 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast that's ever so slight, Apple bias. Today is Sunday, June 4th, 2023, and this is show number 943. If you're listening to this on Sunday night or early Monday morning, don't forget to join the NoCillicast ways in the live chat room during the WWDC keynote at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday. You can find us at the live show page, podfeed.com, slash live, if you wanna see an embedded version of the Discord chat, or you can go directly to podfeed.com, slash chat, and that'll create, or take you to a place where you can create a login to go directly to our Discord. Now, I want you to note that there will be no audio or video from me and Steve. If you're on the live page, the video will be there, but it'll be Sunday's show. So we just don't like to interrupt the show with all of us gibber jabbering. You know, that's not what you're there for. You wanna hear the keynote, so we'll just be texting with everybody else. Now, I did wanna let you know that I asked Mastodon to give me a list of books to read during the inevitable hour-long game demos on the new Apple AR VR headset. And I gotta tell you, Mastodon came through for me. Wayne suggested a short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Ronnie suggested becoming Superman by J. Michael Strasinski, H.C. Light, The Invisible Man by Ralph Allison, and Kevin suggested Bellastriga by Elizabeth Price. If you'd like to join my book club during the boredom, let me know. Well, in all seriousness, I'm fascinated by the hype about the probable AR VR headset from Apple. I still haven't heard a compelling use case for such a thing other than, you know, gaming fun. On MacBright Weekly, Alex Lindsey was explaining how a poor refresh rate gives a lot of people motion sickness. Then he explained that in AR, there's another problem. And that's trying to focus on the lenses that are right in front of you while also focusing on the physical objects in your surroundings. This strain causes headaches and a fair percentage of people. So it makes you sick to your stomach, it gives you a headache, and there's no use case. That sounds great, I'm by three. Now keep in mind, I'm always, almost always, usually wrong about future technology. Usually my prognostications are way off and I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong this time. But I still can't see why everybody is so excited about this. In any case, I hope you'll join us in the live chat room to see me proven wrong. This week, Steve and I joined Bodie Grimm on his awesome Kilowatt podcast. He entitled the episode, The Great Dishwasher Wars of 2023. I love that title because it perfectly captures what we came on the show to talk about. Steve and I have had our whole home batteries from Tesla for about a half a year now and armed with our two master's degrees in engineering, it's still hard to figure out whether we can turn on the dishwasher between four and nine PM. Steve and I get into the details of all of the different configuration options in the Tesla app and why the flexibility of those settings actually kind of makes it harder to figure out how to manage power usage. Now as a general rule, Bodie's show about electric vehicles and renewable energy is delightful. Let me give you a quick sample from a previous show that illustrates why I love listening to Bodie. He's super knowledgeable and yet so self-deprecating and silly, he's a joy to listen to. Tesla has secured an endorsement from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and I'm gonna say it's information but that's not how it's spelled here. So I might've just spelled it wrong. Informatization, informatization. I'm gonna leave this end, moving on. I gotta tell you, I've played that clip about 35 times and I just can't stop laughing at it. That is quintessential Bodie. He does spend a lot of time editing his work so you don't hear that very often but when it comes out, oh man, I just love it. I just love that guy. Anyway, I hope you'll check out Kilowatt in your podcatcher of choice and of course, make sure to listen to the great dishwasher wars of 2023 with me and Steve. While you're looking up Kilowatt in your podcatcher of choice, I want you to also look for the Unmute Presents podcast. This is a show hosted by two no-silly castaways and friends of mine, Marty Sobo and Michael Babcock. You'll definitely remember Marty as the guy who convinced so many of us to buy the Elgato Wave XLR interface. Their podcast, Unmute Presents focuses on blind accessibility tech and conversations. This week they published an episode called Uncovering the Power of Podcasting and it's an interview with me about how I work accessibility into a mainstream podcast. I really enjoyed hanging out with these two men and I hope you'll give it a listen because I think it's pretty interesting but maybe that's just me because it's all about me, so I enjoyed it. Anyway, these are great guys and I think you'll really like the show. Last week on the show, you heard me sing the many virtues ofophonic, the web-based tool I use to do so many wonderful