Kevin Dente's Blog

The Blip in the Noise
Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper

One of the unfortunate casualties of my upgrade to Vista has been Cropper, the excellent screen capture tool from Brian Scott. It seems that desktop composition wreaks havoc with Cropper's ability to capture screen shots correctly - the Cropper overlay shows up in the captured image, thusly:

 

Setting the Compatibility option on the Cropper executable to "Disable Desktop Composition" fixes the problem, but of course without Glass the screenshots don't look nearly as cool.

I exchanged a couple of emails with Brian, and he's working on a fix. I look forward to an updated version - Cropper has been my screen capture tool of choice.

Published Thursday, January 11, 2007 8:47 PM by kevindente

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Comments

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 12:13 AM

Have you tried "snip" within Vista? I haven't used Cropper before, but Snip has done everything I need so far in Vista.

Chris Hammond

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 1:08 AM

I never understood the point of screen capture utilities. What's wrong with the Print Screen key (or Alt+PrnScrn for just the top-level window)?

I'll usually paste the result straight into Paint.NET for further editing.

Dean Harding

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 9:21 AM

I fail to see how a 3rd party app for windows xp screenshotting not working in a new OS with a new graphic system is the new OS's fault.

This seems like the equivalent of me complaining that my commodore 64 mule software doesn't run natively in vista.

Eric Wise

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 10:04 AM

Dean,

Print Screen is fine for occasional use, but if you're regularly doing lots of cropped screen shots, a more powerful tool is a big time server.

kevindente

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 10:11 AM

Eric,

1) There was no statement of "fault" in my post - I was merely pointing out the incompatibility.

2) I fail to see how your C64 analogy is in any way equivalent. Vista is designed for backward compatibility with existing XP apps.

kevindente

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 4:08 PM

1) The fault is in the wording of your title "Vista issue of the day", the casual reader would assume that you are having an issue stemming from vista, which as I pointed out this really is not.

2) Vista was designed for reasonable compatibility. Compatibility is and always will be broken where the creator deems necessary (look at the antivirus/kernel problem vendors are having) Has there ever been an upgrade to a windows operating system that had 100% compatibility?

Eric Wise

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Friday, January 12, 2007 4:52 PM

Eric,

I really don't get your point here. It seems you think that Microsoft has the right to break compatibility when it sees fit. And yet when it does so, that's not Vista's fault?

My purpose with these posts is to point out where problem spots lay when upgrading to Vista. There's now an application that I used to use that I can no longer use.

Do you think non-technical users will be able to distinguish between "reasonable" breaks and "unreasonable" breaks? Between when the problem lies with Microsoft and the software vendor?

kevindente

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Sunday, January 14, 2007 3:49 PM

Until Cropper is fixed, you could try Gadwin PrintScreen:

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Gadwin_PrintScreen/1024878597/1

n4cer

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Wednesday, January 31, 2007 8:15 AM

Lets say nobody is perfect in this world so dont get upset

Rais

# re: Vista Issue of the Day - Cropper Goes to the Crapper@ Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:16 PM

""Have you tried "snip" within Vista? I haven't used Cropper before, but Snip has done everything I need so far in Vista.""

Oh my God, If you were here I would have huged you and taken you to a dinner! I love you. My Prn Sc button has stoped working (and im trying to figure out why) for about a month now...and it was getting on my nerves when I had to post a tutorial  with screen shots. and I neve knew SNIP was a vista tool INCLUDED! Seriously, thank you soo much! Long live Chris and long live Internet :)

Varun

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