Suggestion: The ability to float screenshots on your workspace

[wraith808]

I just purchased Screenfloat for my Mac.  It's lacking some things that SSC has, but it has one killer feature that I think would be great in SSC.

When you take a screenshot, instead of popping up a dialog like SSC, it opens a floating borderless window with the image.  That window has controls on the edges to save and such, and also to set the transparency.  This is useful when doing comparisons, or referencing something as you're writing- or all sorts of things.

If you need some screenshots to visualize what I'm talking about more than at the site, let me know.  But their site explains it pretty good also.  I can't believe how cool it is to have this function- I'm really going to miss it on my main computer, which is why I figured I'd suggest it.

[mouser]

This has come up before, but i haven't quite grasped the value of it entirely until this post.

In the past when this has come up i have suggested that people simply use a standalone image viewer, of which there are many (irfanview is the one that comes to mind).

But I can definitely see the value of a simple quick image overlay that you could drag around and would stay on top, perhaps with transparency controls.

Now, I *could* fairly easily add such a function directly to Screenshot Captor, but I think this would be a perfect candidate for a standalone little tool that someone could write for NANY 2014.  It's trivial to interface such tools into Screenshot Captor.

[mouser]

If no one else does it for NANY I will.

What would be nice is if those of you who like this feature help specify the features and interface options that are important to you.

The features that seem important from what i gather are:
1. super-thin border (or borderless)
2. float on top of all windows
3. easily resizable (maybe with some options for this).
4. transparency control.

[cmpm]

Maybe add the copy function or drag and drop to Framless by our skwire.

edit- the 'easily resizable' is not present in Frameless though.

[wraith808]

I could take a look at it... I might have to ping you for help mouser   I'd thought about it... but figured that you'd be the perfect person to do it.

[wraith808]

My first question... is there an API for SSC?  What I was figuring so that I wouldn't reinvent the wheel is to intercept the saving part of SSC with a plugin that would take the screenshot and float it...  didn't know if that was possible, but it seems like that would be a good plugin.

Thoughts? (And let me know if I should PM these or make a different thread or how you would best like to handle the questions)

[Ath]

Wraith, check out the Post-Capture options page in SSC's Preferences

[wraith808]

The only problem with that is that I would have to make it a non-resident executable, which would slow down the processing of the file.  I'd like to either have an assembly that SSC could load and call a method that sends the filename to the assembly (sort of like FARR does with plugins) or have it communicate with an already extant instance of an application if I have to go the out of process way- perhaps across windows messaging or some other mechanism.

I'll try the out of process bit... but I'd still like to know if there is a way to create plugins like with FARR.

[mouser]

SC doesnt have a plugin system -- it just launches executables.

Regarding wanting to stay resident, might I suggest a commandline option to launch the tool and stay resident, and a commandline option that says to not open a second instance but open the file in currently running instance?

I use such a procedure in some of my apps so that if a second instance is launched, it will just pass execution to the already running copy.  The benefit is that the caller doesn't have to do anything special.

[wraith808]

Yeah... that was going to be my second option, but I wanted to get a word back from you first.

Thanks for the info... now off to make something!  (Between NANY/NaNoWriMo/NaGaDeMon I'm going to be busy the next couple of months...)