things for my podcast. But you know what? Things went horribly wrong withophonic just last week. While I'm normally recording the live show, Steve always pulls images and links from my blog post to paste into the live chat room so people can kind of follow along. While I was recording aboutophonic and telling you all of its delights, Steve was pasting images aboutophonic into the live chat. When I took a pause to do some editing, Steve said I had a problem with the link I had posted to alphonic.com. I checked the link and he was right. It didn't work. Jill from the Northwoods usesophonic and she was in the live chat so I asked her to check theophonic website and sure enough,ophonic was down. While I was continuing to record, my only thought at the time was that was unfortunate timing because in just a few minutes, I would publish the show and people would try to use the links in their podcatcher or over on podfeed.com and the one toophonic wouldn't resolve. Well, you probably realized I was forgetting something just a wee bit more important to me. How was it gonna produce my show ifophonic was down? When I waved goodbye to the live audience and I started to work on the show, it hit me. I was gonna have to do all of those things by hand that I had just described to you. With the help of Jill from the Northwoods, who knows the tools I use much better than I do, I got it done, but it wasn't easy. Normally from my recording software, Hindenburg, I export an uncompressed M4A file of the no-silicast recording which maintains the chapter marks. Then I use theophonic web interface to upload it andophonic does pretty much everything else. I was gonna have to do all of this by hand. First, Jill taught me that Hindenburg has a magic levels option. It ran rather quickly on my hour plus recording so I wasn't sure I ran the tool correctly. The first task after that was to export an MP3 file, which was easy work. I realized as I exported from Hindenburg that the MP3 wouldn't have my artwork. Jill came to my aid again and showed me how to import my album artwork for the no-silicast into Hindenburg so it would be embedded into the MP3 file. Yay, Jill again. Then I needed to send the MP3 file up to Libsyn, which is a web service I used to host all of the podcast files. I've been using them for years, but I'm not exactly fond of the service. To start with, you can't really use a normal FTP client like, say, transmit to send the file to them. You sort of can, but it sends us to this black hole folder where it simply vaporizes and then you wait to see if it shows up in the right place. Instead, I tend to use the web interface when I have to do something by hand. Now, version four of their web interface is graphically hideous, but it contains all of the features you need to upload a file and save it to their service. Over a year ago, they introduced version five of their web interface. It's beautiful, it's responsive, it flows, but it has none of the features I actually need, including the ability to send them my darned files or delete the wrong ones. I've asked them why on earth they keep pushing an interface without the actual tools you need to post a podcast and the answer by telling me, well, use version four instead. But it's hard to find version four of the web interface because you can't get to it from Libsyn.com. I finally figured out that it's at four.libsyn.com. Sheesh. On Sunday, I successfully beat the eye-wateringly ugly Libsyn four interface into letting me upload the MP3 file. At every step, I was appreciating Affonic more and more. Around this time, I wondered, how am I gonna do the transcript? As I mentioned last week, Affonic automatically creates the transcript for me using whisper from OpenAI. Luckily, I already had a copy of whisper transcription from the Mac App Store, so I threw my file into it and I let it churn away while I worked on other pieces of the puzzle. When it was nearing completion, I realized that while I knew it would create a transcription because I tested it before, I wasn't sure it would create a nice HTML file for me. I looked into it and that capability is a pro feature of the app, which would cost me around $20. Now, I truly believe in paying for the software I need and even sometimes giving developers extra money just because I appreciate the efforts they make, but Jill said she already has the pro license and she would transcribe it for me. I had so many balls in the air at that point that I took her up on the offer. I put a copy of the MP3 file in Dropbox and sent her the link using Telegram. She pulled the file down and started the time-consuming process of running it through whisper transcription on the most accurate settings. Things were starting to come together. While the transcript process was churning away again, I put the normal pieces in place to get the podcast feed into Feeder, the application I use that sends you the podcast feed. Then I thought maybe I should give the uploaded file a listen and it was super quiet compared to normal. Of course it was because Alphonic wasn't there to apply the standard loudness for podcasting that I