Pearl Wisdom

This week, we released version 2.1 of Page Saver Basic and Pro.

Enhancements included in both editions:

• Compatible with Firefox 3.5.
• The “Arrange to Capture Flash Content” supports more Flash pages and is now available on Mac OS.
• The default quality setting for JPEG images has been increased.
• If a page request fails during a command line capture (e.g., if Firefox is unable to contact the web server), an error is reported instead of capturing a blank image or an error page.
• The HTTP result code (e.g., 200 or 404) and other useful information is now reported for successful command line captures. Learn more.
• Improved coexistence with other Firefox add-ons.
• Updated Dutch translation (thanks to Markh).

Enjoy the new version, and please let us know what you think.

For the past year and a half I (Mark) have been part of an Ann Arbor, Michigan based group named GO-Tech. The common thread among the group members is that each of us is interested in making things using technology (combining hardware, software, metal, wood, etc.). I refer to it as “Do It Yourself Tech” (DIYTech). The group meets monthly to present projects and have interesting discussions. I attend when I am able; it is a fun, enriching after hours activity.

At the most recent meeting that took place on January 13th, there was a contest in which everyone was invited to build a device and demonstrate it at the meeting. As Dale (the group organizer and leader) described it:

The Five-Minute Timer Contest goal is to design a timer to time presentations at our meetings. It should semi-accurately time the presenter, and give some audible or visual indication when their time is up. Portability, coolness, and robustness will be helpful. Cool prizes supplied by O’Reilly, publishers of Make.

I created a traffic signal based timer that I named “5 Minute Signal.” The time is actually settable to one minute and up (in one minute increments). To build it, I hacked an inexpensive plastic traffic signal (about one foot tall) that I purchased from Oriental Trading Company. To control the signal and provide accurate time keeping, I used my trusty Bare Bones Board (BBB) Arduino-compatible microcontroller board. The hardware is fairly simple (the BBB, a pushbutton control switch, and 3 relays to control the red, yellow, and green lights) and the software was fun to write. I put the whole thing together the weekend before the GO-Tech meeting.

Basic operation is as you would expect: Push the button to start the timer. When the time interval is set to 5 minutes, the green light will stay on for the first 4 minutes, followed by one minute of yellow, and then red at the end of 5 minutes (the green and yellow intervals are shorter when the interval is 2 minutes or less). More details are available in these documents:

• Presentation: presentation.pdf
• Schematic Diagram: schematic.png
• Arduino Source Code: source-code.txt

The other contest entries included a very clever and well-made artificial sundial timer (by Jim) and another with a large servo-driven dial (by Don) that, if the presenter went too far over the allotted time, popped a balloon to get everyone’s attention. The meeting attendees voted and in the end I tied with the sundial for “Best Timer” and the sundial won the “Coolest Timer” award. I walked away with a copy of the Best of Instructables book (thanks O’Reilly).

There was one more 5 Minute Timer project presented at the meeting (it arrived too late for the contest). Peter put together a traffic signal based timer similar to mine that uses a full size (reclaimed) traffic signal that he purchased on eBay. His impressively polished project includes a wireless remote control (something I considered but did not have time to include), a custom printed circuit board, and a wooden project box. Schematic (PDF).

The meeting also included an interesting talk about EMC and some other presentations. Overall, it was a creative, fun and informative evening. If you are in the southeast Michigan area, I highly recommend that you attend an upcoming GO-Tech meeting

Happy New Year!

I am pleased to announce that Page Saver 2.0.1 was released this week. Available in both Basic and Pro editions, Page Saver now includes a translation for Traditional Chinese. Thank you to Jia Heui for providing the translation.

We also fixed problems that sometimes occurred when capturing very large images. In Page Saver Pro the height of the header and footer (if enabled) was not taken into account when limiting the height of tall pages. Thank you to Tim for reporting and helping us reproduce this problem. We also modified the way both Page Saver Basic and Pro determine when a page is too wide and/or too tall to better match Firefox’s limitations.

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Page Saver 2.0 (Basic and Pro editions), which we released earlier this week.

The big news is that we added an option that allows you to capture Flash content (note that this requires both a fairly new version of the Flash Player and Firefox 3). Learn more.

For command line users, we addressed a long standing problem with pages that use <meta> refresh tags to quickly redirect to another page. Page Saver now waits up to 10 seconds for the next page to load; in Page Saver Pro, you can control that time by using the -saveoptions refreshmaxwait flag.

The third big feature is only for Page Saver Pro owners: after you select a region on a page, you can now move and resize the rectangular area before completing the capture. This makes it much easier to capture precisely what you want. View a video demonstration.

Once again, we would like to thank the translators from the Babelzilla community who make it possible for us to provide Page Saver Basic and Pro in 19 different languages (we added Simplified Chinese in version 2.0). For a few of the languages, we were unable to find someone to translate the newest text in time for the 2.0 release; if you can help, please join the Babelzilla community or contact us. New translations are also welcome.

Finally, one unadvertised feature of Page Saver 2.0 is compatibility with Firefox 3.1 Beta 1. We have not completed all of our testing against Firefox 3.1 (and it is a moving target), so please let us know if you encounter any problems.

Occasionally we receive email from someone who wants to remove or change the position of the Page Saver toolbar icon (for example, moving it to a different location on the navigation toolbar or moving it to another Firefox toolbar). It is not obvious to many people how to do this, so I thought I would write a short article that explains how to customize your Firefox toolbars.

From the View | Toolbars submenu, choose “Customize…” A toolbar customization dialog that shows all of the items you can add to one of the toolbars will be opened below the Firefox toolbars. With Firefox 3 on Mac I see a dialog that looks like this:

At this point, you can drag items out of the dialog to any location on a toolbar or you can drag items that are already on a toolbar to a different location or to another toolbar. To remove an item from a toolbar, simply drag it into the dialog. When you are finished, click the Done button.

That’s all there is to it! The only caveat is that some toolbars cannot be customized (but most can).

Some of the customizations I like to make are to add separators and spacers and to remove the Firefox search box (I define keywords so I can search directly from the location bar).

You can also read the official Mozilla documentation on toolbar customization.