The Mac OS has long made it extremely easy to take snapshots of your screen. In Mac OS 9 and earlier, all you have to do is press Command+Shift+3 to take a full shot of the screen. The screenshot appears on your hard drive in PICT format.

In Mac OS X, you take screenshots in a much different way. You use the utility Grab to take your screenshots. Grab also has a couple of new features, including timed screen captures, so that you can set a time for the screenshot and set up your Desktop the way you want it before Grab shouts, "Say cheese!"

One of the most frequent uses for screen capture under Mac OS 9 was to use the Command+Shift+4 key sequence to select only a portion of the screen, instead of the full screenshot you get when pressing Command+Shift+3. You can select, say, a program's icon and then paste the resulting image into an e-mail or a text document. In Mac OS X, you don't have to Grab a shot of that icon; instead, just drag the icon into a TextEdit document and watch the icon become part of your text.