Mac testing

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20 Feb 2004

For the last 6 months I’ve thought about getting a used Mac for testing Web sites with it. The Mac I used to use for this purpose has become more difficult to get access to. I’m able to get a reasonable estimation of what Safari will show by using Konqueror on Linux, so I’ve held off on the purchase so far.

In today’s I-Design Digest, moderator Veronica Yuill provides a link to iCapture, a service that will show you a screenshot of any URL in Safari. The page says it’s available for Mac IE as well, but I couldn’t find a way to create an IE screenshot. I imagine that will be added soon. iCapture isn’t as full-featured as BrowserCam and it doesn’t provide screens for as many systems, but unlike BrowserCam, iCapture is free.

It looks like iCapture’s creator Dan Vine has got a couple of Macs sitting in his apartment that take screenshots and put them on the Web using a combination of AppleScript and Python. I’ve got to get around to playing with Python. All the cool kids know Python.

And while I’m mentioning all this, I don’t suppose anyone has some older Mac hardware that they’d want to part with cheap? I don’t need to run OSX or any high-performance apps. I mainly want to test sites in IE.

Brian Hess
February 20, 2004 11:25 AM

Ahem. May I recommend a certain eMac that I’m selling on eBay? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2788849505

Dave
February 20, 2004 11:42 AM

iCapture works well, but it suffers because of the fact that Safari caches stylesheets and only grabs new ones if you hit the reload button. If you make a change to your stylesheet after using iCapture once its screen grab probably won’t reflect it.

Scott Johnson
February 20, 2004 12:16 PM

I wish there was a free service that would also do this with IE/Mac as well as a few of the Windows browsers. (Maybe I need to get busy making one instead of complaining.)

Trisignia
February 20, 2004 12:29 PM

iCapture, like BrowserCam, is a neat idea, but I’ve always felt that these screen-capture services were nothing compared to the real thing. (And Macs are a joy to use, even with IE!)

Antonio
October 21, 2006 4:58 AM

Hi all, there is also BrowsrCamp, that offers fast screenshooting and VNC testing… http://www.browsrcamp.com

Mary
April 14, 2007 12:03 PM

I tried BrowsrCamp, works well.

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