Codex's new AppShots feature captures an entire Mac application window, including off-screen content, and pastes it into a thread with a double Command key press. Robert Ta shows it working on Riverside and documentation pages, calling it a "magic moment" that beats traditional screenshots for sharing full context like server logs.
AppShots by Codex. Give Codex context from any Mac app. AppShots lets you send the frontmost app window to a Codex thread. Use them when you're actively working in another app on your computer and want to provide Codex with your current context so it can help you with the task. What do you think of this? AppShots, Jonathan.
We've all run into this scenario. Say like you have a server log and on the screen you can only screenshot like a portion of it. But what AppShots does is it takes the whole server log. It takes the window and it can take the whole context from all the content in the window. For things like that, you're going to be using this multiple times a day. This is an innovation on the screenshot itself. By the way, the experience is beautiful. You just hold down both your Command keys on your keyboard, it automatically takes the App Shot and puts it into the Codex window. So you can just jump over there and add whatever you want to, or just send it and you're done.
And that's App Shots. So I just went to Codex and I clicked Command Command and App Shots popped up. Enable App Shots. App Shots lets you attach your current window to Codex App Shot includes all window text, even what's scrolled out of view. That is, like Jonathan said, an innovation on screenshots itself for the use case of, oh cool, hey, like it already tested this out. It pulled in my screenshot of me and you recording this pod. What are we doing? You're in a live Riverside recording session called Jonathan and Robert about 1 hour in. You're sharing your screen and the shared screen says, shows Codex open in the psychic app repo with the prompt. What should we build in Psychic App? So in plain terms, you and Jonathan appear to be recording or discussing what to build next. And so not quite Codex, but I'll give you that one. Here's another one. It took this page here, which is the AppShots page. This was where it was at. And when you take a normal screenshot like this, you only get this level of the page, right? But what AppShot does is you get the whole page context and text, even if you have to scroll. So you're looking at Codex AppShots docs. Good job, Codex AppShots. That is so cool. I love from a product manager nerd perspective and design perspective, the user experience of onboarding into that functionality is magical. What just happened, like what you all saw was a very well-defined magic moment and product and design and engineering team execution to get that done. And that's so cool. And I'm now bought in.
