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Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Products and Tools

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.

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