This documentation uses many technical terms that users new to computers may not know. In order to help novice users better employ this software (and perhaps even get a more firm grasp on computing in general) we've included this glossary of terms.

Computer users, especially advanced ones, toss a lot of jargon about. It's part of the process of making sure the listeners belong to their social group. (It's also why doctors say, "ibid" when they mean "per day" on your prescriptions.)

To read about a term, just click on that term and a bit of information about it will appear. We hope the glossary improves your knowledge of computers, and helps you take better advantage of our software, and of your computer.

Note: this topic is only available in English, even though it might be included in translated versions of the documentation.

3dfx
A maker of previously advanced video chipsets and video boards used to rapidly draw 3D content onto your screen. These include the Voodoo product line and other products. They're not active in the market at this writing, but many 3dfx boards are still in service.

API
Short for "Application Programming Interface." It means a way for a programmer to make requests of the system in order for it to execute his commands. Used by DirectX and Direct3D for example, which are sets of APIs for fast graphics delivery and fast 3D graphics rendering, respectively.

Bit depth
The amount of colors a picture contains, typically limited to the values of 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32, representing monochromatic, 16 color, 256 color, 16 million colors, and "true color" format. Files with 24 bit color typically can display more colors than most people are able to detect.

BMP (bitmap image format)
A file format developed by Microsoft to display image content. It is a non-compressed, fairly space-wasting format that's used for wallpaper, and also for user-interface graphics such as toolbar glyphs. The biggest advantage to this format is that it loads fast into most applications supporting it, and it supports virtually all color depths.

Border
Refers to the region "around" an application window. It's the area you "grab" onto with your mouse when you want to size a window.

Button
A control device used by software to actuate a function. It may appear to actually "depress" when clicked, which is an illusion caused by the operating system.

Caret
The Caret is a programmer's term that usually means the area or control where "focus" or what user interface control you are currently interacting with, is located. It can be any number of things, but mainly it means the "active control." See Control.

Chroma
Refers to "color" or the color "palette" of an image, and sometimes to the color "balance" of an image when used slightly incorrectly. The "chroma" of an image is a compressed reference to its chromatic content, or it's "color content." See Gamma, below, for reference to its white/black content.

Clipboard
A place where Windows stores data when you mark an area of an image and select Edit / Copy or use the CTRL+C shortcut keys. Windows uses a special data format for the clipboard that makes it possible for it to store all sorts of things, both graphics and text, or even mixed formats that contain both (for example, a Word document's page with a chart on it). Sometimes called a "metafile" this format is quite powerful. Some people say that the biggest improvement over DOS that Windows has ever offered was the power of the clipboard. Now applications can share data (and even dynamically through embedded objects, yet another type of technology). Like all powerful graphics programs, HyperSnap-DX makes use of the clipboard and can both read data from it and write data to it, in several formats.

Color depth
The same as "bit depth," essentially. Refers to the amount of colors in an image. Most modern systems run in what's called "high color" or are at least able to display 16,000 plus colors. Many run in "True color" which is typically used to define a color bit depth of 24 or 32 bits.

Color palette
The "table" of colors used to draw an image. In some formats, this may be limited to a certain range (for example, GIF files are "palette-based" images. Each pixel contains, essentially, a pointer to a certain "place" in the palette. If you change the palette, that pointer will now direct the pixel to a different color. This is called "palette-shifting." The larger the palette, the more colors the image can display. Not all image types use palettes, some contain within their pixel data a direct color reference rather than a "lookup" value.

Control
A class of user interface management devices used on software (such as a button or list box) that allows you to make the software "do" things. Everything you "touch" with your mouse on software (buttons, lists, checkboxes) are called "controls" by programmers.

Crop
To cut a region from an image, or to trim off excess material from around a more desirable area. Sometimes incorrectly used when the word zoom is a better choice (to "crop in" on an object, for example, is not really accurate). Think of "harvesting crops," which means when you're done cutting, the region harvested (such as the corn) is no longer in the field (in this case image). How about that analogy?

