manicwave.com

One aspect of developing iPhone applications that I’ve spent a fair bit of time on is preparing screenshots – for the tutorial in the app, for marketing purposes and to capture the evolution of the look and feel of my apps.

My workflow has always been something like:

• Capture a screenshot in the simulator (using SnapNDrag)
• Save the file to a directory
• Spend countless [minutes|hours] manually cropping and saving files to get rid of the simulator chrome

Why the simulator? Because I have a complete set of mocked up data appropriate for marketing purposes.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with JSTalk, evaluating it for inclusion in my upcoming desktop product. I’m a huge fan of Acorn. So much so that I haven’t installed PhotoShop on my newly repaved (with 10.6) macbook pro. With the release of Acorn 2.0, JSTalk is embedded, so the following script does exactly what I need.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

// Note, this requires the Acorn JSEnabler plugin to be installed.
// http://code.google.com/p/flycode/source/browse/trunk/jstalk/extras/acornplugin/
 
// Take a standard full window screen shot of the iPhone simulator and crop it to just the content area
function pathByAppendingString (path, aString)
{
    var fileName = [path lastPathComponent];
    var extension = [fileName pathExtension];
    var baseName = [fileName stringByDeletingPathExtension];
    var path = [path stringByDeletingLastPathComponent];
 
    return [[path stringByAppendingPathComponent: (baseName+aString)] stringByAppendingPathExtension: extension];
}
 
var acorn = JSTalk.application_("Acorn");
var firstDoc = acorn.orderedDocuments().objectAtIndex_(0);
var cropRect = NSMakeRect(33, 129, 320, 480);
 
firstDoc.cropToRect(cropRect);
 
var fileURL = [firstDoc fileURL];
 
var outputFile = pathByAppendingString([fileURL path],"-cropped");
 
firstDoc.dataRepresentationOfType_("public.png").writeToFile_(outputFile);
 
firstDoc.undoManager().undo();

You start with this:

and end up with this:

Finally, if you add the script to your ~/Library/Application Support/Acorn/Plug-Ins folder (and restart Acorn) – ResizeIPhoneSnaps will appear in your filter menu. Thusly.