Menu Capture

Once in a while, I need to take a picture of the screen with a menu pulled down, in order to document one of my shareware programs. If I did this every day, I suppose I wouldn't mind paying for a screen capture program with all the bells and whistles, but as it is, I resist. Years ago, there was a tiny freeware extension called StillDown, by Gregory M. Robbins, that enabled command-shift-3 screen shots with menus pulled down. But StillDown doesn't work with Mac OS 8. Therefore, I decided to write a new free bare-bones menu snapshot program: MenuCapture. To install MenuCapture, drop it in your Control Panels folder and reboot. To use MenuCapture, open the MenuCapture control panel and click the "Enable" checkbox. Then pull down a menu, and briefly press the keys command, shift, and control simultaneously. What happens next depends on what version of the system you are running. With System 7.6 or later, the cursor turns into a cross-hair; let up the mouse button, then click and drag to select a rectangle to be copied to the clipboard. With earlier systems, a snapshot of the whole screen is saved as a picture file on your disk. Version 1.0.2 makes it more obvious how to capture a contextual menu, by ensuring that the cursor changes to a cross-hair.