Cursor
The pointing device on your Windows screen. It may be an arrow, or something else. It provides a way for you to interact with software "controls" and make the system behave the way you wish it to. (Well, most of the time.) You click on things using the mouse cursor, and you type things using the keyboard cursor (that flat thing that moves usually from right to left within WordPad, for example).

Desktop
The background of your Windows screen. It's the area where you put shortcut icons that are not in your Start menu, and the area where you may apply wallpaper, if you have done that. It's also sometimes called the "background," but that's not really accurate.

Direct3D®
An accelerated display technology developed by Microsoft. The idea behind it was to provide a collection of API programming tools for game developers that allows them to create 3D content without having to directly access the display hardware.
This is something Windows likes to prevent for reasons having to do with operating system stability.

Directory
An older term for something Microsoft now calls, and previously Apple called, a Folder.

DirectX®
An accelerated sound, video, and game controller technology (set of APIs, see that above) developed by Microsoft. It allows game and other software developers to have high-speed, closely-timed access to the hardware like they used to have within DOS, but without direct access to the hardware, something not desirable within a multitasking operating system.

Dithering
No, it's not wasting your time playing Solitaire, it's a process of applying one of several specific dot patterns (such as Stuckey or Floyd-Steinberg, to name two) to an image. This is usually to attempt to make an image reduced in color bit depth (see Bit depth) to appear more closely like the original. The idea is that dots next to each other can affect how the group of dots appears, and by adjusting the patterns, the final effect may "simulate" colors that are no longer present within the image.

DPI (dots per inch)
The number of pixels the image has per inch of content. The higher it is, the higher we say its "resolution" is. An image with 300 DPI that is 300 pixels across will print out at 1 inch on the page of a printer with 300 DPI resolution. The relationship can be changed by other settings, but basically this refers to a device's capability (such as a screen or printer) or the data format of the file itself, which may contain a DPI specification in order to enhance its printing properties or viewing characteristics.

Drop-down
This is a control in Windows where if you click a downward-facing arrow, you're presented with a list of possible choices or functions. These might be file format choices (see HyperSnap-DX 5's Save as dialog, for example) or a list of hard drives on your system when saving a file.

FAQ
Shorthand for "Frequently Asked Questions" and often refers to a list kept by software manufacturers or others who are tired of answering the same old questions. They send curious users here first to save time.

Best tip for today: read any FAQ page put up by a vendor BEFORE contacting that vendor!

File format, File type
The actual low-level data-type used by the image or other type of file in question. In our case, it might be JPG, GIF, BMP, and so forth. It refers not to the "look" of the image (for example, a "Portrait" format image) but rather to the binary encoding method used to create the file on your hard disk. The program used to open (view or otherwise handle) that file must be able to decode the "file format" in order to operate on the file.

Not all graphics programs can open all file types, and there are dozens of them out there, many of which are pretty much obsolete (such as the old PC Paintbrush PCX format, which is rarely used).

Folder
Another name for a directory. It's where you put files. Long-time users still call it a directory, and pretty much ignore the term "folder." It's a good way to tell how long somebody has used a computer, actually. See if they call this directory a folder or a directory.

Gamma
The "brightness" content of your image. Not the same as just "brightness," but the balance of white to black on the overall image. An image with high gamma may appear very bright, but also may appear washed out, even "faded by the sun." An image with low gamma may appear "blocked up," and difficult to see.

GIF®
Graphics Interchange Format. A file format developed by CompuServe and used a lot on the Worldwide Web and elsewhere. It is a palette-based format that supports no more than 256 colors, and it best for images containing solid-color areas. JPG is superior for most photographic content, and you should use that format for photographs or variable-tone image content. If in doubt, use JPG or BMP if disk space consumption and/or network transmission speed isn't an issue.

