Pearl Wisdom

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.

Yesterday I talked about the frame capture improvements included in Page Saver 1.6. In this posting I describe the other enhancements we made for the 1.6 release.

Page Saver Pro customers receive a frequently requested enhancement: from the command line, the -saveas flag now accepts an ftp://, http://, or https:// URL to allow you to upload a captured image to a server. On Windows and Mac OS, you can also use -saveas clipboard to place a copy of an image captured from the command line on the system clipboard. For more information, refer to the Page Saver documentation.

Other improvements we made to the Basic and Pro editions of Page Saver 1.6 include:

• Added fine-grained options to control exactly which Page Saver menu items appear in the browser context menu.
• Page Saver is now compatible with Firefox 3.0a8.
• When constructing file names, Page Saver now replaces the forward slash (/), back slash (\), and colon (:) characters with a hyphen character (instead of removing them).
• Added Turkish translation.
• Fixed a problem where Page Saver would sometimes show the PageSaver:CaptureComplete status message more than once for the same command-line capture.
• Fixed a problem on Linux that prevented pages taller than 32,766 pixels from being saved.

We also released an update to our developer product, The Page Saver Toolkit. Version 1.1 includes Firefox 3.0a8 compatibility and the capability to save to any server by specifying an URL in the capture API calls.

To upgrade your copy of Page Saver Basic, Pro, or Toolbox, use the Firefox Tools menu to open the Add-ons window and then click “Find Updates” on the Extensions panel.

Do you have a question for us? Please make a comment here, or contact us through our feedback form.

One of the frequently asked questions about Page Saver is why the entire page is not captured even when the “Save Image of Entire Page” command is used. In almost every case, the reason is that the page uses frames (through HTML frame or iframe elements). Only the visible portion of each frame on the page is captured because that is the only portion that Firefox shows within the browser window (pages that contain frames often have scrollbars along the right hand side just like tall web pages, but the scrollbar is for the frame rather than for the page).

I am pleased to announce that one of the major enhancements we made in Page Saver 1.6 (available now) is the capability to easily capture the entire contents of a frame. To do so, choose the frame from the Save Image of Entire Frame menu within the Page Saver toolbar menu (as shown in the screenshot below), or use the Save Image of This Entire Frame… browser context menu item.

To upgrade your copy of Page Saver Basic or Pro, use the Firefox Tools menu to open the Add-ons window and then click “Find Updates” on the Extensions panel.

Many of you have sent us feedback about our products, especially about Page Saver (which is very popular).

This week in particular we received many messages which made us smile. Here are some samples:

“Great product guys! love it. really useful.”

“I don’t know what to say other than IT IS SUPER! This is what I needed! You are great!”

“Awesome extension guys, the best of the screen-grabbing plug ins that I’ve seen (and I’ve just turned the internet upside down looking for a good one).”

And it is always nice to see blog postings like this one:

“Pearl Crescent Page Saver makes taking screenshots of websites a breeze….”

Of course we know we still have more work to do. So please contact us and let us know what we can do for you.