Snap Screenshots on Your Palm with QuickTake

Screen captures--pictures of what is on the computer monitor--are useful and fun. As software reviewers, we take screen captures of all programs that we cover, so you, our readers, can better understand what we are reporting. You might use them to show errors to tech support, to prove prices at online stores, or simply to show your friends that crazy thing you just ran across on the Web. On desktop and laptop computers, doing a screen capture is a simple matter of using hotkeys--but on Palm devices, it's not so easy. For our screen captures to go with our reviews of Palm programs, we purchased and use QuickTake ($5, 10-day free trial).

Once QuickTake is installed on your Palm, it's very simple to set up. First, you chose your Activation Key from a list of four options. That's the key you'll push to take the picture of your screen. The program's Activation Key options are: Datebook/Phone, Address/Calendar, ToDo/Mail, Memo/NotePad or Power Button. QuickTake is the only Palm screen capture utility we've found that saves JPEG images (with a slider for selecting JPEG quality). Or you can save to BMP. The only other options are checkmarks to play a sound after capture (which we recommend for confirmation that the picture is actually taken), and to delay the capture by x number of seconds. Then, press Enable and press your Activation Key to start the program.

With QuickTake active, pressing the Activation Key takes a picture of anything you have on the screen. It's saved into your pictures folder, from where it can be emailed directly from your Palm, beamed to another device, or sent to your desktop during your next Sync.

The biggest problem with QuickTake is that you need to remember to Disable it when you don't need it, so you can use the key you selected for your Activation Key to access the related areas of your device (such as your e-mail) without interference.

If you need screen captures from your Palm, QuickTake is a simple, inexpensive utility that does the job.