told you about. Back to texting Jill asking, what can I do about this? She told me that on export of the MP3 file from Hindenburg, I can choose a loudness. I chose minus 16 LUFS, which is the standard for podcasting and I made sure to include the add chapters option so it would be retaining those chapters. I told you, Jill knows the tools I use better than I do. Okay, I checked the exported file and other than the fact that I had the music a little bit quiet on the intro, my voice came booming out at the beginning like it usually does for the show. Okay, that met back to the eye-wateringly ugly Libsyn4 interface to figure out how do I tell it I wanna replace a file? It's always hard for me to find it, but I eventually did. I got that done and then Steve called me with the dinner bell. All right, I brought my iPad with me to dinner so I could watch for Jill's message when the whisper translation had finished grading the HTML transcript. Halfway through dinner, she sent it to me via Telegram. I opened the file in the Telegram browser and I used the share sheet to save it to files on the iPad. From files, I needed to find my downloads folder in iCloud. Now, I don't ever remember what my Mac's name is so I opened up Tailscale to find out the virtual private network IP address of my Mac on my network. In Safari, I put SMB colon slash slash and then the IP address which Safari offered to open in files. I've realized later I could have done it using the three dot menus of connect to server but I didn't notice that at first. All right, I knew that if I could get the transcript file into my downloads folder up on my Mac, Hazel would find it, secure FTP it to my server and move it to a known location on my Mac. Sure enough, I watched as it disappeared from the downloads folder using my iPad and I was able to check the URL on PodV and it worked. It's probably obvious to most of you that instead of all this faffing about in the iPad I could have just walked upstairs and done all of this directly on the Mac but it was kind of fun to see if I could do it from the iPad. Plus, I got to keep eating dinner at the same time. When I had time to look at the transcript Jill had produced for us, I was pleasantly surprised at how pretty it was compared to the one I've been producing from Alphonic. I'd be curious whether it's helpful to anyone to have it prettier or is it actually less functional because of the line by line formatting that it created. I put screenshots of them in the show notes for comparison, so let me know if you have an opinion. I'm also thinking it might be interrupted a lot if you're using a screen reader to try to find a section. But I'm not sure you'd use the transcript. You'd probably just use the audio if you're on a screen reader. So anyway, let me know if you have an opinion on the comparison of these two, the most recent one from last week and any of the previous ones. Now, I'd only do this pretty version by the way if I could automate it, of course. Finally, after well over an hour of work instead of the say 10 minutes of automation I'm normally used to and with so much assistance from Jill I was finally able to publish the show. I was so relieved to be done. Imagine my sadness when I saw Alistair Jenks post on Slack about the episode. He wrote, hmm, I was listening on my way home this evening and I noticed a definite increase in volume during the segment onophonic. The volume went up enough that I had to turn my volume down. Though thought maybe I might have been imagining it but a while later it went down again enough that I had to turn my volume up. I thought I also detected another change early on in the security bit segment. So I'm wondering if my iPhone is doing weird things to me but what are the chances the first time I notice it is during a segment on leveling audio? Well, I did talk to George Holtzman who is the developer ofophonic and he said this was the first time in the 10 years he has had this service up that it has gone down. First time in 10 years. So I told him it was my fault as I probably jinxed it by finally telling you all about how aophonic works. I hope I never have to do this by hand but it's good to know that I can. I guess I'd better learn how that leveling actually works in Hindenburg for next time because I clearly didn't do it correctly. I know what I'll do. I'll just have Jill teach me how to do it. Hi folks, Bart here with another review. Now I'm not sure exactly when Allison's gonna play this so I'm not gonna say that last week Allison had an excellent segment on Bluetooth chair speakers, but sometime recently, Allison did an excellent segment on choosing a new Bluetooth chair speaker and the process was fascinating to hear and as best as I could tell by listening to the show it sounds like Allison found an amazing speaker at a fantastic price. So I really can't better that in any way, shape size or form for a Bluetooth speaker. Well, what if like me, you don't want a Bluetooth speaker anymore. Sharing Bluetooth devices is painful. I love Bluetooth headphones because they're mine and they pair with just one device and it just works