1. Don't know how to use the terminal
2. Can't install webkit2png themselves (there are a lot of things that can go wrong - just ask me because they all went wrong for me yesterday. Everything from QT4 libs missing to $DISPLAY not being set, to the PIP package not installing correctly, to X-server connection problems)
3. Even if they had webkit2png they wouldn't know how to write a wrapper that took a damn screen shot, then resized it as a thumbnail, and changes the screen size so you can see a preview for multiple devices.
4. Don't have a Linux (or even POSIX compliant) machine locally or hosted somewhere.
This may seem simple here (well, to me it's more intermediate) but outside HN people will probably go nuts over this. Shameless sorta plug: I just started a project yesterday that does a very similar thing except it's meant for designers to take and store screenshots for inspiration and then plop them into a pretty UI/gallery. I'm going to open source it and host it though.
1. Something that someone else is doing better. Fail.
2. Something someone else is doing exactly the same. DRY/don't reinvent the wheel fail.
3. Something that does something seemingly the same as others but because it adds something others don't.
I think urlbox falls into category 3. There are lots of ways that a new entrant can be successful. Just tailoring it to a specific use-case honestly goes a long way towards success in my book. For example, Blitshot seems to be all about image processing of screenshots in general (and if it's not let's say it is for the sake of example) - you get an API for screenshots and image manipulation and it's up to you to find a use for it. But if someone else enters the fold, like urlbox perhaps, and says "our API is for purpose X and you can only use it in these ways" they could actually be very successful despite not offering what someone else is. There are a lot of people who'd rather use a product with less features in general but whose features are tailored to their use case than another product which offers the same and more but with no specific focus. Look at Pinboard. It's basically Delicious for a specific user group. All it lacks is the social aspect of it which you're not forced to use with Delicious anyway plus Pinboard is far more expensive (anything is "far more" expensive than free). I think Pinboard is a great example even if it doesn't fit exactly.
Thanks for the comment. You're absolutely right - There are companies / developers out there that just want to add this feature to their site without spending a lot of time and resources on it. urlbox takes care of capturing, storage, caching, thumbnailing and also optionally wrapping in mobile devices
https://api.urlbox.io/v1/$URLBOX_APIKEY/$TOKEN/png?$query_st...
Options Not working -
$options['width'] = "1024"; $options['height'] = "768"; $options['full_page'] = 'true'; $options['force'] = 'true';
Wierd - The Screenshot only works when I am logged into the Site.. Its a shame that it is this way
Suppose Sue Webdev bills at $60/hr. and needs something like this for a clients website. She's never heard of webkit2png before, not sure if she has PyObjC 1.1 installed and can't seem to find installation instructions for Windows.
Will Sue be able to create her own urlbox clone in two hours?
For what it's worth, I'm using it on my site http://imnosy.com
As soon as webkit is updated to have better support for OTF fonts urlbox will become so much better
To say something positive: I like that the headline changes the last word periodically. That caught my attention.
Is this copyright infringement? They use apple.com as an example. The grabbing process clearly doesn't happen on the client side. Even if it did, what would be the implications of using Apples website, logos and trademarks embedded in your content without user interaction?
Checkout - http://xgd.in/viewdnsinfo+
Note: I am removing it, since it does not work when a person is not logged into the system - its a shame and a sham
Try a url like http://renren.com and it only has certain characters.
That was a hard to solve problem for me I would love to pay for. What they are offering does not look competitive.
Well, the gist of it is that once you have Flash installed you need to enable plugins (-F plugins -F javascript) as well as set the wait ('-w 10' for 10 second wait before shot's taken) option so that the Flash has time to load.
This article helped me quite a bit. Apparently there's a problem with the wait time so you may need to dig into webkit2png's source to fix it. http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org/2012/08/making-web-pages-screenshots-...
(I did wonder if it was because the sites I tested it with were IPv6 only, but even IPv4 sites are doing nothing.)