andy

The future of ScreenGrab! June 15, 2006

Posted by andy in : screengrab , trackback

It seems that I was dug recently. I must have missed it on the feed, but apparently I got a fair few digs. Yay for that!

The extra interest that this brings, means there are more people trying it out (which is nice) and asking more questions and pointing out bugs and so on. This brings to light the current problem that I have, whereby I’d like to do more work on ScreenGrab (and the other extensions I have planned) but I don’t have much free time what with study, work, wedding plans and a 3 hour round trip commute every day.

I have plans for upgrades, and I have an alpha with a couple of new features, but I just haven’t had time to do anything with it.

The things I’m working on are…
- being able to select a region to grab (using something similar to MeasureIt)
- removing my dependence on Java (much like the folks over at Pearl Crescent did with their PageSaver, based - like I said one would be eventually, on the Canvas widget).
- all those configuration options people keep whining about (default save to location, default naming, different file types, different menu locations)
- making a shortcut key to do the grab

I am also working on a super-secret project that I hope will actually be popular.

Is there anything else that people would like? Would anyone like to help? I can make a Subversion repository and I have a very easy to use environment for building these things.

Actually, maybe I should make a proper tutorial on how to do this. Making Firefox extensions is dead easy - the hard part is figuring out which parts of the DOM are the useful ones.

Thoughts? Comments?

Comments»

1. RodeoClown - June 15, 2006

Ahoy Andy.
>I don’t have much free time
+
>3 hour round trip commute every day

Doesn’t sound like you should have a problem there sport

Hope things are going well with the wedding plans etc.

2. RodeoClown - June 15, 2006

Also - I would like a tutorial on doing firefox extensions

3. andy - June 15, 2006

Heh! That 3 hours is a combination of my most productive study/work/extension time and a great time to watch movies and tv shows and listen to podcasts.

As for the tutorial, there are some other ones, but they cover the basics (setting one up), they don’t really cover the howtos of it all.

Maybe I could re-implement ScreenGrab in a more public form? In fact, I like that idea. The code needs an overhaul anyway. And it gives me impetus to change my packaging to the new 1.5 format…

4. moriyoshi - June 21, 2006

Although this might not be what I’m supposed to write here, I’ve fixed the Japanese message resource in the 0.8 release. You can download it from the following URL. It was totally garbled supposedly because of encoding failure with native2ascii. In addition the DTD file was encoded in Shift_JIS, where Firefox expects it to be in UTF-8. I repeatedly heard many experienced the same problem with the ja locale, so I think this’d help much if it was included in the next release.

Resource files:
http://www.voltex.jp/downloads/screengrab-resource-ja-JP-200606211200.zip

Full repackaged stuff:
http://www.voltex.jp/downloads/screengrab_v0.8-jploc-fix-200606211200.xpi

Enjoy!
- moriyoshi

5. andy - July 13, 2006

Hmm… I didn’t realise it was garbled. Thanks.
I’ll incorporate it in my next release, whenever I get around to it.

(Think mid-November)

6. OFC123 - July 15, 2006

Hi Andy,

Thank you for all of your hard work. It’s very much appreciated! I have a question. I cannot do a full document screen grab on this page:

http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/

I get an error message that says:

“Screen gab failed.
I don’t quite know what happened. This doesn’t match any of my known error. Maybe just try again? Or restart Firefox?
Error while constructing instance of (null)”

I tried restarting Firefox but it still did not work. Do you know how I can get around this so I can do a screen grab of this page?

Thank you

7. CG - July 19, 2006

I’d like to be able to capture to clipboard instead of to a saved file. Is that in the cards?

8. gogiel - July 19, 2006

I get same error as OFC123 when I’m trying to screen grab long sites.

9. andy - July 19, 2006

On the Screengrab page, on this site, there is a big heading that says “Let’s be absolutely clear here” and then goes on to say that if you want to grab long pages you will need to tweak your JVM settings.

So I guess I’m suggesting that reading the Screengrab page is probably a great place to start if you have a problem.

10. andy - July 19, 2006

CG - clipboard is on the cards, but it’s a big deck and I’m currently playing golf

11. Samuel - August 8, 2006

Some pages disable right-clicking, you need to provide a menu option

12. riskpeep - August 19, 2006

It would be nice to be able to grab images of an entire site (e.g. by snapping a page, then walking all the links on the page and snapping images of those pages, down X many levels).

There are already a number of page walkers out there that do page walking for other things so finding code to walk a site shouldn’t be too challenging I would hope.

13. chofmann - October 6, 2006

any update for firefox 2 compatibility in the works? send mail to chofmann@mozilla.org or update if you can https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355568

it would be great to get this compatible before firefox 2 if you can.

thanks

chris h.

14. kenrob - October 25, 2006

G’day Andy,
You’ve done a terible thing. I’m hooked on ScreenGrab. I almost can’t live without it. Here I am sitting in a charity at Yagoona staring at Firefox 2 and I can’t use ScreenGrab!

The two best things since sliced bread - FF2 and ScreenGrab, and I have to choose one or the other - no - it’s too hard, I can’t take the strain…

Any chance of an update for Firefox 2?
–
Regards
Ken

15. kenrob - October 26, 2006

Thank you Andy. The future is now less uncertain…
You’re a good man.
–
Regards
Ken

16. Dave - November 4, 2006

Andy,

I’d be interested in talking with you about helping out with development of this extension - specifically the new features like getting away from Java and only grabbing a specified section of the screen.

Drop me an email.

Dave

17. Radiant guy - December 10, 2006

Thanks for screengrab, i’ll be waiting for FF2 compatible screengrab

18. Sean - December 15, 2006

Hi Andy. This is an awesome add-on and I hope you continue to support it. I’ve been using this quite a bit on my website themebot.com. I think I may have found a bug.

It seems that saving over a file does not work as intended. For example, if I have already saved “example.png” and then select that file so that it will resave the screen shot with the same name, when I go to save it prompts me if i want to replace it. If i click Yes, it doesn’t replace the file but creates another one like this “example.png.png” If I remove the .png extension from the file name while saving, it doesn’t prompt me about replacing the file, but actually does save over the old file. Is there any way to fix this?

I’m using Firefox 2.0, ScreenGrab 0.8 and Windows XP.

Here is the site I’m working on: http://themebot.com

19. Lontek - December 21, 2006

Really like this extension and I use it a lot!

You have probably already been alerted to this, but one thing to be careful regarding the use of this product. Under certain circumstances if the user just keeps the default name that Screen grab assigns, there can be problems. This is because the file name is larger than Windows can properly handle. For whatever reason Windows will allow you to save the save but then when you go to delete it the “fun” can really begin. I had one file that had about 300 characters in the name and Windows just would not let me delete it. Not even in safe mode, not even when I booted from an XP boot disk in the CD drive was I able to get rid of the file. Perhaps if I would have used the command line I could have removed it, but typing 300-400 characters on the command line (without making a typo) wasn’t really appealing…… I finally found a shareware called “Delinvfile”
Delete invalid file and this finally did the trick.

Perhaps some code in Screengrab that only allows 200 or less characters in a file name would completely solve this issue.

But don’t get me wrong overall I really like this extension,

Thanks!

20. Bedri YILMAZ from Turkey - February 1, 2007

I am waiting for ScreenGrab! for FireFox 2.0. But I know that sometimes wifes/girlfriends want to much care attention for herselves. So after wedding and honeymoon we demand ScreenGrab!. There will be no excuse.

Take care of you and everything gonna be allright as you wish.

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