but I really don't like it for speakers. So I have been using AirPlay 2 for quite a few years now and we have AirPlay 2 speakers in pretty much every room in the house and it's so convenient for absolutely anyone whether it be me, the better half or someone visiting to take any Apple device and just make sound come out of the speaker of their choice at the push of a button. And it's also really cool that with AirPlay 2 you can have the same sound in sync coming from multiple speakers at the same time. So I will very often, for example, say when going for a shower, I will play my podcast in the bedroom and in the shower at the same time so that when I'm preparing for my shower I'm in the bedroom, then I go and I shower and I listen to the shower and then I come back and I'm in the bedroom again and my sound is just there. Or when I'm cleaning the house I just have my podcast everywhere and I can go upstairs, I can go downstairs and it's all there and it's always perfectly in sync. I just adore AirPlay 2. So when I needed, or not needed, when I wanted a waterproof speaker for the shower that was AirPlay 2, I did a fair bit of looking around and where I landed in terms of good value for money for a nice speaker with good quality that just, you know, that works well is the little brother of a speaker that Allison mentioned in her list of candidates for her Bluetooth speaker. So Allison mentioned the bigger of the portable speakers from Sonos. And that would be the, I think, oh, it was called the Sonos Move. I think it's a big one. I don't have a Sonos Move. I went with the cheaper, smaller option. I didn't go with it because it was cheaper. I went with it because it was smaller, which is the Sonos Rome and specifically the Sonos Rome SL. And the SL is really important because in Sonos land SL means does not have smart speaker or is not smart speaker or if from my point of view, the important point does not have microphone. And they're also cheaper. So you get the bonus of a cheaper speaker and no mic because I tell you what, I don't want a microphone in my shower. Don't want it there. Also, frankly, the Sonos ones, they only do a lady and I have zero interest whatsoever in giving Amazon any more of my information than they already have. So actually all of my Sonos speakers are the SL model, regardless of what sort of speaker I get from them. Anyway, so the Sonos Rome SL is a fantastic waterproof speaker. It's sort of like a Toblerone chocolate. Big triangle-y thing, but it's very roundy corners and it has two little feet on one side of it. So you can either have it horizontal as a little Toblerone or you can stand it on its end as a little Toblerone. Out of the box, it charges over USB-C and they're doing some sort of black magic. I don't know how it works, but it looks like a normal USB-C port that has no really annoying little rubber gasket wherever you have to remember to plug into it or something. It's just completely open, normal looking USB-C port. That's waterproof. I don't know how it works, but it does work. I have gotten mine very wet very often because it goes into the shower with me and that plug says it's waterproof and it is, I don't know how it works. Now, so it is 179 euro. I'm gonna get my currencies all over the place in this review because I had to buy some things in euros and some things in pounds. So anyway, it's 179 euro for the Sonos Rome SL. I went with the white one, but by utter coincidence or happenstance or wherever these things work out, I ended up on a gift guide, a holiday gift guide show with Chuck Joyner along with another, a fellow podcaster and already an amazing person, Kelly Guimard. And Kelly's pick was actually, or Kelly's picks included two fantastic little accessories for the Sonos Rome. So the first is an unbranded rubber case that gives really good protection for the Sonos Rome and it comes with a little lie hole at the top and a little basic carabiner, which I actually don't use, but you'll see why in a moment. But basically it's designed actually to make the Sonos Rome more rugged. But I just like the fact that it lets me hang it from things because it has that eye loop and ain't no harm, I guess, having a bit of a rubber in it if it falls. It's very carefully molded. It fits like an absolute glove and they went to the effort of making a perfect square cut out in the rubber case to allow the Sonos logo to shine through absolutely perfectly. And they were clearly asleep with the wheel because if you stand the speaker on its end, straight above the logo that is perfectly visible through this case is the status LED. Did they leave a hole for the status LED? No, they did not. Does my rubber case have a hole for the status LED? Why, yes it does, because I just extended the hole to show the logo to be a few millimeters taller and now the LED is covered too and it looks entirely as if it was always assigned that way, it doesn't look like I, you know, hacked it together with a pair of scissors, but anyway, snip, snip, problem solved. Very strange design choice. Now, it is a whopping 21 pounds and 24 pints on Amazon.co.uk and it similarly