Taking Screenshots with Kindle Fire

Renumbered at 4:02pm; Updated 3:47pm, thanks to corrections made by Wangen. (The mistakes were mine, not Erica’s.) Thanks, Wangen!

I just got off the phone with Erica Sadun, geek girl extraordinaire, who had posted instructions yesterday on how to take screenshots on a Kindle Fire but who kindly walked me through the process today. I'll explain what she told me in case you too are interested.

Let me preface this with the fact that I've never used Android before today. If you, too, are new to Android, you should find everything you need in these instructions. If you already know Android, you'll probably be bored.

1First, connect your Kindle Fire to your Mac. (I don't think the process is very different on a Windows or Unix box, but to be honest, I really don't know.) 

2Next, download the Android SDK. You can find that here: http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r15-macosx.zip. You don't have to install anything else besides this.

3Unzip the folder and place it wherever you would like it to be on your computer. I put mine in my Documents folder. You'll need to know the location later on in the process, so I would recommend not burying it too deeply into your folder hierarchy. The folder starts out with the name android-sdk-macosx but you can change it to something faster to type (like android). Don't change the names of the things inside that folder.

4Next, open Terminal. It should be in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.

5When you open a Terminal window it defaults to your home directory. You have to navigate to the android sdk folder you just downloaded. Since I put mine in my Documents directory and I changed its name to "android", I typed:

cd Documents/android

(The cd stands for change directory.) Terminal will confirm that you are now "in" that directory by changing the prompt at the beginning of the line.

6Next type this:

./android

The Android SDK Manager should appear.

Erica told me to choose the "Android SDK Platform-tools" box and deselect everything else. Then click "Install 1 package…" at the bottom right.



Next, you'll get the "Choose Packages to Install" window. Make sure it's the Android SDK Platform Tools in the upper left corner, and then click Install.



Once the package is installed, the ADB will have to be restarted. Click Yes.



7Next, go back to the same window in Terminal, and create a symbolic link (a sort of alias) by typing:

ln -s ../platform-tools/adb adb

8Now, still in Terminal, to see if the Fire is connected, type

./adb devices

The output that you want looks like this:

List of devices attached
6C78000600000001    device

If you do see that, skip on ahead.

If, instead, you just see

List of devices attached

all by its lonesome—which is what I saw—we have to do a few more steps.

9First, we'll stop and restart the adb server. First type:

./adb kill-server

10And then type

./adb start-server

You should see this:

* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *

11Now see again if your Kindle Fire device is listed, by typing

./adb devices

If it still doesn't show up, we'll edit the adb_usb.ini file.

12To do that, open a brand new Terminal window, leaving the old one open since we'll go back to it.

13As ever, Terminal starts you out in your home directory. Type:

cd .android

It turns out that this is the default location for android stuff on any Unix machine (like a Mac).

14Now type

touch adb_usb.ini

15That creates the adb_usb.ini file. Make sure you have a text editor that can save with Unix line endings like the free TextWrangler (or more powerful but not free BBEdit). Then type

open -a TextWrangler adb_usb.ini

16(Or type open -a BBEdit adb_usb.ini if you have that program.) Copy into it, the following four lines, being very careful to create a return after the last line:

# ANDROID 3RD PARTY USB VENDOR ID LIST -- DO NOT EDIT.
# USE 'android update adb' TO GENERATE.
# 1 USB VENDOR ID PER LINE.
0x1949


17Choose Save as and make sure that Unix (LF) is chosen in the Line breaks menu.



18Then type

cat adb_usb.ini

in order to see your work. If you see it just as it appears above, you can continue to the next step. Unfortunately, mine appeared all jumbled on a single line (because I originally used TextEdit) and so Erica surmised that I had somehow entered the returns incorrectly and she emailed me the file. (You can download a zipped copy of that file here.

19Be sure to unzip it and place it on your Desktop before continuing as below.) I copied it to my Desktop and then from the second Terminal window, typed:

mv ~/Desktop/adb_usb.ini .

Which says "move the adb_usb.ini file from the Desktop to the current directory (represented by that final period).

Again I typed

cat adb_usb.ini

and this time, it looked like the four lines above. (Don't forget that final return after the 0x1949 line!)

OK, almost there.

Now, we go back to the first Terminal window, and for good measure, we'll stop and start the server once more. Type

./adb kill-server

And then type

./adb start-server

You should see this:

* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *

Now see again if your Kindle Fire device is listed, by typing

./adb devices

You should really see 

List of devices attached
6C78000600000001    device

If you still don't see a device, make sure that your Kindle Fire is connected, and that the adb_usb.ini file has been correctly configured.

20The next step is to start up ddms. In the first Terminal window, type

./ddms

You should see something like

2011-11-17 13:16:02.750 java[4451:1707] [Java CocoaComponent compatibility mode]: Enabled
2011-11-17 13:16:02.751 java[4451:1707] [Java CocoaComponent compatibility mode]: Setting timeout for SWT to 0.100000

21The Dalvik Debut Monitor window will appear. You should see your Kindle Fire in the upper-left corner. Select any of the lines under your device as shown here:



22Now to make a screenshot, press Command-S.



The first I tried it, it came up black, because my Kindle had gone to sleep. Just wake up your Fire and then click the Refresh button. Click the Rotate button to get it to go the right way around, and then Save to create a PNG file. Here was my first screenshot (note that I added the drop shadow with Skitch):




To take screenshots of the Kindle in action, you'll have to dismount the Kindle from your Mac by clicking the Disconnect button.

If you've left the Device Screen Capture window open, you can hit the Refresh button to see whatever you now see on your Kindle. For example, the first few sample books that you've downloaded:





And I think that's it.


Many, many thanks to Erica Sadun, without whose help I wouldn't have known even where to start. If anyone wants to add what's different on Windows and Unix machines, please add them to the comments.