seeing that this feature works in Tiger (10.4.11 at least) as well.