Review of LittleSnapper (as a designer)

By Dave Roach on April 27, 2009 at 6:00 am in Design,Mac,Reviews

Recently I purchased LittleSnapper through Macheist, a super amazing bundle of mac applications (plus the proceeds go to charity). Sorry PC users, this application is for Macs only =( Anyways, LittleSnapper basically takes screenshots of entire webpages…no matter how tall the page is and puts it in a library of screenshots:

LittleSnapper Gallery

This is very handy for many applications. If you have a need to display a screenshot an entire webpage for a portfolio or gallery, LittleSnapper makes this easy. Furthermore, if you are a designer, you can bookmark screenshots of a tutorial and go back to it later, and even make a colleciton of tutorials to view whenever you need them.

Another cool feature about LittleSnapper is that it allows you to snap specific elements within a site. This makes things much more accurate than trying to make a screenshot yourself:

Element screenshot

Screenshots can be taken straight from your browser  and are automatically imported into LittleSnapper, or you can use LittleSnapper’s built in browser, which is especially handy when taking images of specific elements.

What makes LittleSnapper so cool though is what you can do with your screenshots after they have been taken. You can easily annotate your screenshots and upload them to share with others! Check out my website dnroach.com in edit mode:

Annotating

As a designer, LittleSnapper is a handy little tool that I have used daily since I got it. It makes things much easier and streamlined on my part, and it’s a simple application that doesn’t get in the way either. Check out http://www.realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/ to read about more features and check it out for yourself.

LittleSnapper is on Twitter!

MacBook Keyboard Annoyances

By Nick Little on May 20, 2008 at 12:16 pm in General,Mac

Being a native Windows user, I really dislike the layout of the keyboard on the MacBooks. In particular, I dislike the lack of delete, home, end, page up, and page down keys. While all of these can still be achieved using key combinations, I would still prefer to hit just one key. Another annoyance is that Mac OS X uses the command key for almost all the same shortcuts that Windows uses the control key. Since I dual boot my MacBook and use both operating systems regularly, my fingers tend to move faster than my brain and hit the wrong key all the time.

Fortunately, there are a couple of tools that have made my life a bit easier. DoubleCommand and SharpKeys are key remapping utilities for Mac OS X and Windows, respectively. They allow you to customize the layout of the keyboard and switch keys around using software. Using them collaboratively, I successfully switched the control and command keys in Windows and mapped the right alt/option/enter key to the delete key. It does not solve all of the annoyances, but now I do have a delete key and do not have to worry about different key combinations for copy and paste in the different operating systems.

Now, if only Apple had two mouse buttons on the MacBook instead of one…

Simulating dial-up speeds in Mac OSX

By Nick Little on May 13, 2008 at 11:18 am in General,Mac

First, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has kept me in his or her thoughts and prayers this past week. I am feeling much better and my facial wounds have healed much quicker than the doctors expected. In fact, my doctor removed the all the external stitches yesterday, because I was healing so well.

Using Apple computers at work has both advantages and disadvantages. One of these disadvantages lies in the small number of side utilities for Mac OS X as opposed to Microsoft Windows or Linux. One thing I have been wanting to test for the past few months is how our sites will load on a slow connection (ie. 56K / dialup). There are many utilities and even some Firefox plugins that exist for this purpose, but only for Windows and Linux.

However, I recently came across the post at Mac OS X Hints which shows how to configure the Darwin firewall to acheive the same effect. I extended this by creating an Automator workflow as shown in the picture and saving it as an application. The script must be executed using AppleScript so that the user will be prompted to type in an administrative password. Otherwise, the script will fail because it does not have proper permissions. Once, the workflow has been exported as an application, it can be added to the dock and executed with a single click.