Announced today via its Fabric platform, Twitter is open-sourcing ‘Screengrab’ — a tool which automatically takes screenshots on Android devices for developers, thus saving them the hassles of taking multiple app screenshots and then arranging them in sequence to be put up on the Play Store listing.
Talking about the tool’s open-sourcing, Product Manager Hemal Shah says,
Your screenshots need to reflect the best of your app’s user experience, but taking perfect screenshots is a ton of work. The process includes capturing the shots, making sure each one is lined up correctly, and then localizing them for your customers’ needs. With screengrab, taking and uploading screenshots to the Google Play Store has never been easier.
The tool has been launched on Fastlane for Android — fruits of partnership sworn in four months ago. Twitter had acquired Fastlane last year for a more rosy developer toolkit under possession. Fastlanse has been popular for automating a few steps in the iOS app development process, which entered Beta for Android last year.
Screengrab is available on Github for you to have a go at. You can access all the files right here.
Whats also interesting with Screengrab, is the ease with which you publish localised versions of your screenshots as well. By launching your app in multiple languages, Screengrab allows you to verify that your localizations fit into labels on all screen dimensions in minutes.
Sitting on top of existing UI tests, Screengrab connects with the rest of the Fastlane toolset,streamlining the entire deployment process. You can prepare screenshots and then submit them to the Google Play Store with the rest of your app using supply. Since Screengrab is tightly integrated with Fastlane, it’s super simple to integrate it into your existing workflow.
Like most other valley giants, Twitter too has been open-sourcing quite a few useful tools to get more developer attention for its own platform — something which wasn’t really the case, until ofcourse the first Flight conference happened. Other open-source releases from Twitter include ‘Diffy’, which is a tiny little bug spotting tool, and ‘Data Sets’ that people can use to train neural networks for artificial intelligence.
FEATURED IMAGE : FLICKR // CC 2.0 // IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED
