Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

[yan]

This is actually brilliant. Is wrapping a web rendering engine and exporting the web page as a PSD file the next step?

[andr]

I'm thinking it would be the easiest to do this via DOM manipulation. Sequentially set visibility: hidden to all elements except one, take screenshot, continue on to the next one. Not the most elegant solution, but it's quick and you don't need to understand WebKit or Gecko's source.

[picnichouse]

I agree - not a lot of utility in this (for me at least), but I'd pay $100 for something that did this for webpages.

[showerst]

I just spent a few hours looking into doing this, and all I can say is kudos to them for decoding the psd file format =P.

None of the big graphics libraries (GD, Image Magick, etc) support writing of layered PSD files (Imagick can read them, and export non-layered's, but that's it as far as I can tell.), and the format specs require you to sign an NDA/non-compete with Adobe.

Taking the screenshots is doable if a bit of a pain, but short of reverse engineering the psd format, the second part seems to be a roadblock. Shame, i'd use this too =P.

[river_styx]

This is cool and all, but what's the utility? You can already isolate individual windows and arbitrary screen regions with the built-in OS X screenshot grabber.

[jawngee]

You have a webpage open in firefox, safari, IE (via parallels). You grab all three in one go and reposition them on top of each other to get pixel accurate offsets?

[m_eiman]

Agreed. While I can see that it's a clever thing and nicely done, I can't think of anyone who routinely needs to screenshot all (or at least multiple) windows at once but separately.

Someone who saves a ton of time using this, please tell us what you're using it for!

[bprater]

You get everything in one-click.

[pclark]

very clever.

Now give me an example of this being useful?

[fhars]

You're right. A true hacker never writes user documentation for his software, so this is definitely not hacker news. (Ignore this comment if you only ever use MDI applications).

Edit: My bad, MDI interface is as stupid as LCD display.

[Flemlord]

I logged in to post the same comment. I'm missing the practical application of this.

[bmelton]

In this particular form, it's probably not very useful at all -- but identifying edges, or extracting 'foreground' images from 'background' images automatically with clean edges is something that would be ridiculously useful for videography, photo editing, or just graphic design in general.

Furthermore, if you advance the technology to being able to scan a photo of, say, an airport lobby, break each component into layers, and then perform shape identification on each of the identified pieces, you've got left-package detection or weapon identification technologies available to you (potentially.)

[wmeredith]

User manual authoring.

[icey]

It's pretty cool, but I'm not sold on it being $15 of cool.

[riklomas]

If it saves someone only an hour of their time, then surely it would be worth the $15 price tag?

[omouse]

A large pepperoni pizza is cool, but I'm not sold on it being $15 of cool.

[vetinari]

Well, it is also €15.95. This guy should really investigate others banks, right now he is asking Europeans for $20.70.

[lacker]

I'm not sure why the parent is downmodded - it seems to me that $15 is indeed a relatively high price tag for something that seems like a single feature of a graphics program, albeit a useful feature.

[jupiter]

Many comments, not a misleading tile - must be interesting for quite some folks.

[slavingia]

It's clever but what's really the point?