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Author Topic: DONE: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!  (Read 9812 times)

LuckMan212

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DONE: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« on: January 23, 2006, 12:21 AM »
There are a few spyware/surveillance-type apps out there that are designed to run "stealth" and also perform functions like keylogging, web-blocking, etc.  Generally these are geared for parents who want to spy on their kids or corporate office scenarios.  Most of them are quite expensive ($60-90) and bloated.

What I am looking for is NOT a program for spying.  (Well unless you consider it spying on myself!  :D )  I do some database development as well as some lightweight PHP/javascript work for various customers and have found it quite difficult to accurately log my time for billing purposes.  Part of this is my fault in that I am very bad at remembering to take proper notes after a development session.  Usually I just do the work and then pray that I will remember what I did several weeks later (I know-- terrible!!  :-[ )

Anyway here's the request:  a very tiny and efficient program that just takes a snapshot of my desktop and saves it to a specified folder (with the filename set to the date/time of the snapshot) at set intervals.  The interval and folder should be selectable.  Ideally the format for the images should be PNG since it is very high quality and would give the most accurate rendition of the desktop.  But I guess GIF or JPG would be OK too.

The thread should run at Low or Idle priority so as not to interfere with the work being done in the foreground.  I don't know how possible it is but the main thing I would be concerned about is a noticable pause while the app is doing its thing.  Whatever could be done to minimize this effect would be obviously the best.

This way, when I am ready to review my invoicing, I can go back and review the screenshots to help me remember what I was working on 2, 3, 4 weeks ago etc.

I think this would be soooo useful and I would appreciate any comments or feedback on it!

mouser

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #1 on: January 23, 2006, 01:04 AM »
screenshotcaptor has a function for this - try it and let me know how it works for you..
i could also add it to the new minicap more lightweight capture utility designed mainly for commandline usage..

LuckMan212

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #2 on: January 23, 2006, 11:37 AM »
hey mouser, I didnt see where this was possible with screenshot captor.  could you tell me how?
I think anyway that its a little too "big" of a program for what I am talking about.  I am talking about more of a specialized "daemon" type app that just does 1 thing and uses very little memory/cpu.   ;)

mouser

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #3 on: January 23, 2006, 02:26 PM »
i'm guessing there is a very lightweight tiny program on the web to do this, hopefully someone will find it for you.
i am curious to know how well this works for you however; like i said i could add this feature to the new minicap utility which is a lot smaller than screenshot captore, but it's not nearly as small as a program would be made just for this purpose.

see options below for how to configure autocapture, then just engage it from system tray.

LuckMan212

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #4 on: January 23, 2006, 07:42 PM »
thanks mouser... I didnt know about that feature.  To be completely honest I dont use Screenshot Captor much.  Its nice and all, but I had already paid for a screen capture app (SnagIt) and prefer to just stick with that.  So all those extra features are going to waste.  And also I would most likely forget to engage the timer sometimes and that defeats the purpose of this almost entirely.

So hopefully someone will come up with a snack or be able to dig up an existing program that is more specific to this task.....

LuckMan212

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #5 on: January 23, 2006, 10:16 PM »
by the way, what's Minicap?  :huh:

mouser

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #6 on: January 23, 2006, 10:27 PM »
minicap is a smaller screenshot capture utility i'll be putting up in the next day or so, designed mainly for commandline capturing.
see here for more info:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2160.0


LuckMan212

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Re: Timed desktop screenshots -- not for spyware!
« Reply #7 on: January 24, 2006, 06:56 PM »
I also contacted Alexander Avdonin, Russian programmer and author of the incredible TaskSwitchXP and also WinSnap.  He has agreed to add command-line support to his WinSnap util in the near future.  I am going to test out using MiniCap combined with nnCron as a solution, but I believe that either MiniCap or this future WinSnap version will be the solution.