Grabber  -  Hot key screen grabber

by Lee Calcraft

Grabber is a little utility that demonstrates the technique of automatic incrementing of filenames, as described in the Just a Page article in this month's RISC User magazine. It provides a hot-key screen grab facility, which saves a sprite of the current screen display and often comes in very handy if you need to grab an illustration of a program you are working on, for example.

Running the item from the RISC User menu system opens a directory containing the complete Grabber application. This should be transferred to a suitable place on your hard disc before using it, since there will not be enough memory on this floppy disc to store the grabbed screens.

Once transferred to the hard disc, the program can be run by double-clicking on its icon in a Filer window. A small window is opened on the screen to show that the program is active. Pressing both Alt keys together will immediately grab the screen and save it in the Screens directory which is inside the Grabber application directory. The filename under which the sprite is saved will be Screen_xxx where xxx is a 3-digit decimal incrementing value.

Clicking on Grabber's window opens the Screens directory.

The program is terminated simply by closing the window.

Although Grabber's window is always visible while the program is active, in practice this is not a problem since you would be unlikely ever to want a screen grab without at least one window on display, and Grabber's window is small enough to hide behind virtually any other window that may be open (you can in fact hide it behind the icon bar by sliding it to the foot of the screen and then pressing Shift-F12).

Copyright  Lee Calcraft 1995
