As many of you are aware, I’ve recently converted to a mac through the purchase of a Mac Book laptop. I also tried to convert my desktop life, but after some horrible experiences with the screens on the new iMac’s, I’ve decided that will have to come much later down the road in our business when we can afford a Mac Pro for my desk (where I get personal control over my desktop).

This week, I’ve mostly been playing with the Print Screen options / Screen Capture options. Previously, I’ve only used a couple of the plethora of screen capture options that OSX offers, but I thought it time to get a definitive list of the (hard to remember) key combinations available, mostly for my own reference.

So, putting Windows to shame, you can actually save a screen capture as a JPEG file with a mouse click. This would be a great addition to windows and would definitely stop me from receiving emails that are 5Mb with 2 BMP screen caps in that I’ve been receiving a lot of recently. An overview of the commands are;

Saving a Screen Capture Direct to a JPEG File

⌘ ⇧ 3: Capture the entire screen to a jpeg file on the desktop.

⌘ ⇧ 4 (Followed by Drag): Capture the selected area of the screen to a jpeg file on the desktop.

⌘ ⇧ 4 (Then Spacebar, Then click on a window): Capture selected window (and sometimes a border) to a jpeg file on the desktop.

Saving a Screen Capture to the Clipboard

⌘ ⇧ 3 + Ctrl: Capture the entire screen to the clipboard.

⌘ ⇧ 4 + Ctrl (Followed by Drag): Capture the selected area of the screen to the clipboard.

⌘ ⇧ 4 + Ctrl (Then Spacebar, Then click on a window): Capture selected window (and sometimes a border) to the clipboard.

While it’s fantastic having this much freedom over the print screen process, the last one especially reminds me of trying to learn a 10-hit combo in Soul Calibur. It even feels that way when you’re trying to press all of the buttons on the keyboard/mouse during the process!

This may be old news to some people, but I have recently found the power of a piece of software called Mono. Now, it actually takes quite a lot of research and a bit of experimentation to realise just how powerful Mono is. Nowhere on their landing page does it tell you that it lets you run .NET Managed EXE files compiled for windows on Linux and even OSX.

I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but Microsoft’s .NET languages such as Visual Basic and C# don’t actually compile into windows specific executable code but they instead get compiled into an ‘intermediate’ code similar to Java. This is why you are required to download 80Mb of .NET Framework files to run them on XP.

So, what the clever guys on the Mono Project have done is rewrite the .NET Framework so that it runs on other operating systems. That means that you are able to run software that was compiled for Windows as .NET Managed Code in other operating systems as if it were a native application. Now the system is far from perfect, so you’re not able to just pick any application and guarantee it will work - but the project is improving all the time and making more and more programs compatible.

Again, something which is not stated, is how easy this is. Download the Mono application for your machine. And then type: ‘mono MyApplication.exe’ and wait for the application to run. Hassle free (when it works).

While this may not seem significant to many people, I found it amazing that I could run a bunch of .exe files on my mac directly from my Windows Partition with no problems what-so-ever. My only issue with this technology at the moment, is the inability to have ‘browser windows’ in the application run on OSX. They run on Linux apparently, but not on a Mac.

I really hope that .NET developers start making their applications Mono compatible, and I look forward to the browser window component being accessible on a Mac. I’ll definitely be trying my C# programs on Mono and I may even release some of them soon!