iPhone screenshooting improves

As I explained in iPhone Hacking For The Rest of Us, I’ve been busy gathering screenshots of the iPhone for an upcoming book. For this noble job I’ve used Erica Sadun’s oh-so-handy Screenshot application, an application that runs on the iPhone that you trigger via Terminal and ssh.

Grateful as I am that Screenshot exists (and that, thanks to Ben Long and his oh-so-even-handier instructions for hacking the iPhone, I can actually use it), using Screenshot is a little clumsy as you have to invoke one Terminal command to take the picture and then another, outside of ssh, to copy the resulting picture to your computer, where you have to rename it before grabbing the next shot.

I wouldn’t be so eager to point out Screenshot’s failings had Erica not produced a better solution. Her Snap2Album iPhone application is a very slick refinement of the original Screenshot. Like Screenshot, for it to be useful you have to fire it remotely from Terminal. Once you do, it captures whatever is currently on the iPhone’s screen (it can’t capture video, however, as video lives in a layer that a screenshot utility can’t touch) while making the iPhone’s camera click sound. The resulting jpeg image is given an innocuous name (IMG_9000.JPG) and is placed in the Camera Roll album inside the Photos application. Subsequent picture names increment by one digit—IMG_9001.JPG, etc.

Once in the Photos application you can use the pictures as wallpaper (a picture of the iPhone interface over a picture of the iPhone’s interface—weird but true), email them, assign them to a contact, or send them to an iPhoto web gallery. And when you sync your iPhone, the images are copied to your computer.

Did I mention this is very slick? It is.

You can check out Erica’s other utilities, as well as a host of others’ helpful iPhone applications and hacking tools, here.

Category: Hacking

Posted by Christopher Breen on Aug 16 2007, 2:16 PM ET

Comments (4)

This is all good but what we really want is what Steve Jobs used to project his iPhone interface to the big screen. All we could see from his first and longest iPhone preso was a cable connecting to the iPhone and going into the darkness.

What was it connected to? Where can I get one? How much does it cost?

Gimmiehaveit!

Not only would this be a boffo presentation device (assuming wireless access I suppose) but it would also enable the making of iPhone screen movies that don't have a hand and fingers obscuring what we really want to see. Of course, we'd like to have a surrogate cursor very much like the iPhone tutorials use.

Is this a 'third party opportunity' or will Apple come out with such a device?

Posted by Frank Lowney | August 20, 2007 10:41 AM

It demonstrates that the iPhone is capable of video out just as is the 5G iPod. So mostly it's a matter of Apple flipping the switch and allowing the iPhone to do it.

Posted by Chris Breen | August 20, 2007 11:08 AM

I'm having trouble finding any documentation on how to use this app. Can you provide any help, por favor?

Posted by Edward | August 22, 2007 11:02 AM

If you haven't used the original Screenshot app, you'll want to look at Ben Long's iPhone Hacking walkthrough. This improved version of the application works much the same way. The difference is that this makes it a one-step process. To be useful, you still have to fire the application from Terminal on your computer but you no longer have to use Terminal to copy the file to your computer. The app places the picture in the iPhone's Camera Roll library. When you sync the iPhone with your computer, the image is copied over.

Posted by Chris Breen | August 22, 2007 11:53 AM

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