priced in the US Amazon store. So, hey, for that money, I'll deal with having to make a silly little cut in it. As I say, it has an eye loop, which is the most important thing and it comes with a basic carabiner, but, but, but, I am not using it with this basic carabiner. I am using it with the second amazingly cool thing that Kelly put me onto, the hero clip. This is like a carabiner, only way more versatile. It's basically a jujitsu kung fu Swiss Army knife of a carabiner. It hinges and twists and turns and has little rubber grippy bits so that it can basically be used to hang anything from anything. It is one of the most versatile little gadgets I have ever come across. They come in all sorts of shapes inside, well, they come in one shape, all sorts of sizes. I went with a medium size blue one. The link in the show notes is just to the hero clip size rather than to a specific hero clip because really depending on what it is you wanna hang whether you want something big or something small, you're gonna want a different hero clip, but they all have this absolutely ingenious design and they really are just the hang anything from anything gadgety thingamabob. So I absolutely adore my hero clip. Basically, I have added a link in the show notes and I've also popped into the show notes a photograph of my Sonos Rome SL with its rubber case with the extra little hole cut into the top for the little status LED light hanging with my hero clip of my shower and you can see it works perfectly. Anyway, hope that's of help to someone and talk to you all soon. Hey, Bart, thanks for that. That was pretty interesting. I'm really surprised that the price is fairly reasonable on the Sonos Rome SL, good to know that SL is the unsmart version of it. A while ago a friend of mine said she was looking for soundbars and she saw that another friend of ours had a Sonos soundbar and I told her, I said, do not buy a Sonos soundbar. Whatever you do, do not buy a Sonos soundbar and she said, well, why aren't they any good? And I said, no, they're fantastic, but they're really, really expensive and everybody I know who buys one ends up buying more of them and then you end up in the poor house because you want everything to be Sonos because they work so well. So another friend of ours, she calls me up and she goes, Alson, I'm thinking about buying this Sonos device and I said, no, don't do it, don't do it, you're gonna spend a fortune. She goes, no, no, no, no, I'm really frugal, I am gonna buy one. She has bought, I think, five Sonos devices now. So it's an addiction and I know Bart, Bart has a whole bunch of them too, so whatever you do, do not take Bart's advice and buy the Sonos Rome SL Bluetooth shower speaker. It's an addiction, you just don't wanna do it, don't go there, they're too wonderful. It's been a while since we've gotten a new patron of the PodFeed podcast. This show and all of the podcasts we make here are entirely supported by donations through Patreon and PayPal. If you like this, no ads model and you get value from what we teach on the show, I sure hope you'll consider making a donation no matter how small just to help keep the lights on. Head on over to podfeed.com.payton or podfeed.com.payton.payton and make it happen. My friend, Tim Verporten, was addicted to buying speakers. My friend, Victor Coijou, with his vice was buying disk drives. My addiction is to screenshot apps. It's only been a year since I declared CleanShotX the best screenshot and annotation tool I've ever used. But when Pat Dangler sent me a link to the screenshot annotation tool Shorter, I had to take a look. By the way, Shorter is spelled S-H-O-T-T-R. There's no E in there. Now, developer Max has no idea what a gem of an app he has here. For a long time, Shorter was free with an option of just buying him a coffee. I admit that I didn't even test Shorter at first because it was free. I finally broke down and tried it with the intention of writing a review for people with very limited needs in a screenshot and animation tool. I figured it was free, it had to be really limited. I discovered that Shorter is an astonishingly good tool that I find delightful. This week, Max finally bit the bullet and he made Shorter a paid app for the grand sum of $8. Not $8 a month, not $8 a year, $8. I think he feels guilty for charging for it because you can actually still use it for free if you want. Every 5 to 10 editor uses after the free 30-day free trial and he calls it an annoying fellow animates and says, Hi, I'm the world's most annoying salesperson. Do you want to buy Shorter? Well Max also has a $25 tier. He calls the Friends Club, which he says is for those who really like the app. Bragging rights, access to experimental features, and better support. Alright, I have to admit that Shorter is very good and includes many features I've never seen before in any of the screenshot apps I've tried. It's also delightful in design and movement and it's incredibly fast. Now the best part of a good screenshot app is the annotation capabilities, but we have to eat our vegetables first and talk about how to set up Shorter for