LightShot Part 2: A Friend

So here’s the anticipated part 2 post! I have an imaginary friend, who I will be calling Kon, who’s going to show us all one way he uses LightShot that’s different from me. If you missed part 1, you can read it here.

Just so you know more about Kon, he was introduced to LightShot the same way I was. We met each other in that game actually! However, he’s still a gamer and he is mostly using the app as an easy way to upload and share screenshots to others by sharing the link. Instead of asking him to take a screenshot and upload it, which is very similar to how I used the app in the last post, I asked him to go look for a past screenshot that was taken to share (one of my first screenshot taken in LightShot).

One feature of LightShot is that all the uploaded screenshots are saved into your LightShot Gallery online, if you are logged into it, which allows you to find previous screenshots you’ve taken so that you can reshare them. This is a convenient feature because you no longer have to remember or keep track of which link is for which screenshot.

Demo:

So here I have him go to the LightShot website, where we can access the online gallery. As you can see, right now it is my Facebook account that is logged into the site. It’ll stayed logged into my account so that my imaginary friend Kon can stay anonymous. Lightshot uses a lot of boxes to group things together, except for the social media links (Twitter and Facebook). These two don’t have a box around them, but since they are close, we see them as being group together under the Gestalt principle of proximity. It makes sense to group these two together since they are both related to social media websites.

 

The only thing about LightShot’s website is that the menu buttons are fairly small; there’s a triangle on English and on my name, but that is not very visible. The drop down menu items are also small, making it hard to select the exact item you want. If they could increase the size of the menu, it would make it faster/easier for people to correctly select the item they want under Fitts’ Law.

 

Clicking on My Gallery, we can see all of the past screenshots I’ve uploaded. A nice thing about this layout is that it uses the Gestalt principle of proximity to group items together again. Each screenshot is grouped with a Copy link and a Delete button, as well as the title of the screenshot and when it was uploaded. However, having a title for each screenshot might not be necessary. As you can see in the photo, all of my screenshots have a title of “no title”. Searching for a screenshot by title would be impossible in my gallery since I (and Kon) never named the screenshots. It would only be possible to search for them by date.
One feature that would come in handy here is a search or filter function (mainly filter for the current situation). Right now, Kon has to scroll through all of my most recent screenshots to get my older ones. He can’t use Ctrl + F to jump to a date because LightShot only loads a part of the screenshot gallery at a time instead of loading all the screenshots (each time you scroll to the bottom, around 5 more lines of screenshots are loaded). The search or filter function might come in handy in a situation like this.

 

So now Kon has scrolled all the way to bottom. Take a look at the size of the scroll bar in this GIF compared to the screenshot above it (you might not be able to see it, but it’s tiny). Now he can copy the link and share it. I had him click on Copy link and paste it into the address bar to go to the link, but I realized that I wasn’t taking a GIF and that I was taking a screenshot. He scrolled down to the end of the gallery again, and I realized that the position of the screenshots changed. The time the screenshots were taken wasn’t factored in, so screenshots taken in the same day can switch positions, which might make it a bit harder to find a specific screenshot if you’ve taken many screenshots that day. My “first” screenshot was this one in the first run.

Overall, the LightShot website could use bigger menus and possibly a search or filter function. The arrangement of the screenshots in the Gallery should also be a little more consistent, although they might not be able to do that because storing the times the screenshots were taken might require too much memory for their servers (?).

That’s all my imaginary friends and followers. One day I might make a sign up link so that you imaginary friends and followers can sign up to be featured in one of my posts ; )

LightShot Part 1: Me

Hello my imaginary friends and followers. I’m also imaginary so don’t worry. Today I’m going to introduce you all to this screenshot app I use called LightShot.

Update 9/16/18 9:56 PM: Fixed years to one year more (2014 -> 2015, 2015 -> 2016) + I’m 4 on Monday!?? I could have been 1 on Friday.

Update 9/17/18 9:49 AM: Apparently you can screenshot a specific part of the screen in Windows using Window + Shift + S.

Update 9/17/18 10:12 PM: I think my previous years were correct . . . -changes them again-

Backstory:

I first started using this app back in 2014 when I was playing a MMORPG called Aura Kingdom. It’s where this sparkling-eyed sprout (some people think it’s a peach) emoji is from.
Download links if you’re interested:
Original download site: http://aurakingdom.lepei.me/downloads/chat-emoticon-pack/
Whitespace cropped version download: https://www.deviantart.com/ryushurei/art/Aura-Kingdom-Chat-Emoticon-Pack-701789492

The game is probably dead now; I stopped playing in 2015. But what got me to start using the app was that there were times when interesting things happened in the game, graphical bugs, funny conversations, and I wanted to share screenshots of these events to my friends. What I was doing before was using the PrtSc button, pasting the image into Paint, saving the file, uploading it onto imgur, and then sharing the imgur link. This was working, but it took a lot of steps. I noticed my friends were posting a different kind of link when they uploaded photos, so I asked them what they were using. That’s how I found LightShot. LightShot allowed me to take screenshots that automatically got uploaded, and the link would be on my clipboard so all I had to do was paste the link once I took the screenshot. I stopped playing games and using LightShot as an easy way to share screenshots though.

