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Comment by timcederman | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised at how useful what a seemingly superfluous feature is on the iPhone. I often find myself grabbing screenshots of things and sending it to friends, Twitter and Facebook. My location on a map. An amusing article I just saw. An SMS conversation. It's not obvious, but once you know how to do it, it's very handy and I'm surprised it's so difficult with Android.

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This is what I call a handy-dandy screenshot.

Often I find myself using it as a "cropping tool." For example, if I save some image from the web and I want to only save a certain part of the entire image, I just zoom into whatever area I want and take a screen shot and voila I have a cropped image. ;)

I love screenshots from the iPad maps application imported into SketchBook or some other drawing app. Very useful for whipping up driving directions to forward to a friend.

Why wouldn't you just forward them a link to the driving directions page? You lose all the functionality of the awesome Internet we have in 2010 by sending someone a static map. Anyone who can receive that would be in front of a computer connected to the internet, or if they are on the go, would be on a smart phone with internet access so they could look it up themselves. Might as well just carry around a paper map.

Unless you want to be a doormat like that guy in the commercials whose friends call him to ask him for driving directions and movie show times because your phone lets you browse the web while you're in a call at the same time. Let your friends look up their own directions.

I typically send all three. I send the link for the driving directions, I send my own summary which makes sense to local people, and a screenshot of a map, with my scribbles on there. "There's this landmark, here's where you turn, this is Xyz Lane which you'll see on your left just before the street you turn into, so be ready when you see it, here's our house on the left. If you're coming from the south instead of west, this is where you'll be coming from." As far as I know, no one's ever gotten lost this way.

I can't speak for the others, but I have lots of friends who have phones with no data plans (probably 90% of my friends, in fact). I can't send links to their phones, but I can send them screenshots via MMS. It's come in handy on many occasions.

When I give driving directions to a friend, I send them the address and let them figure the rest out on their own.

It has never occurred to me to take a screenshot of anything on my Android phone...

Except that there are hooks in the OS to share all of those things natively in a data format that is useful to other people with phones... I'd be annoyed as shit if someone with an iphone texted a god damn picture of where they were instead of a mobile link that would open my maps application to your location allowing me to navigate there, etc.

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