Glide™
A technology developed by 3dfx for displaying 3D gaming or other content. It's a programming interface that allows game developers to write to 3dfx hardware more easily. It's not in active development at this writing anymore, but is still present in older systems or hardware using 3dfx video boards.

Hard disk (formerly Winchester drive)
A spinning metal platter (sometimes multiple platters) that's inside virtually all computers and used to store data. This is compared to "floppy disk" even though they've not been "floppy" for years. Hard disks are much faster and more reliable than the nearly useless 1.44 format "floppy" disk. Most modern systems may have up to four Hard disks added to them if they contain sufficient space inside their cases to add them.
Way back at the invention of hard disks, they were called "Winchester drives," being named for their inventor. A huge array of platters that weighed in at about 200 pounds held perhaps a megabyte or less—not even the capacity of a modern 1.44 floppy disk! It's common now to find tiny 2 inch wide one-quarter inch thick laptop drives with ten thousand times that much and more. Science marches on.

Hot key or Hot-key or hotkey
A term referring to a special key combination that can cause a program to perform a specific operation or process without taking multiple steps. HyperSnap-DX 5 uses them to trigger screen captures of various types. Also sometimes called a "shortcut key."

Hue
The balance of colors within an image. Refers to the relationship of the key colors of an image, just like how the "tint" control works on televisions works. Hue refers to the "cast" of the colors in the image. Hue can sometimes be restricted to RGB hues (for example, saying an image has a Red, Green, or Blue casts) because many file formats are considered to be RGB-based.
There are other formats, typically used in printing, called CYM for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, for example.

Icon
The little picture on your desktop, start menu, or a program's toolbar that's used to identify the program or function that will launch when you click it (or double-click it). For example, the icon for Internet Explorer is usually a blue E.

INI file (or initialization file)
A special file used by some software to hold important settings and other information. Windows itself used to be entirely built from the settings within two INI files, SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI, but with the release of Windows 95 the system began to be based on the more fragile (but more powerful) database-format "registry." HyperSnap-DX 5 can use INI files, see the help section "Command line usage" for more information about that.

JPEG (or JPG or JPE)
The "true" extension for JPG, a common file format used for photographs, and throughout many web pages. It can be a true-color format, has the option of superb file compression (reducing size massively) and can produce very tiny files that still look quite good for most purposes.
Overall, the JPG file is a superior format to most others for general bitmapped image work, unless you need a discrete object-based format such as Ulead's UFO format, or Corel Draw's CDR. HyperSnap-DX doesn't work with object-based formats at this writing, however.

List
Within Windows, the items that appear when you click a "drop-down" button or other user interface control and are given some choices. HyperSnap-DX 5 uses a list within the Save as dialog for possible file format types (for example).

Luminance
Often referred to as the "brightness" of an image, it's the overall "light" within an image or scene. If you turn up or down the brightness of your television set, you're affecting the luminance, but not the color of the image. Gamma, above, represents the effect of luminance values on the image.

Maximize
Here it refers to the behavior of an application within the Windows desktop. When it's "maximized" it means it has been set to be "full screen" and it's the only application you can see at that point, unless you "switch" to another using the keyboard. It covers the entire desktop, all of your icons, and all other programs except for (in most cases) the task bar, which can be set to "stay on top" of any maximized window.

Memory
Sometimes refers to RAM, which is the chip-based storage space your computer uses to make its calculations. Its best not to use "memory" to mean hard disk space, you can confuse technical support staff. Say, "hard disk space," and "RAM," or "memory" for the system's running data storage space.
It's best to stick with the exact technical terms for both.

Minimize
Means an application's window has been "sent down" to the task bar or (in the case of HyperSnap-DX 5) to the system tray area where the clock lives. To get access to a minimized program, you must Restore it. Try the right mouse button on HyperSnap-DX's system tray icon, and the left, and see how they differ.

