Screengrab!

A minor release to address the complaints of Screengrab 0.96 not working at all on pages with Flash or Java Applets!

This affects people with Java versions 6u10 & 6u11 and is due to an issue Sun introduced with the release of the new Java Plugin. This is fixed in 6u12 and is therefore a highly recommended Java update.

If Screengrab 0.96.1 detects either of these broken versions of Java it will play it safe and pretend that Java is disabled instead of silently failing.

You can download it from addons.mozilla.org.

Please let me know any issues that you might have with functionality that doesn’t work anymore, or let me know stuff that DOES work now.

Refer to my previous post for info about it.

Thanks!

It’s just pending AMO approval (as usual). As soon as its out, you should get an auto-update from them so please don’t ask me for it early!

This one doesn’t add too many new features – you’ll have to wait for the next release for that.
What I’ve done for 0.96 is completely gut the innards of Screengrab and then present the old interface over the top. But in doing so, I’ve fixed some things…

Fixed in 0.92

• Pages that didn’t capture in full, now should (unless they’re really long – still not fixed that)
  Flash and Java should always capture automatically now as long as you have Java installed.
• You no longer need to pick Java or Canvas modes – Screengrab now does a grab with canvas and then fills in Flash and Applets by grabbing them in Java mode. It’s the best of both worlds and you don’t have to lift a finger.
• Copying to the clipboard should now be MUCH more reliable. Pasting from it should also be significantly more successful and work in all programs (I hope).

There’s now a few options available in about:config for those who can’t wait for a release with real changes to the preferences panel. The ones people care about are…

extensions.screengrab.useJavaIfAvailable
Set this to false if you never want to use Java. If you’re one of those people who hates it for some irrational reason then go nuts and turn off the most useful feature in this extension.

extensions.screengrab.showIconInStatusBar
Set this to false to get rid of the icon in the status bar.

extensions.screengrab.showInContextMenu
Set this to false to get rid of the menu in the right-click context menu.

extensions.screengrab.jpgImageQuality default:75%
Use this to specify a value for jpg quality. Up to 100 should work fine.

Very soon my pretties Screengrab will be awesome and I’ll retake the crown of most awesome web page capturing tool thing from those young upstarts who came on the scene later than me and did a good job!

Damn them all to hell…

I’ve just been reading the comments on AMO https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/1146?show=20&page=2 and while the feedback is all lovely, it seems that people don’t like the icon!

I’m deeply hurt! I made that icon myself – I sweated over it for minutes as I took 3 images and stuck them on top of one another.

So I’ve decided to take action!! SOMEONE MAKE ME A BETTER ONE!

Please! Feel free. If you make and I like it, I’ll use it, include it and cite you in the About box in the app and on the website.

I can’t offer anything else as a reward. You’ll get kudos and the knowledge that your logo will appear in the browsers of somewhere between 250,000 (the number of active users I have) and 1.4 million (the number of downloads for this thing so far) people. You’ll obviously have to be giving me some sort of unlimited license to use it for promoting Screengrab or something, since that’s really the only tenable way this thing could work.

I’ll also post all of the submissions on a page and maybe people could vote? I reserve the right to overrule you all though! Democracy in action!

So if anyone ever reads this website, and wants to do this, please make me a better logo! PLEASE!

I always liked the idea of a fist with a long web-page trailing out of it like ticker-tape, but I am (obviously) an idiot who (thankfully) can’t draw…

I’ve received a few emails recently asking if Screengrab! is dead!

It isn’t, I promise. I’ve just been quite busy with other things.

There will be a new release in the next couple of weeks that will be functionally almost exactly the same as this one, but will have a completely renovated core. The original Screengrab was thrown together in 2004 and it was mostly guesswork at the time. Since then things have changed so it felt like a good time to improve the core functionality.

The new internals are much more easily extendable for all of the features that people have requested and will make it far easier to script using something like GreaseMonkey.

All (many of) those feature requests will get done once that release is out.

The future is good. Trust me…
Andy

And has been mentioned somewhere, the selection box is working again. Hooray!

The source for Screengrab! is now more easily available.

Screengrab! is a GPL3 piece of code, just so you know.

Screengrab 0.95 will be the FF3 compatible version.
It consists of a couple of tweaks to moz chrome changes that snuck in at the last minute.
All should be good soon.

I’m also working on a new release that should resolve a few of the long-standing complaints that people have with Screengrab! and will add some nifty new features.

See the Google Code issues page for a list of what I’m working on for the new release.

This isn’t exhaustive, and none of it is guaranteed to happen by the next release.

The biggest changes going in are under the covers and involve using Java AND the Canvas to always accurately capture what is in the page.

First a big apology! I know… I haven’t done anything on this in ages! The reason is mostly that I’m not that excited by Screengrab anymore. I’m working on DS development in my spare time, so this doesn’t grab me so much right now.

I embarked on a big code cleanup and rework expedition, which consumed my passion and tired me out, so I haven’t really looked at this in a while. I’ll get back to those little things that people want soon.

However, here is an increment of the version counter. Expect another one when Firefox 3.0 comes out.

It’s currently waiting for approval, but it should be out there soon. Good luck!

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!