BackDrop

Over five versions BackDrop stopped being only a cover: it now photographs the screen as well — five ways to capture, each on its own system-wide key, and every one of them works while the program is nowhere to be seen. It lives in the tray, comes up with Windows and speaks Russian as well as English.

Five ways to photograph the screen.

Settings, Capture tab. Each way has its own key field and its own line in the tray menu:

• Alt+1 — a piece of the screen, a frame you drag by hand
• Alt+2 — the window in front
• Alt+3 — the screen under the pointer
• Alt+4 — every monitor at once, in a single picture
• Alt+5 — the area you set aside, a frame left standing on screen

The keys are yours to change, and any of them can be left empty. The key is registered with Windows itself, so it answers over any program and with BackDrop away in the tray: take the picture, save it, and the program never showed itself at all.

A piece of the screen, framed by hand.

Alt+1 freezes the screen, so a notification that pops up or a video playing below cannot spoil the shot halfway through. Drag the frame, adjust it by its corners and sides, move the whole thing, or start again by dragging outside it. Three buttons sit under the frame: copy (Enter or Ctrl+C), save (Ctrl+S), close (Esc). The screen is no longer dimmed while you frame — all that is left is the dashed border, the white handles and the size of the selection in pixels.

Marking up the picture before it leaves.

The bar under the frame carries a set of pens: freehand, line, rectangle, circle, arrow and text, with a colour swatch, undo and a wipe beside them. An arrow and a caption can go on before the picture goes anywhere: what you see drawn is exactly what reaches the clipboard or the file — the ink is clipped to the frame. A minus and a plus set the size: line width 1 to 20 with a pen or a shape, font size 8 to 72 with the text tool; hold a button down and the value walks the range. The colour and the width here are the same pen as the one on the canvas, and the choice survives a restart. A tool in hand takes the mouse; a second click on it, a right-click or Esc puts it down and hands the frame back.

Quick captures: the window, a screen, every screen.

Alt+2, Alt+3 and Alt+4 ask nothing at all. The file goes straight into the folder named on the Capture tab, under the name and format you chose, with the next number that name has not used — no frame, no dialog, and deliberately no word of confirmation: a message after every capture wears out its welcome by the tenth one. The window in front is cut to what the window actually draws, without the invisible border Windows keeps around a resizable window — the strip of desktop around every shot is gone. Every monitor comes out as one picture, laid out the way the screens sit on the desk. The tray menu grew a Capture submenu listing all five with the key each answers to, plus entries that open the pictures folder and put the path of the last picture on the clipboard.

The area you set aside (Alt+5).

An area you set up once and photograph as many times as you like. The first press puts a frame on the screen; every press after that takes what is inside it. Draw it once around the thing you keep needing a picture of — a log window, a viewport, a corner of a chat — then go back to work, and the key takes the same rectangle every time. The middle of the frame is see-through: clicks inside land in whatever you are actually working in, and only the border and the bar above the frame take the mouse. The bar shows the size of the picture to come and carries two buttons — the camera takes it, the x puts the area away, and the x asks first. The border is drawn outside the piece being photographed, so the frame is never in its own picture and the screen does not even flicker. Where the frame stood is remembered: put it away, ask for it again, and it comes back to the same place — and it comes back on its own at the next start, if that is how you left it.

The name, the number and the folder.

The name and format of saved pictures live on the Behavior tab: "screenshot" to begin with, PNG or JPG, and JPG quality is a setting now instead of a number baked into the code. A new picture takes the number after the highest, not the first free one — in a folder that had had pictures deleted out of it, the newest file used to land in the middle of a listing sorted by name, which looked exactly like a capture that had not happened. The checkbox "Say in the name what the picture is of" gives each kind of capture its own word and its own count — screenshot_front_app_1, screenshot_scr_1, screenshot_allscrn_1, screenshot_area_1, screenshot_region_1 — so the kinds stop interleaving in the folder. Off to begin with; turning it on leaves saved files alone. A name the folder already has is now a proper question: replace it, keep both, or cancel. Keeping both writes "name (2).png" beside it, Explorer style.

The save picture window.

The save button — on the toolbar and under the selection frame both — remembers the last thirty folders and shows them as a list in a window of its own. A double click on a folder, or Enter on the selected line, writes the file there under the automatic name; "Browse..." opens the ordinary file dialog for a folder that is not on the list, or a name of your own. The window opens centred on what is being saved, and it is not modal, so the frame behind it can still be adjusted without closing the question: the picture is cut when you pick the folder, not when you press the button. A folder on a drive that is not plugged in today simply drops off the list. Ctrl+S still goes straight to the file dialog.