Monochrome
A black and white image. Not to be confused with "grayscale." Black and white is often used incorrectly, for example Black and white photos from a camera are actually grayscale photos. A true black and white image is made up only of dots of either black or white, with nothing else. How tightly they are packed, or how loosely, creates the illusion of other shades. A newspaper photograph may actually be Monochrome, it depends on how it's printed. The newspaper printer then sizes the dots, or makes smaller dots crowd together, to simulate varying grayscale value. But all dots and spaces are either black or white, making them monochrome.
Examine a newspaper photo with a magnifying glass and you may see only larger or smaller black or white dots, giving at a distance the effect of black, gray, or white colors, which then appear as grayscale. Many big city newspapers have switched to color and many more are finally using true grayscale, though.

Overlay
A technology where a software application, like a DVD player, will "paper over" part of the Windows screen with the "active content" it is providing, such as the moving frames of a film delivered via the DVD. It will use its window space to directly write content to the screen, bypassing Windows itself for this. Overlay functions are common with desktop TV tuners and DVD players, all of whom must show data at a rate much faster than Windows would be able to do, so Windows lets them "clip out" a region and then handle it themselves.
Capturing such a window is very difficult as the data is "private" and must be carefully decoded.

Palette
The table of colors used by certain image types, just like an artists palette might be. Such types include GIF, for example. These files contain "pointers" to a location on the palette rather than actual pixel color values. If you change the palette, the image will change right with it, perhaps looking very weird. Sometimes the palette is stored internally, and in other (rare) cases, the palette can actually be loaded from another file and applied to the image itself, dynamically changing how it appears. This is called a "palette shift."
Think of it as each pixel as a house in your neighborhood. If you change that home's address to "yellow," it re-paints the house yellow, too. It's as simple as that, more or less.

RAM (sometimes "memory")
Techno-babble for Random Access Memory. It's the chip-based storage space used by your computer to run itself, and to execute programs. Generally, the more you have, the faster things run. It's best to call this RAM and not "memory," to avoid confusion. A good rule of thumb when building a system is this: More RAM is better.
Buy as much as you can afford, Windows and your programs will thank you for it by running better and faster.

Rectilinear
A region defined within a rectangular or straight-edged space. The box you draw when you crop an image is usually rectilinear in nature. It's a fancy way of saying "rectangular," in some cases.

Region, as in "Region capture"
To capture one or more "regions," or areas of your screen, application, or desktop. It means to only pick a part of what you can see rather than all of it. A useful tool when you only want to capture the important part of the screen. These can be rectangular (or rectilinear) or freehand, using HyperSnap-DX.

Resize (or Scale)
This means to change the dimensions of an image (not its resolution, which means dots per inch). For example, changing a bitmap from 320 X 200 to 640 X 480 would be a 2X resize. Sometimes confused with "resampling," which applies advanced techniques such as anti-aliasing to prevent the "jaggies," and may also alter resolution, too. A simple resize just changes the dimensions to those you want.

Resolution
The resolution of an image is its dimensions in relation to its DPI values. An image of high resolution means it can contain "fine detail" and typically has a high DPI value as well as a high pixel count. A low resolution image typically has a low pixel count, and a low DPI value. Screen resolution is usually very low, only 96 DPI. Some printers are now printing well above 1,000 DPI. This means if you send an image that covers 1 inch of your screen to this printer, it's only going to cover a tenth of an inch on paper.

Restore
Here means to "bring back" the window of a minimized application, like HyperSnap-DX. To Restore it from the System Tray, you can right-click its System tray icon, and pick Open HyperSnap-DX. (You can also choose from other menu items, too. Take a look.)

Saturation
Refers to how much "color" is in an image. A highly saturated image contains a lot of color, and may appear to be "overly-colored." Think of it as if it were paint on a brush. A brush dipped into paint only lightly will produce strokes of light color. A brush that's saturated will produce rich, thick color.

Scale (or Resize)
Refers to changing the dimensions or resolution of an image. This can be to make it print larger, smaller, or appear on the screen smaller or larger.

