Pinch me--I'm not wearing green!

[R. Mansfield]

Our Bible study at church tomorrow focuses on Isa 5:1-14. I found some very nice pictures of a vineyard and some grapes in the "Flora" article in the PhotoGuide.

 

After pasting one of the pictures into Keynote '09, I accidentally resized it. At first, I wondered how that happened, and then I realized that the new version of Keynote has obviously incorporated the new "pinch" commands first introduced on the iPhone, and now available on the trackpad of newer MacBooks and MacBook Pros. It worked very naturally, and is a much better solution than what I've done for years (first in PowerPoint and then in Keynote) after dropping in a picture larger than the background: I used to have to drag the picture down, find a corner and reduce it in size. The pinch is a much better and faster solution.

 

So, then, I went back to Accordance to get my second picture from the PhotoGuide. I was certain it wouldn't work, but I had to give it a try. I tried to use the pinch method to reduce the size of the cluster of grapes to fit completely on my screen, but of course, that didn't work. I had to use the regular method by clicking on the "out" button.

 

But I thought to myself that this would be a great feature to add in later version of Accordance--that is, to incorporate the "pinch" for expanding and reducing the size of pictures. I'm not a programmer and have no idea how difficult that would be to incorporate, but I imagine we're going to see the pinch in more and more applications that use graphics, and it would be perfect for graphics and charts in Accordance.

[Helen Brown]

Remember that Copy Picture (rather than Copy Picture Selection) does copy the entire image, irrespective of the current siz and portion you are viewing.

 

We can look into adding the pinch to the graphics windows, but not for the upcoming 8.2!

[David Lang]

Rick, you can also just drag the thumbnail of a picture in an Accordance tool onto a KeyNote image drop zone to copy the whole picture. Then you can resize it in KeyNote. The pinch within Accordance is a cool idea.

[danzac]

I agree this would be a cool idea.

 

Something else that may be helpful to you for grabbing only portions of a picture are the Mac Screen grabs. My particular favorite is command>control>shift>4, which allows you to grab a selection of the screen and puts it on the clipboard for you to paste. Taking the shift out of the shortcut grabs the selection and makes it a picture file on the desktop. I've found the copy to clipboard to be ridiculously useful, particularly when I'm doing lesson preparation. Instead of copying, for instance, a table of paradigms from an Accordance module as text and then trying to properly arrange it in Keynote, I just do a screen grab.

[Joel Brown]

I agree this would be a cool idea.

 

Something else that may be helpful to you for grabbing only portions of a picture are the Mac Screen grabs. My particular favorite is command>control>shift>4, which allows you to grab a selection of the screen and puts it on the clipboard for you to paste. Taking the shift out of the shortcut grabs the selection and makes it a picture file on the desktop. I've found the copy to clipboard to be ridiculously useful, particularly when I'm doing lesson preparation. Instead of copying, for instance, a table of paradigms from an Accordance module as text and then trying to properly arrange it in Keynote, I just do a screen grab.

 

Sorry to correct you, but to have it save as a picture file you need to take the control out of the command. Summary:

 

Shift-Command-3: Take entire screen and save to desktop.

Shift-Control-Command-3: Take entire screen and put in clipboard for pasting.

Shift-Command-4: Take selection of screen and save to desktop.

Shift-Control-Command-4: Take selection of screen and put in clipboard for pasting.

 

One other cool thing, if you press the space bar while in the selection mode (as in, Shift-Command-4, but then before you make a selection), the cursor will change to a camera, enabling you to take a specific window or menu or such, with correct drop shadowing.

[R. Mansfield]

Thanks for the responses. For sake of clarification, I realize thumbnails can be dragged to an application like Keynote and right-clicking copies the whole picture. My main thought for pinching was simply for viewing the picture. Obviously, it would be impossible for the set enlarged image to fit perfectly on everyone's screen. I enjoy taking a good look at the picture in full detail before deciding if I'm going to use it with a presentation. Usually, after clicking on the thumbnail and opening a new window, I have to resize it one way or another. That's where the benefit of the pinch would come in handy (for those using newer portable Macs anyway).