Mon, 01 Jun 2009 LittleSnapper 1.0.4 review

Anybody who has ever created websites will understand what a pain it is to show them off. Realmac’s LittleSnapper aims to make this process as easy as possible.

Websites – as we’re sure you’re aware – are generally several pages long. The Macworld UK website is almost ten times as long as the typical Safari browser display, so there’s no way you can look at it all at once.

It is possible to print out a page as a PDF, but this will usually divide the screen up into virtual pages, rather than print it all out as one long screen.

Until LittleSnapper came along, the only other option was to take multiple images of a page and use an image-editing application, such as Adobe Photoshop, to stitch the images together; a laborious and time-consuming process.

LittleSnapper enables you to quickly take screen grabs of an entire web page. It acts as a standalone application that works in conjunction with your web browser (Safari or Firefox) or you can browse from within the application itself.

Taking snaps is straightforward. You can either press a keyboard shortcut (Command+Alt+1 by default) while browsing, or head into Little Snapper and choose Capture and Capture Web page.

If you have multiple web pages open (or even multiple browsers) the app takes the foremost window on the desktop (the one you clicked on last).

Taking a snap takes a few seconds, depending on the size of the website, then a preview appears in LittleSnapper’s light table-style library.

You can double-click to get a full-size view of any snap, and zoom in and out on details. Snaps can be exported to the Finder, and can be edited in Adobe Photoshop (or any other image editor set in the preferences). A nice touch is that it also snaps the source code of the page, and this can be viewed in TextEdit, or BBEdit, or a similar program.

It’s this sort of touch that lifts LittleSnapper above and beyond being merely functional. The application is packed full of useful features that makes taking and working with web page snaps a joy.

There’s a wide range of tools for annotating shots – some are fairly straightforward, such as rectangular and circular outlines, lines, arrows, and text captions. It is also possible to highlight specific parts of a website and blur out confidential information.

The application also has built-in sharing functionality. By default this is via a Realmac’s QuickSnapper service (currently in beta) although it also offers support for Flickr or a private FTP service.