The picture, or a link to it, on the clipboard.

A saved picture can leave one of two things on the clipboard: the picture itself, for pasting into a chat, or the path to the file it just wrote, for pasting a link where the pixels will not go. Never both — there is one clipboard, and a picture put on it would wipe the path, so the two checkboxes in Settings clear each other. It holds for every save now, however it was asked for: a quick capture on its key, a folder picked in the save window, or the file dialog.

Living in the tray.

While BackDrop is running it keeps an icon in the notification area. A left click puts the program away, or brings it back exactly as it was: the same mode, the same drawings, the same place. A right click opens the menu: show or put away, see-through mode, the captures, the pictures folder, the path of the last picture, start with Windows, Settings, About, and Quit — the one way out for good. The x on the floating palette puts BackDrop in the tray without ending it, and the window's own close button does the same; the checkbox for that is on by default, and clearing it makes the button end the program as it used to. Starting the program twice is now hard to do: a second launch wakes the copy already running and bows out.

Starting with Windows.

The Startup tab, "Launch BackDrop when I log in". No administrator rights are needed, the entry shows up in Task Manager alongside every other startup program, and clearing the checkbox removes it. On the same tab, what the program greets you with: the palette in see-through mode over a live desktop with clicks passing through (the default), waiting in the tray with nothing on the screen at all though the capture keys still work, or the ordinary window for anyone who wants the old start. That choice used to apply only to an automatic start; it applies to every start now.

Hotkeys of your own.

The field catches whatever you press, and Clear leaves a capture mode with no key at all. A combination needs at least one modifier — a bare letter would be taken away from every other program on the computer; PrtSc and Pause are the exceptions. If another program already holds the combination, BackDrop says so: a line with the reason sits under the field on the Capture tab, and the tray menu writes "key taken" beside the mode. Such a key used to say nothing — it looked like a working one in Settings and simply did not appear in the menu.

A Russian interface.

The whole program speaks Russian: windows, settings, tooltips, the tray menu — and the user manual comes in both languages. The language is picked on the Behavior tab and takes effect at the next start. It is a written translation rather than a literal one, with the program and the manual agreeing on the same words throughout.

Fullscreen leaves the taskbar alone.

The window used to fill the whole monitor, and Windows answered by taking the taskbar off the screen. BackDrop now covers the work area — everything but the taskbar: the clock, the tray and the way to your other programs stay in sight. What gets hidden is the desktop, not Windows itself. The floating palette stopped jumping along with it: the restore-window button now stands on the palette in both modes, both modes measure the palette's parking place with the same ruler, and a palette parked at the bottom stops just above the taskbar instead of lying over it. The Toolbar tab gained an "Edge gap" slider, 0 to 20 pixels.

Silence when it worked.

A save and a copy no longer announce themselves. The file is in the folder and the picture is in the clipboard; a message on top of that is one more thing to read and one more thing that can land in a recording, which is what the program is for. What is left speaks only when something failed or was refused.

Fixed.

• The save button under the selection made the screen flash and did nothing else: the list of recent folders was a drop-down menu, and the menu closed itself the same instant. It is a window now.
• Turning down the save dialog cost you the whole selection — the frame closed before the dialog opened. It now comes back with the selection intact.
• The capture key fired over an open dialog too. The frame then took neither clicks nor Escape, and the only way out was the task manager.
• Pressing the key twice made two frames on top of each other and left a still picture on the screen that answered to nothing.
• Quit in the tray menu ended the program instantly, without asking — the cover vanished, and the session's drawings with it.
• A minimized window would not come back from the tray: a click on the icon offered to put the program away rather than show it.
• Two copies launched at the same moment both carried on — two tray icons and two writers to one settings file.
• With no notification area on the desktop, the program hid into nothing: no window, no icon, no way to get it back.
• A capture picked from the tray menu could catch the menu itself: it was dismissed, but the screen underneath had not been redrawn yet.
• In see-through mode the folder-picking window made it into the saved picture.
• The Russian interface translated the author's signature in the window title; it is "(by e.ov)" everywhere now.

The About window has been rewritten — it still described the program as a cover and nothing else. The user manual is updated for 1.6, with new sections on the captures, on marking up a picture, on the area you set aside, on the file names and on the new backdrop.ini keys.

A FLOATING TOOLBAR, TWELVE PLACES TO PARK IT, BUTTONS ON THE PANEL ITSELF, Fixes

Base