The Catch-22: set of folks with the skills to use a security token to call an API and archive screen dumps for visual regression testing, roughly equals the one that already knows how to automate via headless Chrome ;)

laktek, I'd be interested in hearing how you would turn this into a consumer product? For myself, I'd like an API that wraps devtools for remote debugging (on users machines). Am able to extract useful info via performance counters and computed styles. But the entire process can be made much more friendly I imagine.

Good luck, and keep building!

Incidentally over the last few weeks I've been looking around the tools to monitor the appearance of websites; think of this as a step up from "is my site still online?" services, over toward "does my stride still look roughly correct". The latter is super important for sites whose functioning is critical to (for example) business happening, cash flowing, salaries being paid.

What I found is that this market is relatively crowded at the low end, with services that either don't state what browser they are using to render a site for a visual check, or which state and only support one browser.

It looks like screen.rip is also aiming at this low-end. I don't see anything on there about what browser uses, and nothing about choosing a browser. And it is only $7 (for 10000 images).

It seems to me that there may also be a market for people happy to pay $70 for the same thing, with the ability to specify which browser, and have the list of available browsers include the ones that are kind of inconvenient to support (older IE). Sure, it's a lot more of a technical slog, but I imagine someone facing the sort of troubles and trying to monitor the appearance of their site across all the major browsers would find that 10 X the stated price is a relatively good deal compared to the misery of setting all that up locally.

C# api client https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService.Api.Cs...

Nodejs api https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService

:)

Good timing — though slightly OT.

For training our customers we often record little demos of how to achieve something in our app, and then send it to them as an animated GIF in Intercom. We've been using Giphy but it's pretty clumsy. The app itself is always in the way, especially on a laptop screen and then you need to record the clip, save it to disk and then drag it from disk into an Intercom conversation.

After trying a few other solutions there doesn't seem to be a pain-free way of recording a clip and then having it available as an animated GIF ready to paste into the browser. I'm not sure if some of the issue is that it's just not possible to but an animated GIF in the clipboard on OSX (it just comes through as a single still shot).

Does anyone have any recommendations for this workflow?

Screenshots are useful, but diffs of screenshots are even more useful.

You could maybe immitate the workflow used by wraith? https://github.com/bbc-news/wraith

For example to setup screenshot diffs between an existing production site and local dev, use:

    # (required) The domains to take screenshots of.
    domains:
      current:  "https://prod.yoursite.com"
      new:      "http://localhost:8000"

    paths:
      home:     /pageyouareworkingon.html

This is a great single-line tool that can make taking screenshots easy.

I'm a cheapskate, though, and don't mind spending the time to write my own screenshot script via Selenium.

Very cool! Useful to keep tabs on competitors and your own sites.

I'd suggest adding some kind of Stripe branding to your payment form to make it a little more trustworthy.

This seems like a great idea and I don't think $7 is steep. There are free options about but it's still cool none the less.

How different is from this free tool?

https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

A lot of talk about pricing here, so I add my favorite www.thum.io - charging $2 for 10.000 with first 1.000 for free.

What I like about them in particular is their buffering: once a screenshot is made, it can be served from their server 'unlimited' times without counting as a new screenshot.

A real improvement on their service (worth paying extra for me !) would be a way to dismiss the banner on github projects for new visitors. Obviously their browser is not logged into Github at the moment of the screenshot, so those screenshots mainly shows a general Github welcome banner :-(

So one perspective is that a lot of development these days is combining existing libraries with glue code to meet a need. I wonder how much of the future will be combining microservice APIs with affordable micro transactions to meet a need.

What does auto-updating mean?

I run a website builders review website and have always wanted to write a script that captures every pricing page so that my readers could scan them all at once.

Two problems have kept me from this:

1) Scrolling (which it looks like you've fixed— haven't seen other screenshot APIs do this— awesome!) 2) Pricing pages change often— so manual screenshots don't make sense. Does your auto-updating take care of this? (ie: captures a new screenshot each time the page is updated)

I guess it's using headless chrome, am I right?

How come "Arimo" is the default font for sans-serif, though?

img: https://imgur.com/a/ULr4I

page: http://www.juliendesrosiers.com/

Edit: I know I should've used @font-face for my logo, but still, it bugs me.

Any chance you implement bitcoin/blockchain payments. So I can pay you through code and then programmatically get my token?

Well pitched and put together IMO but the thing that always irritates me about services like these is the so-so font rendering. Screenshots taken on macOS just look better for some reason. As an aside, I've always found it weird no other OS has got text rendering quite as right, it's a key part of why I stick with it.

Awesome product, awesome landing page, awesome pricing scheme. I wish you only success!

Next step: animated screengrabs (gif/webp)? :)

The api is just perfect, I wonder if I can use it in a commercial project to address some niche market ?!

Does it work with emojis and other interesting characters? If not then we should talk since I'm working on a project that helps solve the browser part of the equation https://browserless.io

I am working on a tool[0] to record a video of a website or web app. Instead of A/B testing, I am using it to capture Repro Steps.

[0]: https://github.com/styfle/magnemite

I build a similar tool but with few more capabilities like CDN, analytics and PDF support. Feel free to check it out.

https://capture.techulus.in/

I'm curious what the "We're ::lightning:: by Drift" means in the contact box. What verb is supposed to be conveyed by ::lightning::? Fast? It's just the chat box.

Check out https://www.pdfparty.com as well - some similar and different capabilities

I like the "capture an area" feature. Very nice!

The 365 day expiry time is a little frustrating - but you probably don't want customers stretching out the quota over 2+ years.

Looks cool! Maybe you can add an option to record the screen / area for x seconds as a gif, it might be useful in some cases.

I've tried 7 different pages from our setup and not one of them worked.

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Can you make it save the page as PDF as well?

Any consideration towards bulk pricing?

100's of millions?

why? Why not just use casperjs or something and use the built-in method?

It's literally 3 lines of code. Or even a one-liner if you really want.

  require('casper')
    .create()
    .start('https://rms.sexy')
    .then(function() {
      this.capture('test.png');
    }).run();

I thought of offering this as a service too. Of course you'll never see my comment because the bitches behind hackernews think they are more righteous than me.

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I've never heard of several proper nouns in these threads: Intercom, Selenium, Drift.

Time to Google.