Collaborating with a designer on the other side of the world

Question

Hi Guys,

I am trying to collaborate with a graphic designer sitting on the other side of the world. The only communication medium we have is a phone line. Every time she makes even a minute change to an element on a page, she has to take a screenshot, save it and mail it - all manually till now.

As you can guess, this gets downright irritating and is significantly hampering progress on the project.

My idea is to create a simple .xls file with a macro which will capture a specific hotkey combination (in a global manner) so that she can just press ctrl+shift+q (or whatever) from inside her photoshop / illustrator with the .xls file open and minimised (and the macro listening for the key combo) and this key combo would capture the screenshot and send it to outlook / thunderbird as an attachment just waiting for the send button.

My question is whether this is the best (and free) method of achieving this and if it is then how can we make an excel macro listen for global hotkeys, capture screenshot and mail?

Answer 1

You can use TeamViewer.

Edit:

Teamviewer is only free for non commercial use. There are a number of alternatives to this including a variety of VNC type products. Just search for free remote desktop tools.

Answer 2

I take it the other side does not have a permanent internet connection?

In that case should check out a screenshot utility like Snagit. Though not free it does everything you need.

Answer 3

We have this. Our designers are based in San Francisco and our developers are all over the world (most in Auckland). We use a lot of Microsoft Shared View to see each other's desktops. We also have a defined diagramming style of wire diagrams that are used to communicate intention.

We tend to use a lot of screen captures and the snagit tool from Tech Smith is excellent. Once you've captured what you want, it can go straight to email, or a document, or in fact anywhere as they have a number of capture profiles and an api you can use. It really is a worthwhile tool for the amount it gets used.