

Show HN: My embarrassingly simple printscreen weekend webapp - newsmaster
http://www.easyprintscreen.com

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brent_noorda
I love it. Fantastic for multiple reasons.

1) I can never remember the "intuitive" keyboard combinations to do this on my
mac, but I can remember "easyprintscreen"

2) Useful. I can capture my screen, draw on it, highlight issues or bugs or
whatnot, and share it.

3) I know you'll keep it running because it has an obvious, lucrative business
model (assuming you monitor what screens people capture for the occasional
useful password, credit card numbers, stock tips, blackmailing opportunity,
etc...)

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newsmaster
Haha, there's no monitoring setup, infact there's no backend at all :)

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sillysaurus2
If there's no backend, where are the images saved to? Just curious.

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tokenizerrr
From looking at the source, imgur.

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sillysaurus2
Sweet! Feature request: Would you expose the imgur link directly? I often want
to take a screenshot and send it to someone, but I almost never need to draw
on it. So getting a direct link to imgur would be perfect.

Also, would you consider removing the 5-second "Redirecting..." countdown?

EDIT: Right clicking on the image and clicking "Copy image URL" gives the
imgur link.

EDIT2: When you click save, could you automatically copy the imgur link to the
clipboard? That way you can save, alt-tab, and immediately paste the imgur
link into email/IM/whatever.

Great work! Thanks for this.

~~~
biturd
Not to take away from the OP but you can enable a new feature in DropBox where
screenshots are immediately moved to your DropBox directory, uploaded, and a
share URL is stuffed in your clipboard. A notice is given on screen and on Mac
OS X you get a notification center alert. I think I also hooked it into growl.

The screenshot is only moved, not deleted. It's in the DropBox preferences —
and along with this feature you enable photo syncing and all your phone taken
pics get put in your DropBox folder in "Camera Uploads", or the "Screen Shots"
directory. You also get a good deal of bonus space for enabling these
features.

You won't have time to grab the screenshot and edit it or draw on it. It
happens fast. I use Skitch, which is a screen shot collaboration and editing
tool. Once done, you can drag and drop the image to DropBox and get a share
URL. Or drag and drop out of any app onto "Droppings", a small "app" I wrote.

I wrote a small script that fishes out your DropBox ID, which is used as your
ID in a URL ( this is done once on install ). On receipt of a resource, the
script creates a directory and time stamps it. This script is wrapped up in an
app that accepts drag and drop. Drop a batch of jpg and gif etc., images, and
it will copy them to the DropBox public folder, and put unique URL's to imgur
on your clipboard. Full support for maintaining Mac Resource forks and all
that as long as you compress on the Mac.

Drag and drop a zipped or compressed set of files, and it will do it's best to
look and see if they are all web displayable, extract them, and give you a set
of public links. If it contains other zips, binaries, etc, the original format
is maintained.

All these actions are logged. I engage with Skitch, a screenshot type app,
which I've also integrated logging for and created "cron" ( Launch Items in my
case ) actions to clean up the mess Skitch leaves behind. I don't use Skitch
as an image storage app, so it keeping multiple copies of everything only ads
confusion.

It's pretty handy. If I want to send anything to anyone, I just find it, drop
it on an app in my dock, it's 99% bash, the rest is an app that is made to
take a shell script and give you same basic UI controls to make a pseudo app.

I started to have tons of link rot on DropBox. Screenshots to CSS questions
that I would see posted by others but the screenshots were long since deleted.

My ~/DropBox/Public/drops/date-stamp/the-files.{html, htm, CSS, jpg, gif, png,
tif, eps…etc. } directory has been filling up from this droplet for two years
now. I think I have about 500MB of stuff that will forever resolve.

I do remove huge files via a "find" command that looks for specific things
that I would not want in DropBox beyond a certain date or that I know were
meant for specific people and the file will never be needed again. Sort of how
I do IMAP image attachment maintenance in gmail but have to use a desktop app
to remove attachments.

~~~
newsmaster
Hey Biturd seems like you're using a lot of screenshots in your workflow but
what are they for? Product development? I only stumbled upon this as a side
project and would like to see how it fits in with people. thx

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adrow
I think you could be clearer that 'Save' uploads the screenshot to your site,
and does not (as I assumed) open a Save-as prompt.

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CatsoCatsoCatso
I really suggest you give some warning that this saves to a public site, I hit
save and had my email in the background, thankfully there was no private
information on screen.

This gave me quite a panic, please fix it or else someone else will make a
bigger mistake.

~~~
newsmaster
My apologies, I've added it to the save button now.

~~~
CatsoCatsoCatso
Thanks. I forgot to mention in my panicky state that I really liked the app,
nice work.

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joebo
Great work! It might be helpful to show images of common keyboards to show
where the print screen button is. For example, on my keyboard it's labeled
PrtScn. I've had to explain hundreds of times where the print screen key is.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=keyboard+images&oq=keyboard+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=keyboard+images&oq=keyboard+images&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2562j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8)

To make it even more dead simple, you may even want to show a video. I'm not
kidding.

