Having a MacBook Pro Retina is awesome. I’ve been using mine since the end of July 2012. I am completely happy with it. I’m often asked how I like the Retina and the best way I can describe it to people is using the analogy of television, that is standard definition (SD) non-Retina vs. high definition (HD) Retina. I find the Retina display a true pleasure to use and experience.
So the point of this post is about screen captures from a MacBook Pro Retina. When taking a screen capture from a Retina display it will be in HD as opposed to SD. Here is an example of what it might look like.
Image on the right is what a screen capture looks like from a Retina display, 1696 x 998 at 144ppi. The image on the left is taken from a VM running Windows 7 Pro, 800 x 600 at 96ppi. To be clear these screen captures are “native” without any tweaking or processing.
When a screen capture from a Retina is sent out to share with someone, say in an email, it will display in HD and is ridiculous to view. I find it personally annoying, it’s too large.
After some thought it seemed like a good solution was to use Mac’s Automater to take the screen capture and down-size the image.
Using Automater deals with several repetitive tasks that I perform when taking a screen capture. I created an Automater Service, which allows this automation to be available from the menu wherever I may need to take a screen capture.
The following is what the Automater Service looks like that I use. It does several things that are not related to taking the screen capture, but what I find desirable to my liking.
It takes a screen capture and saves it to a directory with a serialized file name.
This is a repeatable process that helps keep sharing screen captures consistent and deterministic.
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