OpenEuphoria

2. Re: Screen shots

• Posted by Hawke <mdeland at NWINFO.NET> Aug 25, 1998
• 436 views

PatRat wrote:
> I want to take A screen shot from a windows euphoria program, the
> difficult part is that it must take a picture of WHATEVER the user is
> viewing, be it in dos text mode or graphics mode or windows.
> Is this possible?
damn near anything is possible, the question is: is it probable?
someone mentioned the <printscreen> trick, but i don't read your
message that way...

> Also how do I get a list of all tasks running?
basically, you would have to build a snoop utility for that.
something that functions like Nuts&Bolts "discover" utility,
or "winhacker", or SiSoft's "sandra".  but, for your application,
you would need it to be called, perform it's function of determining
all threads running, invisibly of course, and report those
findings, also invisibly, to either a log file or a variable.
it seems to me, there was a program written that actually did this.
where i saw it, when i saw it, what was it called, and who made
it all completely escapes me. sorry. some advanced web surfing
for such terms like "snoop utility" or "shows processes running"
and things like that might turn up something???

> I want to make a program for a friends mum to monitor his computer
> activity.  (It'll help him in the long run, he needs to rebuild trust
now to the meat of your post.  from what i can tell, you want to
build a running log of screens a user has been viewing over a certain
time period.  this is why i said i didnt think the <printscreen>
option was the correct solution for you.  this idea of yours
will invariably consume **enormous** amounts of harddrive space
holding all those images.  this of course would vary as to the
frequency of screen capturing.  to be effective as a kid monitor
i would think a minimum of one screen shot per minute.
now 60 screenshots (1 hour) of 640x480x64k would be
640*480*2*60=36,864,000 bytes uncompressed!
(the 2 is bytes per pixel, 64k is 16bit per pixel, or 2 bytes)
thats 36meg of data an hour!!! and that is only at what
would be commonly a *low* resolution.  average users, from
a news article i saw recently discussing the benefits of
upgrading a monitor mentioned that most users with 14"
monitors run 800x600 resolutions and the benefit of a bigger
monitor let you run at 1024x768.  so if we assume that
this is a casual user running 800x600x64k then your data
amount becomes: 800*600*2*60=57,600,000 bytes!!!
practically *double*.

to sum up: you are facing a daunting task, but with compression
(average image file with pkzip is about 4 or 5 to 1)
you may be able to pull it off.

now how to do it? one way i can think of is thus:
find a program that allows you to schedule tasks to perform
at certain times... bunches of them out there... set that
task to load at startup/bootup and have it run a command line
interface screen capture utility, which would have to be
compatible with win&dos.  set the time frequency to 1 minute,
and place all needed command line switches to run the screen
capture utility in quiet capture mode and set the output
directory to a hidden directory.  problem solved? hopefully.

take care--Hawke'