Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#2Yes! I'm so pleased to see this, only because I had the same idea and went ahead and implemented it with playwrite. I also added the ability to add annotations, ie overlayed text, and outlines, ie borders, on certain elements I want to highlight, focus on, explain.
My main problem is that I still had to write the code to do the work (go there, click there, wait for that, etc etc). The good thing was that it took video and screenshots, and embedded them into docusaurus markdown that then built our docs pages.
Seeing other people doing the same makes me think it wasn't such a bad idea after all.. Maybe I should get back on it..
Thanks!
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#3Yes! I'm so pleased to see this, only because I had the same idea and went ahead and implemented it with playwrite. I also added the ability to add annotations, ie overlayed text, and outlines, ie borders, on certain elements I want to highlight, focus on, explain. My main problem is that I still had to write the code to do the work (go there, click there, wait for that, etc etc). The good thing was that it took vide…
Thanks! One of the main benefits of this approach for me is that I can easily set up all the sample data programmatically in the database. It would be near impossible to manually set up all the data and charts by hand. And when it comes to updating the screenshots for new product releases, it would be very time consuming to redo all of this again.
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#4Yes! I'm so pleased to see this, only because I had the same idea and went ahead and implemented it with playwrite. I also added the ability to add annotations, ie overlayed text, and outlines, ie borders, on certain elements I want to highlight, focus on, explain. My main problem is that I still had to write the code to do the work (go there, click there, wait for that, etc etc). The good thing was that it took vide…
Did you mean PlayWright, from https://playwright.dev/ ?
If so, then the above statements make sense to me.
If not, then I’m curious to learn about this PlayWrite you mention.
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#5Wow, that is a nice idea!
I will try out something like it for our docs. we don't have a lot of screenshots because it's so much effort to keep them up to date.
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#6Yes! I'm so pleased to see this, only because I had the same idea and went ahead and implemented it with playwrite. I also added the ability to add annotations, ie overlayed text, and outlines, ie borders, on certain elements I want to highlight, focus on, explain. My main problem is that I still had to write the code to do the work (go there, click there, wait for that, etc etc). The good thing was that it took vide…
Did you mean PlayWright, from https://playwright.dev/ ? If so, then the above statements make sense to me. If not, then I’m curious to learn about this PlayWrite you mention.
Yes that's it, I always get it wrong..
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#7If you have an app that has frequent UI updates this could save you a lot to time. Another scenario that I see is possibility to create localized version of screenshot for different languages. I used to maintain docs on a site that was translated to 10 languages, app was localized to even larger number of languages but I've always used screenshots only on source (original) language.
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#8If you have an app that has frequent UI updates this could save you a lot to time. Another scenario that I see is possibility to create localized version of screenshot for different languages. I used to maintain docs on a site that was translated to 10 languages, app was localized to even larger number of languages but I've always used screenshots only on source (original) language.
Good point regarding localized UIs; I haven't thought about the benefits of this approach for translations
Re: Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots
#9If you have an app that has frequent UI updates this could save you a lot to time. Another scenario that I see is possibility to create localized version of screenshot for different languages. I used to maintain docs on a site that was translated to 10 languages, app was localized to even larger number of languages but I've always used screenshots only on source (original) language.
Good point regarding localized UIs; I haven't thought about the benefits of this approach for translations
When dealing with localized UIs and documentation creating screenshots is one part of the task and another one is getting the right image into the right document, but that is beyond the scope of your app. I'm glad that you have found this scenario also useful.