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HPLovecraft
I don't think that it is clear to a user what to do here? What does "this
keyboard shortcut" mean? What should a user do once they get the image in
there? The paintbrushes should be labeled better? Then what?

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johnnyg
I believe this tool has legs and is a bigger deal than you think.

~~~
iambateman
Skitch is bulky. Dropbox/Cloud.app are great, but too simple.

There's definitely middle ground for quick annotation, without going
crazzzyyyy. If you can screenshot, annotate, and upload in 5-8 seconds, you've
got my $$.

~~~
newsmaster
Thanks! I'll add more tools this weekend and polish it up a bit. How much
would one be willing to pay for something like?

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riffraff
I wonder, on my macbook I always did cmd+shift+3 or cmd+shift+4 without
hitting ctrl.

I am not sure if there is a difference, if not maybe you can simplify the
message :)

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slig
Without ctrl, the print screen is saved on your Desktop as a PNG. With ctrl,
the screenshot is copied to the clipboard.

~~~
riffraff
ah awesome thanks :)

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beobab
I'm assuming you don't keep people's screenshots to sell to the highest
bidder. ;)

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nashashmi
This has a lot of bones but no flesh. All I can do is a mark up a picture with
really think ink.

The only thing this seems to be is a picture paster with save to server
function that can be linked to using a short url.

~~~
nashashmi
Also, ink55 has other nifty small tools.

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slig
Loved it. Combine with browser version/OS/etc and let the user send the info
directly to the person who requested it. There's a company doing something
like that here on HN, but I couldn't find it.

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joshdance
How do you delete something saved to Imgur? Need to have that option
available.

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thejerz
Doesn't work for me on Safari version 6.0.5 (8536.30.1) on OS X 10.8.4

~~~
newsmaster
I ran into a security error 18 with Safari after pasting the image from
clipboard and running the data through Canvas .getDataURL(). Perhaps Safari
devs could make an exception for clipboard images?

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yoklov
On mac, Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4 will work with this for regions. If you hit space
before selecting anything, you can select by window.

This is nice, as I rarely want to capture my whole screen.

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waylandsmithers
Nothing to be embarrassed about. This is excellent. I can already see this
being useful for our less technical users who need help reporting issues.

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leemac
Very cool. It frustrates me to no end when users send a docx file containing
screenshots.

As a precaution, I minimized everything. :)

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hfsktr
I like that you can edit after you've saved it. Doesn't matter if it's simple
if it's intuitive and works.

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squiggy22
Fantastic. Can see applications in technical support. You could easily enough
combine with support details functionality.

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rotub
I'm a bit confused. I can only manage to screen shot the website itself. How
do I, say, screenshot my desktop?

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mden
I like it. I only wish there was the option to crop an image. Especially
useful for people with multiple monitors.

~~~
HPLovecraft
Also the ability to crop off or to blur out/cover up anything that the user
does not want shown

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cstuder
Yeah, I've apparently accidentally just uploaded a screenshot of some closed
source code to imgur...

~~~
HPLovecraft
newsmaster posted: "The imgur id is in the URL after you press save :)" so you
could go delete it off there?

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nodata
Doesn't WFM :( (Firefox + Linux)

~~~
newsmaster
Oops, I tested on Win+Mac. Guess I'll be downloading linux then.

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luis8
i think linux doesnt save the image in the clipboard after you pushed the
button, in ubuntu however a dialog is displayed after pushing the button that
allow you to copy the screenshot to the clipboard, but this tool is specially
designed for this purpose. AFAIK this wont work out of the box in linux :(

~~~
anan0s
Well I guess that's expected behavior. So you may need to explicitly state
that the feature works if you save an image on your clipboard -- not just
pressing printscreen ;-)

nice work for a weekend app!

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osetinsky
You only need Shift + Command + 3 (no need for Control) to screenshot. Makes
it much easier!

~~~
biturd
Yeah, you could actually mess up a workflow. The current instructions would
over-write your clipboard, maybe you had something you needed in it really
bad.

I use a clipboard manager which is nice, and past copies are saved for a
defined few hours or additional entries.

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guardian5x
I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen before trying out
the web app :)

~~~
patatino
I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen after trying out the
web app :/

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japaget
It supports multiple monitors. Windows 7 Pro 64-bit + Firefox 25.0.

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ksk
Nice, Can you add a progress bar for larger uploads?

~~~
newsmaster
I was halfway creating a progress bar when I thought the design sucked so I
kept it simple, but yes coming weekend a progress bar will be made.

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toddmatthews
This is a great little MVP, nice work. very useful

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coherentpony
Didn't work for me. Mac + Chrome.

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coherentpony
Ignore me. PEBKAC.

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namanyayg
Have you seen on paste.com?

