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Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

urlbox.io

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Re: Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

#12

Post by bpatrianakos »

This is a great idea. I was actually working on something similar yesterday! The beauty of this is that it has so many uses! I think all the haters need to chill and think about this for a minute. Yeah, it's probably a wrapper around webkit2png but outside of HN people...

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.

Re: Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

#15

Post by micheljansen »

For a single-purpose app like this, at least it could do a better job at rendering the screenshots, if you ask me. I tried it out on my site (no custom web-fonts, pretty standard stuff) and the font-rendering looks awful:

http://cl.ly/image/3S2E3Z3i412n

Re: Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

#16

Post by blowski »

bpatrianakos wrote: post #12

This is a great idea. I was actually working on something similar yesterday! The beauty of this is that it has so many uses! I think all the haters need to chill and think about this for a minute. Yeah, it's probably a wrapper around webkit2png but outside of HN people... 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 the…

By the time you've paid for the server, the time to write the wrapper, and the cost of maintaining it, $10 per month is actually pretty good if screengrabs are an inconsequential part of your UI.

Re: Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

#17

Post by bpatrianakos »

grakic wrote: post #10

No flash plugin. That was a hard to solve problem for me I would love to pay for. What they are offering does not look competitive.

I know how to get Flash working in case you're interested. I'm assuming here that you (and they) are both using Webkit2png. In that case what you do is install Flash ([package-manager] install flash-plugin) then...

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-...

Re: Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

#18

Post by mnutt »

micheljansen wrote: post #15

For a single-purpose app like this, at least it could do a better job at rendering the screenshots, if you ask me. I tried it out on my site (no custom web-fonts, pretty standard stuff) and the font-rendering looks awful: http://cl.ly/image/3S2E3Z3i412n

It's probably related to linux font rendering.

Re: Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site

#20

Post by bpatrianakos »

blowski wrote: post #16
bpatrianakos wrote: post #12

This is a great idea. I was actually working on something similar yesterday! The beauty of this is that it has so many uses! I think all the haters need to chill and think about this for a minute. Yeah, it's probably a wrapper around webkit2png but outside of HN people... 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 the…

By the time you've paid for the server, the time to write the wrapper, and the cost of maintaining it, $10 per month is actually pretty good if screengrabs are an inconsequential part of your UI.

Exactly! That's why this is totally worth it. Not only do most people not have the skills but it's also not so important to their core product that they need to spend all that time and effort on rolling their own. You have (or maybe you do have) no idea how many things can go wrong with these sorts of things. Both wkhtmltopdf and webkit2png are two pieces of software that have given me more trouble overall than all the time I've ever spent maintaining production and dev environments for any other purpose. This site is totally worth the $10 bucks like you say.
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