After seeing screenshots appearing across the ‘interweb’ of people having apparent screenshots from the Android G1, I wanted to know how it was done. The alternative I actually considered? Taking a digital camera and then trying to photograph the screen. Yep.
So, I went in search of a tutorial to be able to do this. I found 1 or 2 which were OK, but they made it seem much more difficult than it really is. After a moment of pondering, I thought that if I’m having trouble, that I bet a lot of other people are too. So here’s the Wuup tutorial, fresh from the oven.
3 Easy Steps to Taking Screenshots of your Android
1. Enable USB Debugging Mode on the Android
OK, this is pretty easy:
Hook up a USB lead to your Mac > Press Menu > Press Settings > Choose Applications > Choose Development > Choose USB Debugging
That’s as much as you need to do on your Android… (except navigate to where you want to take a screenshot of).
2. Download the SDK for the Google Android G1 (For Mac) & Eclipse
Here’s a direct link to what you need to download.
Google SDK:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r3/index.html
Choose the Mac Version. Obviously.
Eclipse
Once you’ve got both of them, make sure they’re extracted. Mine are still in my downloads folder, as there is no installation needed.
3. Loading up the Android SDK to take your screenshot.
Go to where you have downloaded Android. From here, go to:
Double click on ‘ddms’. Open it with Eclipse. I didn’t have to, but you may have to. Don’t worry: at worse, simply browse to where you downloaded an extracted Eclipse and run it with.
Select your phone from the list:
At the very top, you have the menu for ‘Device’ – Choose ‘Screen Capture’.
Now you can take all the screen captures you like and save them as handy PNG’s…
…like this: (yes, that’s a screenshot of a screenshot):
