When I embarked on my virtual Flight Around The World I wanted to take an easy to use virtual camera with me to document my trip. Matthias Holzer has written a free program called FSScreen that is just that kind of tool, you can find it on his personal homepage. FSScreen watches the Windows-Clipboard and saves every image that gets copied to it to a file on your harddisk.
Unfortunately I am a software developer myself and suffer from a common disease shared by lots of colleagues: I need to change something here or there add a bit or two even if something works (almost) perfectly just to make it fit my personal taste. YAFSScreen is the result of such fiddling. YAFSScreen does the same thing FSScreen does, but has a few features to separate it from FSScreen. That, and my ego, is why I am making it publicly available here.
It is just as free as FSScreen, though. You can download the installation archive (~750KB) or ask me by mail for the sourcecode. The program is written using Borland Delphi 4 and a collection of third-party libraries lying around my workshop.
After download read the Docs (what little there is you can find below) and have fun.
Simple: Run the installation program (~750KB) and answer its questions.
If you want to do it manually copy YAFSScreen.exe to any place you want to. I suggest a subdirectory off Program Files (or whatever that folder is called in your language). Create a shortcut to it if you want to. That is all.
YAFSScreen uses a concept called Savers. A Saver is a set of options that can (but does not need to) save the content of the clipboard in a given format applying some transformation on it before it does so. YAFSScreen supports an arbitrary number of active and inactive savers. Whenever the content of the clipboard changes every active saver is called to do his work. The following description tells you how to configure a single saver, but you may have as many as you wish.
Press "Options" on the YAFSScreen main window to open the options dialog:
On the top of the dialog you can select one of the configured savers. The main part of the dialog allows you to configure a single saver. The Button "Add saver" creates a new saver, "Delete saver" deletes the current saver, "OK" saves the current settings and "Abort" closes the dialog without saving changes. The saver-specific settings are:
| Active | If checked the saver will be executed when the clipboard changes. If unchecked the saver is ignored. | ||||||||
| Path | Select the path where the files are to be saved. If you enter a path that does not exist, it will be created the first time a file is to be saved there. | ||||||||
| Filename | A template for a filename. The following tokens are replaced
before the file is saved:
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| Dump binary | If checked any data on the clipboard will be dumped in binary. Some datatypes are given an extension using a very simple heuristic. Others are saved without extension. | ||||||||
| Dump as image | Only acts on data that can be retrieved as an image. Only when this option is checked any of the options in the box "Image Options" apply. | ||||||||
| Size as copied to the clipboard | Don't scale the image | ||||||||
| Scale by percentage | Scale the image by a relative value horizontaly and verticaly. If you want to maintain the aspect ratio of the image it is your responsibility to enter identical values for X and Y. | ||||||||
| Scale to fixed horizontal size | Scale the image to a fixed width given in pixels. The height of the image is computed to maintain the aspect ratio. | ||||||||
| Scale to fixed vertical size | Scale the image to a fixed height given in pixels. The width of the image is computed to maintain the aspect ratio. | ||||||||
| Scale to fixed size | Scales the image to a fixed pixel size possibly distorting it in the process. | ||||||||
| Enable absolute upscaling | If the scaling operation selected makes the image grow that will only happen if this checkbox is checked. This can be used to specify a maximum size for the images: Whatever you copy to the clipboard, it will shrink but never grow. | ||||||||
| Enable absolute downscaling | If the scaling operation selected makes the image shrink that will only happen if this checkbox is checked. This can be used to specify a minimum size for the images: Whatever you copy to the clipboard, it will grow but never shrink. | ||||||||
| Filter | Specify the algorithm to use for scaling. The scaling operation is implemented by the Graphics32 library. | ||||||||
| Save as | Specify the image file format you want to save in. | ||||||||
| Compression quality | (JPEG only) Select how agressively you want to compress the image. | ||||||||
| Progressive encoding | (JPEG only) If checked the image will be saved using progressive encoding. | ||||||||
| Compression Level | (PNG only) Select the ZLib compression value to be used when saving. Valid values are 0=min through 9=max. | ||||||||
| Interlace | If checked the PNG-Image will be saved using "Adam7" Interlacing. This allows for progressive decoding. | ||||||||
| Filters | When saving the PNG-Library will try every checked filter-type and keep the one that yielded the minimal file size. If you check all five filters you will get the smallest possible file at a cost of four unused compression-runs. | ||||||||
| Play sound | Give the name of a WAV-File to be played whenever a file is saved. | ||||||||
| Run Command | Run this command whenever a file has been saved. The
following Tokens are replaced:
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| Wait for command | Disables YAFSScreen until the command launched with "Run Command" terminates. |
Application-specific settings are:
| Show Thumbnail | Display a thumbnail of the last saved image in the main form
if checked. If unchecked a static image is displayed instead - you can supply your own image by putting a BMP-, JPEG-, GIF- or PNG-file with the name background.bmp, background.jpg, background.gif, or background.png in the directory where YAFSScreen.exe is located. |
Run the program and forget it. As long as the program is running it will watch the clipboard and whenever data gets copied there it saves that data as one or many files. You don't want that? Just quit the program.
There are only three actions other than that you can take:
| 6.Jun.2002 | 0.0.0.11 | Option to not display a thumbnail of the last saved image |
| 30.Jun.2002 | 0.0.0.7 | Brasil 0, Germany 0. YAFSScreen can save Images in PNG-Format |
| 13.Apr.2002 | 0.0.0.3 | First version to be published |
Have fun!
Marian Aldenhövel
Hainstraße 8
53121 Bonn
http://www.marian-aldenhoevel.de
marian@mba-software.de