Screengrab!

I’m making another extension. This time in full view.

Head over to BookSmarts to watch the work very slowly progress!

The selection tool was inspired by (and reverse-engineered from) MeasureIt one of the cleverest extensions available for Firefox by a chap called Kevin A. Freitas. His technique involves injecting a transparent div and some javascript into the page you want to measure (and that I want to grab). I never would’ve thought of that - it’s genius.

The canvas grab is thanks to me stumbling on this page a couple of years ago and then waiting for the feature to be fully implemented in the browser. The motivation came from my main competitors Pearl Crescent Page Saver (their grabber is pretty good - but you have to pay for the selection box). who had been previously capturing images using some very clever native libraries to do their work. I’m not that smart, so I was using the language I know: Java. My ego decided that I couldn’t lose the Firefox screengrabbing race so I got back to work.

(There’s also another extension called Snapper that does this now. It’s good for quick shots.)

The copy feature was inspired by all of the people who said they wanted it as a feature. You would not believe how hard it was to do. I’m not even doing it right, it’s a hack. I still don’t know how to put image data on the clipboard using the interfaces provided.

Anyway, here’s how the hack works…

• I grab the page and get the dataUrl from the canvas.
• I load the dataUrl into a hidden image in my extension chrome (it’s in the main overlay).
• I then trick Firefox into thinking that the last thing the user clicked on in the browser was this image that they can’t possibly see (so that it thinks the context menu would be using it).
• Then I invoke the command that drives the “Copy Image” context menu item.

(There’s also a couple of timers in there while I wait for Firefox to get with the program)

If you think that’s hacky, one day I’ll explain how I get Java to take those shots and scroll the page. It’s CRAZY!

The new version is now available. I hope you like it!

Luckily this site gets no traffic right now. If it did, people would be wondering where their release was.

It’s coming. I found a bug getting the visible portion using Canvas while making this site, so I just need to squash it.

I also need to add my cool new icon to everything, incorporate some locales and get the Firefox extension guys to put it up on their site. I’m going to stop hosting the download myself.

… Nick La of N.Design Studio for the site template and for the awesome free vector clipart on his site, which a man with zero graphic design skills (me) cunningly used to create a new spiffy logo for Screengrab! I always knew I wanted a logo and now I have one.

I decided that Screengrab deserved it’s own home, since it currently lives in a very unnatractive corner of my very useless blog.

This is it. It even has its own domain. Amazing.