Skip to main content

Screen capture in Android 2.2.1 "Froyo"

My Android Desktop snapped with this method
I took a screen capture by mistake once but then struggled to repeat the behaviour.  After Googling for a solution I found some very complicated solutions.  Probably the best way to do this is to buy an application on the Market, but I don't want to spend money on a toy.

If you look in your "Settings » Applications » Running Services" menu you should see a service called "ScreenCaptureService".

This allows you to take a screenshot by pressing the "Back" and "Home" buttons simultaneously.

What works for me is to press and hold "Back" and then to press and release "Home" (while holding "Back").  This makes a snapshot noise and displays a message.  Files are saved to the ScreenCapture directory on your SD card and should appear in your gallery.

Of course this is a problem if you try to take a snapshot of a running application because pressing "back" causes it to quit.  I could not find a workaround for this and there doesn't seem to be anything much on Google.  I'm not sure if they did this deliberately or if for some reason the developers didn't consider this when implementing the system.  It seems too obvious an oversight to be anything but deliberate to me.

UPDATE:
For more recent versions of Android you should press the Power and Volume Down buttons together for 2-4 seconds.

If your phone has a physical button for the home button then you may need to try pressing power and your (physical) home button together for 2-4 seconds.  Make sure you press them together.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Ara Bk23 April 2013 at 09:21

    "Pressing and holding" doesn't elicit the same behaviour--much like a single click vs. a drag or hold with normal computer mouse. So, pressing and holding the Back button doesn't necessarily exit the application, actually.

    SO, YOUR KEYSTROKES WORKED FOR ME JUST AS YOU DESCRIBED THEM.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Geeks9 December 2013 at 06:25

    hi..Im college student, thanks for sharing :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Solving Doctrine - A new entity was found through the relationship

There are so many different problems that people have with the Doctrine error message: exception 'Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException' with message 'A new entity was found through the relationship 'App\Lib\Domain\Datalayer\UnicodeLookups#lookupStatus' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Searching through the various online sources was a bit of a nightmare.  The best documentation I found was at  http://www.krueckeberg.org/  where there were a number of clearly explained examples of various associations. More useful information about association ownership was in the Doctrine manual , but I found a more succinct explanation in the answer to this question on StackOverflow . Now I understood better about associations and ownership and was able to identify exactly what sort I was using and the syntax that was required. I was implementing a uni-directional many to one relationship, which is supposedly one of the most simpl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grokking PHP monolog context into Elastic

An indexed and searchable centralized log is one of those tools that once you've had it you'll wonder how you managed without it.    I've experienced a couple of advantages to using a central log - debugging, monitoring performance, and catching unknown problems. Debugging Debugging becomes easier because instead of poking around grepping text logs on servers you're able to use a GUI to contrast and compare values between different time ranges. A ticket will often include sparse information about the problem and observed error, but if you know more or less when a problem occurred then you can check the logs of all your systems at that time. Problem behaviour in your application can occur as a result of the services you depend on.  A database fault will produce errors in your application, for example. If you log your database errors and your application errors in the same central platform then it's much more convenient to compare behaviour between...
Post a Comment
Read more

Translating a bit of the idea behind domain driven design into code architecture

I've often participated in arguments discussions about whether thin models or thin controllers should be preferred.  The wisdom of a thin controller is that if you need to test your controller in isolation then you need to stub the dependencies of your request and response. It also violates the single responsibility principal because the controller could have multiple reasons to change.   Seemingly, the alternative is to settle on having fat models. This results in having domain logic right next to your persistence logic. If you ever want to change your persistence layer you're going to be in for a painful time. That's a bit of a cargo cult argument because honestly who does that, but it's also a violation of the single responsibility principal.   One way to decouple your domain logic from both persistence and controller is to use the "repository pattern".   Here we encapsulate domain logic into a data service. This layer deals exclusively with imple...
Post a Comment
Read more