Roll Your Own Screenshot Annotation App

In our CheezTech chatroom today, another developer was asking for advice on screenshot apps that could do annotation for OS X. I’m a big fan of Automator, so I took a quick sec to whip something together.

For my day-to-day screenshot usage, I use the built-in OS X command ⌘-Shift-4 (or 3) to get a draggable selection box. I also use a cloud storage app called Cloud, which has a built-in option to auto-upload screenshots and give you back a shortened link in the clipboard. I combine the OS X command, Cloud app and a quick hack to change the default location of screenshots to take photos, throw them in my Dropbox, and upload them to Cloud. Adding annotation into this is pretty easy! I’ll go into detail after the break.

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Firefox <input> styling

A coworker just pulled me over to help with a javascript issue, and I noticed on his screen that some of our input elements looked totally whacked out in Firefox. Not so in -webkit. I dug around a bit and found this handy reset:

input::-moz-focus-inner,
button::-moz-focus-inner { padding:0; border:0; }

Now the buttons are happy in both browsers! Hooray!

Mac OS X Lion

Along with the announcement today of new MacBook Pro models, Apple also updated their feeature page for Mac OS X Lion and released a developer preview. I never really paid attention to the initial announcement of the nwe features, or at least none of them really stuck with me.

Looking over them again, there’s some exciting stuff going on. It makes sense that Apple is trying to unify their Mobile and desktop OSes, and bringing some of the UX experience from the iPad makes sense, especially when you consider how awesome Mac trackpads are. I think right now, he things that I’m most excited about are (in no particular order) :

  • Gestures
  • Resume
  • Mail 5
  • AirDrop

I’m all for adding more gestures to the lineup, and resume seems like it will make updating less of a hassle. I barely ever restart my computer, and when I do it can be a pain to close everything. Mail 5 looks like it might get me back into the realm of using an e-mail client instead of a web client. Personally, I never have any issues with moving files around, but AirDrop brings zero-config to that world, and when they work, those types of systems are awesome.