When taking screenshots, macOS at some point followed iOS and introduced a “floating thumbnail,” which serves as a proxy of the screenshot you just took – you can drag it somewhere, open it to annotate, etc.

The thumbnail is a nice gesture. The problem is that I rarely do the things it enables, so the thumbnail is now an extra thing to deal with and dismiss. And you have to dismiss it, because inexplicably on macOS the floating thumbnail is diegetic, meaning it itself can be screenshotted. And this happens, routinely, if you do a few screenshots quickly in a row – the screenshotting tool literally ruining your screenshots. “You had one job,” &c.

(“Diegetic” is perhaps my favourite pretentious word. It generally stands for “in-universe.” If characters in a movie are listening to the song, that song is diegetic. If the song is just for the viewer as part of the soundtrack, that song is non-diegetic.)

You can turn off the thumbnail, but then outside of the sound – which is unreliable for other reasons – there is nothing else to tell you the screenshot was taken. And I think it’s good to have some sort of a confirmation, especially since the screenshot shortcuts are so harrowing.

Now, on Windows, when you press the equivalent (Windows key + PrtSc key), this happens:

I think this is better. It’s elegant, unmistakably recognizable as a screenshot, gone immediately, and a cute skeuomorphic nod towards old cameras.