Archive for September, 2009

Where the idea came from

A couple months ago, while working on the help file for a project i was doing, i needed to add a few screen shots of the application dialogs, toolbars and some context menus, while doing this, it occured to me that it was a lot of work having to capture the entire window, then having to edit the image on some image editor, select and cut the required section, then save it as another file, and finally, add it to the help file.

I went on the next searching for some utility that would allow to save only one section of the window, to avoid all that long process of editing the images, i found a project named X-Shot 2002, which is made or was made by Nico S. Beck, a developer in Germany, it can be found on www.nsbnet.de, it worked as i needed, at least partially, it allowed me to draw a rectangle over the area i wanted to save, this was good since i didn’t need to edit the image anymore, only the section i had covered under the rectangle was saved to the image, but it has a very big limitation for me, it only supports to save one section of the screen at any time, if i want to save a different section, i have to go through the process again, draw a rectangle over the new area i want to save, then save the settings and click “Screenshot!” on the main window, and the old settings i had are lost after i save the new rectangle settings, this was not very good since i wanted to have several parts of each windows saved, at the end this only moved the problem from one place to another, i still needed to process each image separately.

Although i found the X-Shot 2002′s approach good, it was not enough for me, so i gave it a little thought for a week and then came with the idea for xShots, which main feature, basically, is to be able to save each shot settings under a name and reuse them as much as i want, any time i need them, X-Shot 2002 has a timer feature that allows to save a screen capture at regular intervals, it allows to set hour, minute and second for the shot, it allows the timer to loop, so a set of images will be saved until the timer is stopped, it also has a few default time options to select from, i wanted to have something similar, but for now, since i needed the app really soon, i just added a simple option to set the time in seconds, so that each time the seconds interval i set has elapsed, a new shot is taken, eventually i plan to follow the same approach as X-Shot 2002, but for now it was enough to me.

After quickly writing down my specs, i started to write the app by the end of August 2009, about three and a half weeks later, by September 14, i had a first beta ready, fully functional, and i uploaded it to several sites as well as my home page and blog, a couple days later, it was being noticed by a few bloggers here and there, nothing really to get too optimistic about, but i didn’t really care since it was a personal project with no other purpose but to help me do my work, i just thought that maybe someone else would find it useful, and so it seems a few people have found it interesting, i hope it of some use to them.

I have always thought of sofware as a piece of art, which is built by a developer as if he was adding a piece of his soul to each application he makes, good software must be unique, must provide a different, new, approach to an existing problem, or simply a good and correct approach to solve a new problem, that’s why good software will always remain in the memory of those who used it, and nobody will remember those who just copied somebody else’s work, just like a painting, nobody will remember those who just copy the mona lista, but everyone knows who came up with it first…