Imaginary you: Wait! What are you still using this app for?

Well, this app has other functions that still makes it convenient for me to use it. In some of my classes, mainly computer science ones, we have to take multiple screenshots of different apps or websites. Recently, I was using LightShot so that I could take a screenshot of only the webpage or app (so my taskbar doesn’t show up in the screenshot/I don’t have to crop it later) and then save the screenshot right after taking it. Mac users don’t have this problem, but on Windows, your screenshots are not automatically saved. LightShot basically solved those two problems for me.

In addition, I use LightShot to annotate my screenshots when I take them, mainly because one of my classes has us annotate our screenshots and I’m “lazy”. LightShot saves me from having to open the screenshot in Paint or pixlr, a photo editing app, and annotating the screenshot in there.

It’s going to be interesting taking screenshots of me taking screenshots. Screenshot-ception.

How I use the app:

Here’s an example of me using LightShot to take a screenshot and make annotations on it. Upon clicking the hotkey for the app (default is PrtSc) or running the app, the whole screen is overlaid with gray. The contrast between the grayed out screen and the white “Select area” pop-up makes it clearer about what actions a user should take, since the “Select area” pop-up directs our peripheral vision and attention to look there and see the directions. The pop-up serves as a signifier as to what actions you can do, and these directions are short and simple, making reading and understanding fast. To select an area, you have to click and drag, much like the convention of being able to click and drag to select multiples items within an area in other apps like Finder or File Explorer.

I changed the settings so that it would capture my cursor, but it only captured my cursor at the moment when I took the screenshot. The other screenshot app I was using to take screenshots of me taking screenshots doesn’t have the option to capture cursors.

 

The contrast also makes it clear what area you are selecting to be in your screenshot versus what area you are leaving out, when you select an area. They grayed out versus normal colored screen follows the Gestalt principle of Figure/Ground, with the grayed out area being the background and the normal colored area being the figure.
It’s also interesting to note that the undo and exit/close buttons are separated from the rest of the buttons in their column/row with a thin line. 

 

With a glance of all the buttons, it seems clear what they should do because of their icons and how those icons are conventionally used in other apps. For example, the text button icon is used in other apps like Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Adobe Acrobat Reader and Xodo docs have a similar icon for adding text boxes.

 

Here, I’m just selecting the arrow button, which turned light blue once I clicked on it. The light blue contrasts with the gray, and it serves as feedback for letting me know that I have selected this button.

 

I clicked and dragged make an arrow point to wherever I want in a screenshot. Here, I’m pointing to the cursor LightShot captured. It’s not shown below, but the arrow button stays blue, indicating that I can continue to draw more arrows if I click and drag. Making an arrow in LightShot is similar to making an arrow in Powerpoint.

 

Then I selected the text button in order to type in some text to describe what the arrow is pointing to. The text buttons turns blue and the arrow button goes back to being gray.

 

This is what the app looks like when you are inserting text.

 

I inserted all the text I wanted, so now I’m going to select the rectangle button to box what I annotated. The rectangle button turns blue and the text button goes back to being gray.

 

In the next two screenshots I am highlighting some text with two different colors, and then I use the pen button to draw a circle around the emoji. It’s pretty straightforward.

 

Here’s a screenshot of the color selector when you click on the color button. The layout of it is similar to Paint’s color selector (and probably also in other apps), which makes it easier to understand since knowledge of color selectors from other apps can carry over to here. This color selector option is also applicable to any of the actions you can do using the buttons in the column. For example, you can change the color of the pen, line, arrow, rectangle, highlighter, or text. This makes it easier to understand what the app can do since every button in the column allows you to annotate the screenshot in some way, mostly by clicking and dragging, and you can also change the color of any of these annotations. Learning from one button applies to other buttons.

 

I just wanted to quickly mention that they have a social media sharing button, but it’s not particularly useful. All it does is open up a tab of the social media site you choose and then puts the link into a post that you can send. I’m not sure how many people use this feature, since pasting the link that’s already on your clipboard onto a site isn’t that difficult.

 

Once I’m done with annotating a screenshot, I save it somewhere I can find it, so I can upload it onto a school website.

LightShot takes in the convention of Ctrl + Z for undo, Esc to exit out of the app, Ctrl + S to save, Ctrl + C to copy, and Ctrl + P to print. It’s pretty straightforward to use, but if there was a feature I want in it, it would be the ability to change the size of the pen/line/arrow/rectangle/marker/text. Right now, there’s no option to do that, but sometimes I want the text to be bigger so it’s easier to read. Other than that, LightShot works well for me as a screenshot taker that lets me choose the area I want to take a screenshot in, annotate within the app, and save it.

Stay tuned for LightShot Part 2: A Friend.

You might have noticed that my cursor changed since my first post. I just wanted something more visible I guess. If you’re interested in my cursor scheme, I downloaded it from this site.