System
A common term to refer to your computer, or the operating system itself used to "run" the hardware of your computer (such as your display, your printer, and your hard disks). It's a generic term, used to cover both the hardware or the operating system, or both working (with any luck) in unison.

System tray
A feature of Windows 95® and later Microsoft® Operating systems where you see a small recessed area in the taskbar that shows you a clock, and sometimes many other icons. This allows you to keep your eye on running applications without them hogging space on the main taskbar. HyperSnap-DX 5 can be set to minimize to the system tray if you like.
See the Options menu, Startup and Tray Icon menu item. Check Display System Tray icon... and also the option below, probably, Do not exit when X button... That will prevent you from closing it accidentally during long work days.

Taskbar or Task Bar
A feature of Windows 95® and later where icons are no longer minimized to the desktop, as they were in previous 3.x versions, but are sent to this window-within-Windows. Here's a usability tip: you can grab any blank area of the taskbar (a part not occupied by a program icon) and drag it up to the TOP of your desktop. If you do this, you'll save a lot of mouse motion. Because most applications have their menus at the top, you'll only have to move the mouse a short bit to get to the taskbar rather than making a huge motion all the way from the menu to the bottom of the desktop.
Try it for a few days, you'll like it after you get used to it.

Toolbar
Sometimes called "button bar," it's a row of icons within a program that contains buttons. When you click the buttons, the application will perform various functions. With most programs (including HyperSnap-DX 5) if you hold the mouse still over a button you'll see some brief help for that button's function.

Truecolor or True color
Commonly used to refer to files that contain 16 million or more colors. This number of colors (and beyond) is essentially more than the human eye can see, so supporting more in a file format isn't practical or even logical. A true True color file is usually 24 bit or higher, and may contain area transparency information, too.

Video buffer
Your computer's video board has some chips on it where it stores data it needs to display images on your monitor. In the case of 3D accelerated hardware, this data buffer may contain entire screens or huge "chunks" of screens as well as complex texture data (such as for games, which may render brick walls, for example, in 3D). HyperSnap-DX 5 is able to "grab" data from this buffer when it captures Direct3D screens, for example.
By storing the data here, rather than re-calculating it again and again in memory, the video board is able to quickly re-supply the image content much faster than if it had to re-create it from scratch each time it was needed by the active software generating the images.

Wallpaper (also called Desktop)
This is the name of images that some people apply to their Windows desktop. To change your wallpaper, right-click your Windows desktop on any blank space (not on an icon) and pick Properties. There's a Background tab, and from this tab you can choose from available files to use as wallpaper.
Changes to the operating system may alter this procedure somewhat, but it should remain similar.

Web
The shorthand name of the Worldwide Web, the thing on which we are all wasting far too much of our time. But it's a great place to find superior software tools such as HyperSnap-DX 5...so I guess it's of some value.

Window
The rectangular or square place where a Windows application displays its data, but also in a technical sense, every part of that application is called a window. Programmers know that Windows itself calls every button, toolbar, and so forth a "window," and even gives each of them a "window name or window handle." Because of this, HyperSnap-DX 5 is able to capture even the smallest of controls, because they are all "windows" in that way, and it can get their names—and then their content—from the system individually.

Window capture
This means to capture the entire window of an application, including its border (usually) and title bar. Such captures will not show the desktop, wallpaper, or other programs.

Windows
This can mean either the programs you run, as these create "windows," or it can mean the operating system on which you are running your programs, trying to get some work done in the process. There have been many versions of Microsoft Windows®, going all the way back to 1.0 (which nobody used) through 2.x (which about fifty-six people used) and on to the current versions, Windows ME, 2000, and Windows XP Pro and Home.
The latter versions dominate computing around the world, running about 90% of the world's PCs by some estimates, much to the chagrin of the Mac and Linux folks who are jealous of Windows' "undeserved success." Of course that's just sour grapes. Windows is a tool like any other, and succeeds or fails on its usefulness or failure to be useful.
Many people think the best version "ever" (so far) is XP Pro.