Ubuntu Wiki

Quickshot

Quickshot is a program designed for quickly and easily capturing a large number of screenshots in a vast number of languages. Its development is centered around the Ubuntu Manual project, but later versions will be easy to customize for use with any large project requiring extensive translation work.

Purpose

For the Ubuntu Manual Project, we have around 45 screenshots in our publication. That publication is translated into over 50 different languages, and we need the screenshots to also be translated. 45 x 50 = 2250 screenshots that would otherwise manually have to be captured, cropped, resized and set balanced for appearance - then uploaded into some sort of consistent and organized structure.

Also, due to the tight timeframe that our project has, we need to get these screenshots collected and reviewed in under one month - which means there will be a lot of people generating a lot of screenshots very quickly. As with any project, the more people that are involved, the less efficient progress becomes: the administrative work of teaching them all the correct way of doing things becomes staggering and the likelihood of errors increases as a direct consequence.

Quickshot is designed to simplify and automate a lot of this process.

How it works

1) A user with sudo privileges opens Quickshot for the first time.

2) They're presented with a welcome screen that explains Quickshot will create a new user.

3) Quickshot creates a new user called "quickshot" with a user-supplied password. The user is prompted to log in as "quickshot."

4) Once they log in, Quickshot appears in capture mode and reconfigures the working environment to ensure that every user captures screenshots under the same conditions.

5) Once the environment has been configured, Quickshot communicates with a remote server to determine what screenshots still need to be taken, thus enabling collective gathering and centralized updates if something changes after the client has been distributed.

6) As long as screenshots remain to be collected, Quickshot continuously prompts the user to take the next one, automating the process using details downloaded from the server, such as instructions, areas of the screen to be cropped, and hints about how to interact with the window manager to reduce the amount of clicking the user will have to do.

7) Once the user has selected a screenshot, Quickshot launches the program with any arguments that help simplify the process and presents the user with instructions.

8) Once the user has followed the instructions, they click a "Capture" button, which starts a short timer that allows menus to be activated, if necessary.

9) After the screenshot has been taken, the user is prompted to compare it against a reference image downloaded from the server, to make sure they have captured the right content.

10) When satisfied, the user clicks an "Upload" button, which sends the screenshot to the server, where it is stored, under version control, until downloaded by a member of the Ubuntu Manual team for inclusion into the finished product.

11) The user will then be returned to the screenshot selection screen, which is updated to reflect their progress. The user may log out at any time, with the freedom to resume work at their convenience simply by logging back in.

Original design concept