Jing instead of Grab

Since purchasing my Mac early this year and commencing studies in EDN113 I became aware that where as my old PC had a print screen option on the keyboard, Mac's do not. It took me a little while to figure out after beginning this unit that there is an application called 'Grab' installed on Mac's to do this function.  Grab can be found by going into Finder, clicking on the utilities folder under applications.

Grab is a application created by Apple that allows you to take a whole window screenshots, capture a marquee selection, a whole screen or a timed screen. 

I am finding that this option is rather inconvenient and hard to use.Initially you are  required to open the program from the applications menu to use it.

After completing Task one and starting on my first blog for Assignment 2 I was having problems with my screenshots appearing upside down or squished up so you could not read them. I was unaware of ever having this problem before in my previous blogs until going back and viewing my last blog entry ' Peer review complete' only to discover the screenshots were also unclear here too. I was gutted and annoyed that I hadn't doubled checked my blog after publishing and submitting for marking.

I was totally confused, what was different and why this was happening? I decided to email my tutor to see if they had a solution to this problem.  They asked  whether I could 'check the original file? do you have one called feedback r1.jpg?'(Dani, March,10,2013).

I checked the files that I was using to upload. There was the problem clear as day! They were saving as PNG files not JPG. Unfortunately, this means that because Grab does not allow an option to save as JPG each screenshot I take and want to use I have to re-open in Paintbrush and re-save as a JPG file. This is now resulting in me having multiple files of the same screenshot and is very time consuming. From now on I think I will be using Jing to capture my screencasts.