Get to Know ScreenFloat 2 – Part I: An Overview – Eternal Storms Software

Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power ^up your screenshots, too.

Posts in this Series

Part I	An Overview
Part II	Take Screenshots and Record your Screen
Part III	Floating Shots, Color Picker, Visibility
Part IV	The Shots Browser, Exporting, Printing
Part V	Editing, Markup, Annotations
Part VI	Floating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows
Part VII	iCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight
Part VIII	Shortcuts and Widgets , Miscellaneous

Part I – An Overview

ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs.
Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.

ScreenFloat 2 builds upon these core features of version 1:
1 – Screen Capture
2 – Floating Shots
3 – Shots Browser

I’ll give you a quick overview of these, and show you what’s new. In subsequent parts of this series (see above), we’ll deep-dive into all of them.

ScreenFloat runs in the background, in your menu bar; you will not find it in your Dock, nor the app switcher (although you can, of course, drag ScreenFloat to your Dock manually).
You can access ScreenFloat via its icon in the right portion of your menu bar:

Using its menu bar icon, or its keyboard shortcuts, ScreenFloat is always ready for you to capture your screen, or browse your Shots in the Shots Browser.

1 – Screen Capture

ScreenFloat offers three types of captures: Screenshots, Screen Recordings, and Timed Screenshots.

To take a screenshot, use the according keyboard shortcut or select it from the menu bar icon and select the portion of the screen you’d like to capture.

Screen recordings ^(new) can be started in the same fashion, and allow you to highlight mouse clicks in your video, or record your microphone (what you say) and system audio (what you hear).

A timed shot is like a screenshot, only that it is taken with a delay. It can be very useful when you need to take a screenshot of something that takes extra steps to get to.

Areas can easily be re-captured so you don’t have to painstakingly re-frame the shot ^(new).

After capture, the Shot will appear and float right away. Which brings us to…

2 – Floating Shots

By default, anything you capture with ScreenFloat appears as a floating Shot right away. It will follow you around windows, (fullscreen-) apps and spaces, so no matter what you do, the shot will always be in sight. That is very helpful when trying to remember something, or having to copy over information from one app to another, for example.

Floating Shots can be set up to follow you around, stay in a certain space, or only appear when a specific application is active. They can be closed (and then reopened from the Shots Browser), or quickly hidden with a keyboard shortcut, for when you know you don’t need the shots right now, but will later (at which point you’d use the shortcut again to unhide them).
You can change their opacity by scrolling up and down within them, and you can make them ignore mouse input ^(new), so you can interact through the shots with what’s below.

ScreenFloat detects ^(new) text, faces and barcodes in your shots and recordings, so you can easily extract, copy, view, and redact them. You can even search by this content in the Shots Browser or Spotlight ^(new).

The color picker ^(new) allows you to pick colors from images and screen recordings and copy their hex-, rgb-, float-, or hsl values, or a sample color image. You can even drag the picked color right from there to a target, like selected text in another app. Recently picked colors can be accessed through the picker itself, or the according widget ^(new).

Shots can be cropped, folded, resized, “de-retinized”, rotated, trimmed, annotated, redacted, and have their audio tracks removed ^{(all new)}.

Sharing shots is as easy as dragging the document icon from the floating shot to the target app. You can change their file format, quality and dimensions on the fly ^(new), and have a lot of exporting options available ^(new). You can choose if you want to share shots with or without annotations ^(new).

Double-click workflows ^(new) allow you to run repetitive tasks with just – you guessed it – a double-click onto the floating shot. You always “de-retinize” your shots before you mail them? You tend to crop your shots before you annotate them? You usually create a duplicate of a shot before you edit it? All that and more can be done with just a double-click.

3 – Shots Browser

The Shots Browser stores everything you capture with ScreenFloat. Here, you can organize, name, tag, favorite ^(new), rate ^(new) and find your shots.

Create folders to organize shots manually, or smart folders, which will automatically collect shots based on criteria you provide – an extensive list of detailed options is available, like whether the shot contains a barcode, or you have annotated it with a certain text phrase, to name two.

ScreenFloat syncs ^(new) your shots, folders, tags and metadata across your Macs over iCloud, so wherever you are, your shots – and the force ^{(of ScreenFloat)} – are with you. And you decide what gets synced – all shots, only image- or video shots, or only shots up to a certain file size.

Exporting ^(new) gives you complete control over the file format, quality, size, annotations and metadata of your shots. Printing has been much improved.

Addendum – Also New

Also new in ScreenFloat 2 is its integration with Shortcuts, to automate taking or importing shots; an extensive list of widgets; and system-wide Spotlight search.

The Tags Browser is also a new addition to the app, allowing you to rename existing tags, merge duplicate or similar tags, favorite, and delete them.

Upload shots to iCloud and share a link to it instead of having to send a potentially large – or multiple – files.

Up Next

The next part of this series – Part II: Take Screenshots and Record your Screen – takes a detailed look at all the capturing options ScreenFloat offers you. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!

Links

ScreenFloat Website ^{(+ free trial)}
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store ^{(one-time purchase, free for existing customers)}
ScreenFloat Usage Tips

Eternal Storms Software Productivity Apps Bundle ^{(Yoink, ScreenFloat and Transloader at ~25% off)}
Contact & Connect

Thank you for your time. I do hope you enjoy ScreenFloat!