Merging screen shots on iOS with LongScreen

The iPhone is not a Mac. On my big fat desktop computer I have multiple the lovely ImageMagick to take care of all my image merging needs. If you’re desperate to script something, there’s a way to do it on iOS, too – it’s Dr. Drang’s infamous cleanbar script.

The strange thing with being a Mac guy is… sometimes I don’t want to overcomplicate the simplicity that iOS is (and should be)… (for me). In those cases I’m always glad when “there’s an app for that”.

One of those cases where I like it simple: image editing. More precisely, merging screen shots. Welcome to LongScreen.

For $0.99 you can…

• merge images horizontally or vertically,
• clean-up the mess behind you and delete the original shots,
• clean the statusbar (Hi Federico!) and…
• use the app with x-callback-url’s.

LongScreen makes use of the beauty that iOS 8 is or better - has brought to us: once you have created your newly merged screen shot, you’re only one tap away from passing it of to Transmit or Dropshare.

I haven’t tested the results in cleanbar, but when LongScreen cleans-up the statusbar there can be issues sometimes:

… like blur issues you see ↑ and ↓. It is iOS 8’s new transparency which provides a certain challenge.¹

The app is relatively young, so I’m sure those issues will get ironed out over time. I’d also like to see more options, c.f. creating a tile like…

1 2      1 3
     or
3 4      2 4

… having an optional resize option or choosing to fill the transparent padding in-between the images with a color.

The last pet peeve is that there should be a tiny bit more documentiation on the existing URL scheme. So far I figured out that longscreen:// will launch the app. Obvioulsy there’s also an auto-merge option since the developer is hinting at a parameter for the x-callback-url:

• Set url parameter count=0 will now find the latest image sequence and merge them automatically.

UPDATE: Here is the LongScreen x-callback-url API documentation along with merge and copy/save actions for Launch Center Pro.

It would be nice to a have a small website along with the documentation. For now, you can get it touch with Shing Cheong Cheung via Twitter or App.net.

In the end I’m glad that I have another useful addition to my screen shot tool-belt on iOS. I even find LongScreen this useful that I ignored my personal rule of not purchasing something from a developer who doesn’t have a website.

PS: Another minor wish of mine is that the rather odd time of “9:41” get’s exchanged with something visually more appealing like 8:00 or 12:00. UPDATE: On the other end, I get it after reading this (Thanks @michaelj).