Constrictor is a screen snapshot utility for Mac OS X 10.7 and up (for older versions, see our software archive). It provides you with a moveable, resizeable frame that floats over all your other windows. Here's Constrictor ready to take a snapshot of an icon on the desktop:

As you can see, the frame is transparent, so you can see the desktop and the icon through it. The lumps on the sides and corners are knobs you can use to resize the frame. Mouse clicks go right through the interior of the frame, so the frame really just delineates an area of your workspace without interfering with your work in other applications.

Once you've got your frame positioned where you want it, you can take as many snapshots as you want to of that area, with a variety of options for the snap's appearance. For example, you can scale your snapshots to a smaller size, frame them, and feather their edges to blend onto a background. Windows and icons can even be shot with a "backdrop" that isolates them from the desktop and captures their transparency and shadow. For example, here's a small Safari window shot on a backdrop:

We've set the image inside a larger white area here, so you can see how it would look in a typical document; Constrictor could shoot the window with a pink backdrop instead, but a white background more clearly illustrates how the typical user would use the backdrop. The point is that the backdrop has isolated the window, along with its shadow, so that it can be placed upon any background you desire.

Once you've taken a snapshot you can copy it to the clipboard or save it in a wide variety of image formats. Your saved snapshots can automatically have thumbnail icons added to them, and Constrictor can even tag them as screenshots so they can be easily found with Spotlight later. Snapshots can be triggered by a context menu or by configurable hot keys.

Constrictor can also be useful to designers for seeing how a layout will fit on a screen of a given size. Just set Constrictor's frame to be the size of the screen you want to simulate, and then see how your content looks inside it. Since the frame is transparent, you can edit your layout right through the frame.

Constrictor is quite configurable. Being a Stick Software product, it has a preferences panel with everything we could think of that would be useful to you. Here are reduced snapshots of the panels of its preferences window (click the images below for full-size versions):

If this seems complicated, there is an online manual to help you out (for a 704K PDF version of this manual that can be used offline, click here). But Constrictor is really very simple and intuitive to use.

Constrictor is shareware (which means we rely on you to pay for it if you use it). It costs $10. Feel free to try it out for a little while before paying, but please do pay for it if you find it useful. For details on how we handle registrations, see our main registration page. Thanks!

Constrictor uses the IconFamily open source class, copyright Troy Stephens. Thanks to Justin Williams and Quentin Carnicelli for the SGHotKey library. Thanks to David Stapleton for Constrictor's icon.

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