Grab

On most of my blogs I start off by saying how much I love the application I'm talking about. I'll refrain this time, because to do otherwise would be a lie. In other words, I honestly dislike this application, although it has its uses.

Said uses would be a very roundabout way of taking screenshots. I'm not honestly sure why anyone would go through the hassle of finding and opening an application and then going through menus to take the screenshot when you can do the exact same thing by pressing a 3 key shortcut.

I'm talking about cmd+shift+3. If you press cmd (aka the apple key) + shift+3 you will take a screenshot of the whole screen. This screen shot will be saved to the desktop. If you want the screenshot to go to the clipboard, press the cmd+shift+control+3. In addition, if you switch the 3 for a 4, you'll be able to select a smaller area in your screenshot.

Anyway, back to 'Grab.' Once you open the application you go up to 'capture' and you can choose the kind of capture you want. That's most of what there is to know about this application. I guess it does have two advantages. First is the timed grab, which I'm sure has some use, I just don't know what. Second (and the one time I've used it with almost good results) is the fact that you can choose if you want a cursor to show up in your screenshot. I'd really love it if they had it take the actual cursor on the screen, but alas, it does not.

Another annoying thing is that by default it saves your screenshots as tiffs (I have no idea why) and you can't choose anything else. So if you want to use the shot elsewhere you'll have to open it in another application and save it as your desired (and widely supported) file format.

You don't have that problem with a 3 key shortcut...