Continuing my look at some of the highlights in the upcoming Window Clippings 3 release, today I want to share some of what I’ve done to support different user experiences. In previous versions of Window Clippings you always needed to go through the capture surface, or overlay, to create any screenshot.
For Window Clippings 3 I was determined to make a clean separation between the core capture engine and the rest of the product. This has turned out well, allowing me to enable a variety of different user experiences. Of course as with any software release I have a finite amount of time so only a few of these user experiences will surface in the upcoming release. Fortunately the groundwork has been done so that future updates should bring even more surprises.
One of the features that I am exposing is the ability to create screenshots using the command line. This command line interface (CLI) is a wrapper around the capture engine and provides the most direct and complete access to the screen capture functionality provided by Window Clippings 3.
This is not an exhaustive description of the command line features but should give you some idea of what’s possible. Consider the following command that instructs Window Clippings to run the “capture” command. The rest of the command line arguments are specific to this command.
wc.exe capture /wt Calculator /out C:\Images\calc.png
The /wt argument provides the title of a window to capture.
The /out argument provides the file name of the image that will contain the resulting screenshot.
If the window’s title changes frequently or is just not convenient to use then you can use the window’s class name instead.
wc.exe capture /wc IEFrame /shadow /out C:\Images\ie.png
The /wc argument provides the class name of a window to capture.
The /shadow argument instructs the capture engine to include the window’s shadow.
Naturally, you can include more than one window in a single screenshot.
wc.exe capture /wt Calculator /wc IEFrame /shadow /out C:\Images\both.png
That’s it for today. Stay tuned for more highlights from the upcoming Window Clippings 3!
Check out the other highlights:
Kenny Kerr 