Pauspapier

When developing applications or websites, user experience is a developer’s top priority. In a world filled to the brim with a wide variety of design templates and languages, it can be tough to follow a certain theme. In situations where the interface designer defaults to a template that does not suit your needs, adjusting it to fit your application’s use case may be your only solution.

A handy utility for developers is Pauspapier, a screenshot-overlaying app whose straightforwardness and ease-of-use in terms of quickly comparing design elements allows for adjusting one’s interface or getting inspired by another without any hassle.

The app’s strengths lie not only in its simplicity, but also in its highly specialized feature-set. Designed with developers in mind, the app may be the perfect alternative to clunky or complex screenshotting software. Upon launching it, users are greeted by a movable menu with a link towards the project’s source code and the option of starting the selection of the desired area.

Once the portion of the screen is selected, users then have at their disposal a bright green tab sitting atop the screenshot element, featuring the ability to show or hide the overlay, toggling the option of always staying on top of all windows, buttons for increasing or decreasing the opacity, and “Window Nudge controls”, for carefully aligning the screenshot on the desired area.

One caveat is that selecting the screen area is done only by selecting first the upper left corner of the overlay portion. Not doing so may result in empty screenshots.

In a pinch, developers might be tempted to adapt the user interface of their app for touch displays or for a more spaced out, accessibility-oriented layout. In the final stages of application development, it may be tough to reconsider adopting a new template or rebuilding the interface from scratch, leaving people with very few choices, one of them being to draw inspiration from an already optimized design.

Moreover, when testing others’ programs, certain differences between the homepage and final iteration of the design can occur, and being able to easily view the differences down to the pixel placements can be very handy.

In order to quickly compare and adjust the desired app’s UI with a different template, or for handling various types of inconsistencies, Pauspapier’s lightweight layout, along with quick opacity and overlaying settings combined in a single function bar, can help developers save plenty of time and energy in a short time frame.