This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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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.
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.
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.)
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!)
Hi all, there is also BrowsrCamp, that offers fast screenshooting and VNC testing... http://www.browsrcamp.com
I tried BrowsrCamp, works well.
This discussion has been closed.
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