success. macOS comes with a built-in screenshot utility with some standard keystrokes. To most easily use Shorter, the opening screen suggests you deselect the keystroke options in system settings, keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, screenshots. When you do this, you can assign the same keystrokes your fingers already know to the features in Shorter. After you've disabled the default screenshot shortcuts in macOS, open Shorter's preferences and set the shortcuts the way you like them. Also in Shorter's preferences, you can choose between four options for the background to be included with your screenshots. I personally prefer no background on my screenshots, so I chose the Trim Shadow option, but you can also choose to have your wallpaper as a background, a solid color, or a transparent offset. In Preferences, you can decide how you want Shorter to behave after a screenshot. You can have it show in the editor to start annotating, you can have it just copy, or you can have it simply save to your default screenshots folder, or you can have it do any combination of the three. If that's not enough options, you can have it show in the editor as I mentioned, or just have it show in a thumbnail. If you have it shown in a thumbnail, you could even more options. If you want to be able to hide the thumbnail quickly, select the option to hide the preview thumbnail by simply clicking outside of the thumbnail. Escape works to dismiss it as well. If you find that you're accidentally closing the thumbnail before you're ready, then choose the manual option where you have to select the close button intentionally to close the thumbnail. Alright, that's enough vegetables, let's have some fun editing our screenshots already. When the editor opens, you have a row of buttons across the top. The first two are Copy and Save. Copy will do what it says on the tin, and also immediately dismisses Shorter. The Save button saves your default location, or you can use Command Shift F to save to a new location. Open up is a pin icon that creates a very minimalistic floating window of just your screenshot. This can be really handy if you have something in one app that you need to refer to while you do work in another app. If you hover over the pinned image, along with a close button, you get a little drag and drop icon. Grab that icon and drag the image to the finder or to any document you like. The pencil icon will open the editor. The window also says 100% on the top. I drag the corner of the floating window, and then 100% increase proportionally. Not sure why I need to know that, but it works nicely, stopping in kind of detents at round numbers like 200%. By the way, if you scroll over the pinned window, that will also increase and decrease the size. When you're done with your pinned screenshot, you can simply close it like any standard macOS window. I didn't think the pinned image would be all that useful, but I've used it about a dozen times in the last week. It's so helpful for those apps that don't allow persistent windows. Let's get back to the editor options. Crop and selection are combined into a single tool. If you select a region, the icon changes to the word crop, and all of the icons to the right of the tool change to be specific to this crop function you're about to execute. The most surprising option in there is to capture the text that's inside of the selected region. It's not only super accurate, but it's also really fast. As soon as you hit the OCR button, you get a pop-up on your whole mac window that explains the text is in your clipboard. This pop-up also offers to cut line breaks in the text. Be snappy about hitting that button, though. The pop-up's only on screen for a second, maybe two. If you change your mind, the cut breaks button switches to say add breaks, but again, be quick about it. If you do any kind of graphical layout work, you'll really appreciate the next tool you can use within the selection crop tool. There's a button to imprint the selection size. When you ask for the imprint, on the screenshot you'll see the height and width in red boxes and white text showing you the size of the area you've selected in pixels. You can even select the imprinted numbers and change them individually to points, and you can change the color of these imprints. Select each measurement and hit delete to remove them. The last thing in the contextual menu after you make a selection is an eraser. This brings up the same contextual menu options we'll be seeing in the blur tool, and I'll explain that a little bit. When I first started playing around with the annotation tools inside Shorter, I thought they were pretty limited. For example, there's an arrow tool, but there's only two shapes to choose from and a double-ended arrow. But then I noticed an odd-looking icon to the right of the arrow options. It's a gray dot with a chevron above and below it. If you click first on the left of the three arrow buttons and then on this unnamed button, it changes the shape of the arrow through some much more interesting options. This button changes the default look of the first