Pearl Wisdom

Yesterday was a big day for Mozilla: Firefox 3 is now available. With Firefox 3 comes new features and improved security. There are many reasons to upgrade now. However, for some, the drawback to switching is that not all add-ons have been updated to work with Firefox 3.

Last October, we updated Page Saver to be compatible with the early releases of Firefox 3. However, we expected that we would need to make additional changes to Page Saver since new features were still being added to Firefox at that time.

Here at Pearl Crescent, we are proud to announce version 1.7.1 of Page Saver (both Basic and Pro editions). For this release we added a Greek translation (thank you Demetris Kikizas) and made some minor adjustments and fixes for Firefox 3. In addition, Page Saver Pro now allows file name patterns to be used with the -saveas command line option.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or compliments to share with us, feel free to leave a reply below or use our feedback form.

One of the most common questions we receive about Page Saver is “When will Page Saver be able to capture Flash?” Unfortunately this is a Firefox issue. See bugs 313462 and 317447.

However, now that Firefox 3 will soon be available, we have good news to share with our Macintosh customers: Page Saver 1.7 (Basic and Pro editions) can capture Flash content in Firefox 3! When I heard this good news I immediately loaded a YouTube video in Firefox 3 release candidate 1 and captured it. Thrilled with my resulting image, I tried it a few more times! Woohoo! Hurray! Yippee!

Unfortunately I don’t know when this will be addressed in Firefox for other platforms (Windows and Linux). For now, if you control the web page you want to capture and you are on Windows, you can change the HTML to include transparency (wmode=”transparent”) on the <embed> tag. For example:

  <embed src="my.swf" wmode=”transparent”
         type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”>
  </embed>

If you want to try Firefox 3, download the release candidate here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

Here is a sample capture:

A new Page Saver user recently emailed us. He mentioned that we don’t emphasize a feature that would have been useful at his previous company. He and other quality assurance testers needed to verify that web pages designed by their company looked correct at specific screen resolutions. However, the testing was not being done well because nobody had figured out how to set the browser window to the right size.

With Page Saver installed, from the command line, you can specify the width and height of the browser window and capture an image of the page for review in one step. For example:

Before Page Saver does its capture, it resizes the browser window to the specified size. (Note that this is the window size including all of the toolbars, not the size of the web page content.)

Please let us know if you use this feature or if you have suggestions for how to improve this feature to make your job easier.

Last week we released a new version of Page Saver Basic and Page Saver Pro. Version 1.7 has several new features:

• The URL of the page can be used in the captured image’s file name. Include %u in the file name pattern in the Page Saver Options window.
• The MD5 hash of the page URL can be included in file names. Use %5 in the file name pattern in the Options window. This is useful when integrating with services such as the del.icio.us JSON feeds.
• Polish and Brazilian Portuguese translations are now included. Thank you to Rodrigo Bergmann Laurindo and vatzec for providing these via Babelzilla.
• Page Saver Pro now includes the capability to add a new Header and/or Footer to a captured image. This feature may be used to record the URL of the captured page, the date and time the page was captured, and other information. The header and footer is configurable in the new Header and Footer tab in the Page Saver Options window.

Yesterday we released updates to the Pearl Comments Server and to Pearl Comments for Firefox. New features that Firefox users will see include:

• An option to replace your name with “me” when displaying
  comments.  You can adjust this option from the Pearl Comments
  options window.
• An option to show the URL of the page for each comment in the
  sidebar when the “Any Page” or “Recent” tab is active.  Set the hidden
  preference pearlcomments.showPageURLsInSidebar to “true” to enable this
  feature.  Each URL is displayed inside a <div> element that has
  the CSS class PearlCommentsPageURL.
• The capability to use a Pearl Comments stylesheet
  (pearlcomments.css) that is separate from userContent.css and
  userChrome.css.  For more information about customizing Pearl Comments for Firefox using CSS, see this blog posting.
• Firefox 3 compatibility.
• Russian translation.  Thank you Alexander Sokolov!

To upgrade the Pearl Comments browser extension, open Firefox’s Add-ons window and click “Find Updates” on the Extensions tab.

If you use the Pearl Comments Service, your server has already been upgraded for you.  If you have purchased a license for the Pearl Comments Server, please contact us to obtain the new server.

If you have any questions or suggestions for additional features, please contact us.