How to Take iPhone Screenshots

March 27, 2009 – 8:45 am by Gabe Anderson | 7 Comments

iPhoneMy company uses salesforce.com for our CRM. The other day I installed the Salesforce Mobile app on my iPhone so that I could access our customer data on the go. I had enabled mobile access in our account, so I thought everything should work pretty easily.

I launched the app, typed in my user credentials, clicked the “Activate” button, and thought I was on my way to a quick and easy way of using salesforce.com wherever I was. But lo and behold, I was presented with an error screen.

I replied to the email from salesforce.com that had promoted the new “Lite” version of the app — a smart move on the company’s part since previously salesforce.com was charging for mobile use and it just didn’t seem worth it for my company to pay them even more than we already are just to access our data from an iPhone app — and my first instinct was to type the details of the error message from my iPhone into the email.

“Wait,” I thought, “that’s silly.”

The iPhone is a Web device with a very simple and handy feature: Screen capture. Just as you can do at your computer (using built-in OS features on your Mac or PC, or using an even more powerful tool like SnagIt), the iPhone allows you to take screenshots of whatever you see on screen (haven’t you always wondered how they get those screenshots into all those reviews?).

Here’s how to take iPhone screenshots:

  1. Hold down the home button.
  2. Press and release the sleep button (top right of device).
  3. You’ll hear a camera click and the screen will flash white.
  4. Go to your Camera Roll and voila! There’s your new screenshot (saved as a .JPG photo).
  5. Tap the photo and email it away.

So that’s exactly what I did when I got that Salesforce Mobile error. Rather than describing the problem to salesforce.com support, I showed them this screenshot:

sfdc-iphone-app-error

Enjoy!

[ Subscribe to gabeanderson.com via email or RSS feed. ]
  1. 7 Responses to “How to Take iPhone Screenshots”

  2. Top Tip… ! Thanks !

    By David on Aug 4, 2009

  3. Very cool and useful, thanks!

    By Itai on Mar 30, 2010

  4. Thank you Gabe for this tip. Was looking for an app to do this but did not realise the iPhone had this built-in functionality.

    By Jason Nichols on Dec 10, 2010

  5. Glad it helped, Jason!

    By gabe on Dec 10, 2010

  6. Thank you so much!!! That is very useful.

    By Kaia on Feb 11, 2011

  7. VERY GOOD SHARE !

    Much obliged, kind sir –

    By Daniel S on Jan 18, 2012

  8. Nice article, Gabe. Have you any advise on editing screenshots, similar to the mentioned software “Snagit”?

    By Doug Abromaitis on Mar 15, 2012

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.