Looking Forward to Window Clippings 2.0: Storage

Scott Hanselman today mentioned that it would be nice if Window Clippings could automatically call PNGOUT to compact images created using Window Clippings so that an additional step would not be required. Well Scott, your wish is my command.  :)  Seriously, this happens to be something supported by Window Clippings 2.0 so I thought this would be a good time to talk about it.

Continuing my look at some of the highlights in the upcoming Window Clippings 2.0 release, today I want to share what I’ve done to improve the storage features. (So far I’ve introduced features related to capturing pop-ups and advanced selection features.)

Window Clippings 1.5 provides two storage settings. You can specify where images will be stored automatically or be prompted for a location. You can also choose between Bitmap, JPEG, PNG and TIFF image formats. You do not however have any control over the image format characteristics like JPEG compression or bitmap color depth.

Window Clippings 2.0 introduces a few major improvements to the storage options. Here’s what the new Storage tab looks like:

Copy image file to clipboard

This checkbox enables just what it says. After the image is created, the file is copied to the clipboard as if you copied it in Windows Explorer. You can then paste it into another folder in Explorer and a copy of the file will appear. You can paste it into an OLE-compatible application like Microsoft Word and the image will be pasted into the document. It also stores an additional clipboard format automatically allowing you to paste into a text box or editor and the full path to the file will be inserted.

This may seem like a small touch but it can save a lot of time as it cuts down the number of steps involved in getting your screenshots to where they need to go, whether it’s pasting it into a document or pasting the path into an FTP utility for upload.

Format

Window Clippings 2.0 still supports the four formats offered by version 1.5 but now the sky’s the limit. With the introduction of Window Clippings Add-ins, which I’ll introduce in an upcoming blog post, anyone can write an add-in to “save as” any format they can think of. Window Clippings 2.0 will ship with add-ins to support the Bitmap, JPEG, PNG and TIFF image formats. Add-ins can also provide settings that may be configured by the user.

As an example, here is the settings window for the JPEG image format:

And here is the settings window for the TIFF image format:

As I mentioned, you can write your own add-ins to support different formats so if you want a format I don’t provide, for example Photoshop’s PSD format, or even if you think you can do a better job creating PNG files for example then by all means write your own add-in.

Post-Save Event

The post-save event is also pretty self-explanatory. You simply provide a command that you would like to execute after the image is saved to disk and Window Clippings will launch it for you. In this example I use it to run pngout.exe after every image is created so that I don’t have to do it manually before uploading my images.

Stay tuned for more highlights from the upcoming Window Clippings 2.0!

Version 1.5 is the current release and you can download it here.

© 2007 Kenny Kerr