When I'm observing a multi-step process during a debugging exercise, I often take screenshots at each breakpoint. It gives me a record of the data values and behavior at particular points in the process, sometimes recording something I didn't realize I needed to pay attention to until after the fact.
On Windows computers, I use the freeware application Greenshot to take my screenshots. One of the features of Greenshot is that it lets you use date and time parameters in the filename settngs, so I have it set to save each screenshot with a name and folder location based on date and time. If I were to take a screenshot on June 16, 2016 at 3:30pm, I'd end up with a file named "screenshot-15-30-00.png" in a "2016-06-16" subdirectory of my root screenshot directory.
I recently started using a Mac laptop as my primary personal laptop, and I was disappointed to learn that there is no Greenshot version for Macintosh. OS X's native screenshot implementation is less than ideal: it saves the screenshot file on the desktop and provides no control over the naming of the screenshot (though it does include the timestamp in the name). I looked at what Mac-compatible screenshot programs were out there and found many of them had a workflow geared towards manipulating the screenshot right after taking it. I just wanted to take the screenshot, move on to the next one, and review all of them later.
So I decided to solve my Mac screenshot problem myself. First, I followed the instructions for changing the location where OS X saves the screenshots (it's not a setting you can change in the OS X UI anywhere) so the files would be created somewhere other than the desktop. Then I wrote ncline-screenshots, a new, separately-downloaded command module for my Node-powered ncline project. It uses the chokidar npm module, an enhancement on the native Node file watcher library, to watch the directory where the screenshot files are created. When a new file is found in that directory, it gets processed by a series of processing rules that rename and/or move the file.
The command module creates the watcher task, provides private functions that implement the processing rules, and includes a few commands for changing configuration settings and rule processing behavior. Creating additional rules is simply a matter of writing additional functions that manipulate the file and pass on the results of the change to the next rule in the sequence.
Even though it was written to solve a Mac-specific gap in my workflow, ncline-screenshots works on Windows systems as well.
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