button until you make another choice with that odd button. Now it's just poking around and I discovered that if you double-click on an arrow you've already placed on the screen, it'll cycle through the different arrow options so you don't even have to bring up the menu. That's pretty handy. You can change the width of the arrows with a typical slider as well. The color options for arrows are pretty limited. There's only eight to choose from so you don't get the standard color picker. Text annotations are cute. They're like rectangular thought bubbles with rounded corners and you can move around the pointy part so it's obvious what the text should be pointing at. To increase the font size, you drag a slider and it automatically increases the size of the thought bubble. If you choose a light color for the text annotation, the text automatically will be black. And if you choose a dark color, like a dark purple, it'll automatically change to white. There's not much flexibility in the text annotation formatting but I think they're very good looking at annotations. Other apps have more options but I think the other options are kind of silly in cartoony. Remember earlier when I told you that with the selection slash crop tool you can imprint a measurement of the selection area? It turns out by holding down the number one or two key, you can instantly measure either vertically or horizontally between any elements in your screenshot. Measuring in this way doesn't automatically imprint it on the image. There's an icon for the ruler but its main job is to remind you to choose one or two on your keyboard to invoke it. It's table stakes that Shutter has a rectangle tool but even here the style is unique. Unlike most rectangle annotations, this one is a nice rounded rectangle which I like quite a bit. You can make the rectangle be opaque or hollow or it can be translucent and of the same color. Kind of like a highlighter with an opaque border. It's very pretty. It's pretty nifty. The latest version of Shutter that just came out this week added two new tools. We now get a freehand drawing tool. After you scribble on the screen, the drawing converts to a smooth vector that can be scaled by drag handles. I'm not much for freehand drawing but if this kind of anarchy blows your dress up you go girl. The second new tool is a highlighter. Holding down the shift key lets you draw a straight horizontal line as nature intended. Another tool that wasn't available for free users before is the spotlight tool. This tool lets you select a region to stay at full brightness and dims the rest of the image. You can choose a nice rounded rectangle or an elongated oval. By default, spotlight has a colored border but if you drag the thickness all the way down, the border disappears. When I first tested the spotlight tool, the one feature I thought was missing was the ability to change the dimness of the background. Because sometimes you want to barely highlight an area to draw attention to an element without making the rest of the image too hard to read, but other times you want to really emphasize that one part of the image that you're spotlighting. I learned a hidden trick from the developer on how to accomplish my goal. Create the spotlight and then just type any number from 1 to 9 to change the opacity of the background from light to very dark. You can do this by selecting it again later. Now I'm a big fan of numbered bubbles next to items in a screenshot. This can be very useful when you're trying to describe a sequence of steps on a screenshot. Shutter calls them counters and again they're prettier than most. There's circles with a little nubbin on them and you can drag the nubbin around on the circle to point in different directions. Now while deleting a counter from a set does not renumber the following counters which I wanted to do, you can change a counter's number simply by selecting the counter and typing a new number. It's not ideal though because adding some subsequent counters keeps the numbering where it left off. Maybe you don't want a number 2 and you want to gap in your numbers but I kind of like them all sequential. Now Shutter's blur tool is actually called blur slash erase and it's amazing. Now the main reason you want to use a blur tool in the first place in a screenshot is to obfuscate some sensitive information or maybe just distracting information. As soon as you select a region to blur you get four options in Shutter. Plain blur pixelates everything in the region you've selected. That's pretty standard. But you can also choose to just blur the text. So let's say there's some text on top of a photo. If you select a region that includes the text and a portion of the photo the photo region does not get pixelated. Seriously it's downright freaky. Now if that's not enough the erase option under the blur tool will erase text and graphics but it leaves the background. Now your mileage may vary on how well this works depending on the background imagery you're working with. But the unique feature of Shutter that I may use the most is its ability to simply erase text leaving the background