Taking Screengrabs

An ideal way to document screen-based work is by taking a screenshot image or making a screengrab video. This page presents information about how to do so.

Screenshot Images

You can take a screenshot of your application with an external tool or from within the app itself. You can then use PhotoshopGimp, or any number of utilities to crop and adjust the image. All operating systems have a native screenshot function:

Exporting images of the screen from code,
…and then compiling these into video

Another method is to write code, in order to save a frame directly from your application itself. You might attach such a function to a keypress. Or you might use a keypress to toggle the state of a boolean, which controls whether or not your application exports an image on every update of the scene.

If you export a sequence of images and intend to create an animation from them, make sure their filenames are numbered consecutively. There are several tools that can compile a frame sequence into a digital video file:

Screen-Grabbed Video

To record video of your app running, you will need a screen recording application. The

Afterwards

After you’ve recorded your video, it’s nice to do some editing. Consider adding a narration and some titles in Premiere, AfterEffects, FinalCut, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, etc.