512 Pixels

Apple Support:

You can capture your whole screen or just part of it. The screenshot is automatically saved to your desktop.

Dr. Drang also dislikes window shadows in screenshots:

The problem arose because I was including the drop shadow in window screenshots. There are some, like Dan Benjamin, who think this is an abomination. I agree that the shadows are too big, but don’t like the “open” edges of window screenshots that don’t have the shadow.

Drang’s solution solves the main problems some people have with both sides of the com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool coin. I may poke around in this a bit.

Update: Here’s a link to a more updated post by the good doctor on the subject.

I really dislike that the shadows on macOS windows appear in screenshots. It makes the overall image larger, making the content of the window less prominent. In this example, I’ve opened a photo in Preview and made a full-window screenshot:

For any screenshot, the shadow can be disabled by holding the option key while taking the screenshot.

Thankfully, the shadow can be excluded from screenshots for good with a quick trip to Terminal.

Launch Terminal.app and enter this command to tell the system to just capture window content, without the window’s shadow:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Press Return, then use this command to force your Mac to pick up the change to the prefrence file:

killall SystemUIServer

Your Mac’s menu bar will flash as SystemUIServer restarts, and then you’ll be all set for more sane screenshots:

Casey Liss:

I happened to wake up at around 11:30, and at that point figured I may as well stay up to see the ball drop. I quietly grabbed my phone, started my Slingbox and tuned it to ABC. When the time came for the ball to drop, I wanted Erin and I to share the moment, but that would be hard without disturbing the sleeping toddler between us.

Luckily, I had a solution.

With about a minute to go, I opened up my AirPods, ensured they were connected to my iPhone, woke Erin up, and handed her one.

On this week’s Liftoff, Jason and I look back at some of the biggest space stories of 2016.

My thanks to our sponsor this week:

• Luminos: A fantastic astronomy app, 10 years in the making! Now with an Apple Watch app for skygazing!

Micro.blog is a new platform for independent microblogs: blogs with short text, links, and photos that you control. It’s launching this week with a book called Indie Microblogging on Kickstarter.

Indie Microblogging covers setting up a new microblog with WordPress, cross-posting to Twitter, standards for microblogging, and more. If you back the project on Kickstarter, you’ll get early access to Micro.blog so you can reserve your username.

Micro.blog is a new kind of social network, built on RSS and the open web. It’s as easy to use as Twitter, but you can publish to your own web site. Micro.blog has favorites, replies, an iPhone app, and hosting at yourname.micro.blog or your own domain name.

With your support on Kickstarter, the web can be made better.

Zac Hall:

Last New Year’s Day I decided to start eating healthy, exercising daily, and filling the Activity Rings on my Apple Watch as a way to get in shape. I broke my New Year’s resolution by January 4, but I started again on April 1 and ultimately lost over 50 pounds in 2016.

Apple Watch didn’t lose the weight for me — it took a lot of dedication and really changing my lifestyle — but the fitness tracking features and Apple’s Activity app helped quantify my effort without me doing too little or going overboard.

The scale of Apple and Foxconn’s operations in China is staggering.

This week on Clockwise:

In our final episode of 2016 we review the best and worst and dumbest and most life-changing things of the year, and then look ahead to 2017.

This episode was a lot of fun to record.

We all have goals for 2017. I wonder if technology can help us be better people.

The world lost a lot more than a princess today.

Riccardo Mori, writing about iOS’ future if macOS were to go away:

When I walk down this hypothetical path, what I see in iOS’s trajectory, more than sheer innovation, is a reinvention of the wheel. iOS was born as a simpler, streamlined version of Mac OS X; its multi-touch interface was ingenious and groundbreaking when applied to a smartphone and (similarly, but less strikingly) to a tablet; to then evolve — through a series of iterations and feature creep — into… Mac OS X?