intact. I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to draw rectangles over text and using the color picker to try to match the background to cover it up. With Shutter it's instant and it's pretty darn accurate. It's crazy cool and I've never seen anything like this. By the way you can also choose to erase text and graphics so like if there's a button and text and they're both on top of an image the button is considered graphics. It's very weird that it can do both of those. I don't know how it does it. Now I never use tools, ovals as an annotation because nothing ever fits properly inside them. But I might with Shutter's ovals because they're really more like super roundy rectangles. Lines on them can be solid or dotted which is kind of fun. Now Shutter provides single key keystrokes for all of the tools I've described and they make sense like P means pin, T is for text, C is for counter and R is for rectangle. There's a ton more of course. Speaking of keystrokes when the Shutter editor is open you can get to all of the tools from the menu bar too and you can see zoom options with a lot of easy to remember keystrokes. The editor allows you to paste a screenshot on top of an existing screenshot. Now the additional screenshot is much smaller than the original so the features really intended to allow you to add like a small overlay. With CleanShotX you can have two images side by side or overlapping to create a composite image and the entire graphic expands automatically. I use that feature fairly often. The image overlay in Shutter can make an animated GIF of the overlay disappearing and reappearing on the screenshot. I have no idea why you'd ever need to do this but someone must have asked for it. But wait, there's more. Shutter has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It can take scrolling screenshots so you can capture a long webpage as a single image. With other screenshot tools I've used it's sometimes tricky to scroll at the right speed for the image to be captured. Shutter solves this by doing the scrolling for you. When you invoke a scrolling screenshot from the menu bar app or using a keystroke you've defined you get a crosshair cursor. You then select the region of the browser window you want to capture and when you let go the browser window scrolls all by itself and takes the screenshot. You can also have Shutter take a scrolling screenshot by scrolling up instead of down which might be handy if you're trying to screenshot a text message conversation and it's tedious to scroll to the top first. Now often when trying to document a process in an app or even on the web you need to take screenshots of the same area of the screen each time the content changes. Shutter has a repeat capture area option so you get the exact same screenshot size and shape and location each time. From the menu you can capture the active window or any window by tapping on it. You can even do a delayed timed screenshot which is a tool you need frequently to capture things like dropdown menus. In the menu bar dropdown I discovered yet another gem. Shutter can do OCR text on the fly without even taking a screenshot. The default keystroke is control option command O which brings up a crosshair cursor. You simply drag across a region of visual text anywhere on the screen and you will instantly see a pop up saying it's ready to paste anywhere you like. I use this feature in other tools all the time when I'm trying to grab the text in something like say system settings and it's not selectable. Having on the fly OCR as part of Shutter is fantastic. I've described how you can measure objects with Shutter. It turns out you can also select objects. Instead of just dragging with the selection tool across your screenshot, hold down the option key and drag and you can select buttons, text and more. It's really fabulous. Now one of the things I wish CleanShotX could do is resize images. I work on a screenshot, I get it annotated just the way I want but then I have to open it in preview to resize it to post it online. In the upper right of the Shutter window you can see the image size. If you click on the size, you can change the size of the image either by scaling down or up and you can define specific dimensions. The app warns you that this is a destructive change that cannot be undone so beware before using the resize option. All right, we got a bottom line this. I've been going on a long time but bottom line is Shutter is a super capable and really fast screenshot utility with tons of tiny little utilities built in that are very powerful. From OCR to scrolling screen captures to innovative automations to the ability to measure geometry inside screenshots to the hiding of text and images, Shutter is a gem. You can find Shutter at Shutter.cc. If Shutter sounds as delightful and useful to you as it is to me, scrape some loose change out of your couch cushions and pay the $8 for this amazing and delightful app. Well, that is gonna wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allisonatpodfeet.com anytime you like? 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