Pearl Wisdom

Happy New Year!

We are happy to announce the availability of a new product, Clue Tracker for the iPhone and iPod touch. Clue Tracker is a location-aware mobile app that makes it easy to find and use letterbox clues. Learn more on the Clue Tracker product page.

What is a letterbox? A letterbox is the “treasure” part of a treasure hunting hobby called letterboxing. Letterboxes are hidden all over the world. Clues to finding letterboxes can be found on web sites such as http://letterboxing.org and http://atlasquest.com. Each letterbox contains a logbook for people who find the box to record their nickname and date, plus a rubber stamp which they can use to make an imprint in their personal letterbox journal.

We love to receive feedback and suggestions so please send them to us.

Today, in addition to new versions of Page Saver, we also released an update to Do Not Disturb (an extension for Mozilla Firefox that suppresses prompts and other behaviors that interfere with unattended use of the browser).

The new version suppresses prompts that may prevent a browser window from closing when a web page uses an onBeforeUnload event handler. This problem was reported by one of our long-time customers, and this enhancement will benefit everyone.

You can update to Do Not Disturb 1.2 from the Firefox add-ons window.

Today, we released version 2.5 of both Page Saver Basic and Pro.
Here are some of the enhancements included in the both the Basic and Pro editions:

• Added an option to show the Page Saver item in the Firefox Status Bar. Learn more.
• Added a -savelog command line flag to allow the PageSaver:CaptureComplete log output to easily be captured in a file. Learn more.
• A new flashdelay command line option was added to allow an additional capture delay to be used when a page contains Flash content. Learn more.
• Improved Flash capture for dynamic pages.
• When a page is too large to be captured in its entirety, an alert message is displayed.
• Added a hidden preference named pagesaver.file.name.maxlength that may be modified to change the maximum length of the file paths that Page Saver generates. Learn more.
• Added Galician translation and updated other translations (special thanks to Eduardo Bauta Bis and all of the BabelZilla translators).

PRO In addition, Page Saver Pro purchasers can enjoy these enhancements:

• When capturing a selected region, the position and size of the selected area is displayed.
• When capturing a selected region, the arrow keys may be used to move (nudge) the selected area one pixel at a time (hold down the shift key to move it 10 pixels at a time).
• When capturing a selected region, the Enter or Return key may be used to complete the capture.
• When using the -saveoptions right and bottom command line options, negative values may be used to specify an offset from the right and bottom edge of the page.

As usual, you can upgrade from the Firefox add-ons window. If you are not using Page Saver yet, start at this page.

Most of these enhancements were requested by our customers. We value your feedback.

Recently, we lowered the rates for our Pearl Comments hosted service. If you heard about Google’s new Sidewiki public web page commenting system and are looking for a private, workgroup focused solution take a look at Pearl Comments.

Recently, we’ve received several email messages from customers who report that Page Saver Basic and Pro are not able to capture Flash content on their Linux system. Unfortunately, we have not been able to determine the cause in all cases. Here are some things to check:

1) Make sure you are running Firefox 3.0.x, Flash 10.x, and either Page Saver Basic 2.1 or Page Saver Pro 2.1.

2) Make sure that your X display bit depth is 24. Other bit depth levels don’t allow Flash to be captured (see Mozilla bug 476282).

3) Make sure that you’ve enabled Page Saver’s Flash capture option. Interactively, check the menu item “Arrange to Capture Flash Content.” From the command line, be sure to include the -captureflash option along with some delay to allow some time for the Flash content to load (use the -savedelay command line flag).

If you are still having problems, it may help to:

• Install and use a copy of Firefox from Mozilla’s web site.
• Install the Flash plugin into your Firefox profile directory (~/.mozilla) rather than using a package provided with your Linux distribution. One customer reported:
  

  I found that the RPM package that Adobe distributes does some strange things with openSUSE. After uninstalling Flash completely and reinstalling the .gz manually on each user I was able to [capture Flash] with Arrange for Flash checked.

If you are experiencing this problem or if you found a fix, please make a comment here or contact us.