Pearl Wisdom

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.

Last week we released a new Firefox extension named Keyword Box (we also submitted it to the addons.mozilla.org site, but it will take some time for it to be made available to the general public from there). What is Keyword Box? Quoting from the Keyword Box product page:

Keyword Box is a free (no cost) extension for Mozilla Firefox that adds a toolbar item which invokes a script or URL with the text you enter. The script can be customized to your needs or you can use one of the sample scripts provided by the extension. Keyword Box includes the following sample scripts:

* Web Dev Lookup
Look up CSS properties, HTML tags, JavaScript functions or PHP functions (useful for web developers).

* Highlight Text
Highlight (and a yellow background) to each occurrence of a word or phrase on the currently loaded web page.

* Go to Mozilla Bug
View Mozilla bug reports including those for Firefox and Thunderbird.

* Weather
Get weather information for U.S. locations (useful for people who travel often.)

* Map
Show information from Google Maps.

The screenshot below shows Keyword Box in action. In this case, Keyword Box was configured with the Map sample script, so entering “mountain view, ca” in the keyword box and pressing enter caused a Google Maps page to load.

Why Use Keyword Box?
Keyword Box provides capabilities similar to bookmark keywords in Firefox. We created Keyword Box because some people prefer to have a specific text entry field that makes the availability of a shortcut more prominent.

Originally, this extension was requested by one of our clients. But we think many people will find a use for it. So try Keyword Box and then let us know what you think.

Ever since we released Page Saver Pro, people have been asking us how they can leverage its image capture features within their own in-house projects. The wait is over.

Earlier this week, we launched a new product named Page Saver Toolkit that allows web and Mozilla developers to use the page capture capabilities of Page Saver Pro. By placing a little bit of JavaScript code inside a web page, you can call the Page Saver Pro engine to save an image of a page to a local PNG file. Or save it to a local JPEG file. Or upload it to an FTP server. Or save the area occupied by a single DOM element on the page. In fact, the Toolkit API will let you access nearly all of the capabilities of Page Saver Pro.

We also provide an XPCOM interface which is callable from privileged code inside Firefox (typically, that means from within another extension).

I could go on and on but I know this kind of product is not for everyone. But for those of you who are doing things like writing automated quality assurance tests for an interactive web product or who want to go beyond the capabilities provided by Page Saver Pro’s command line interface, the Toolkit is the product for you. Plus, it is fun to use. Learn more on these pages:

• Page Saver Toolkit Overview.
• Documentation (includes sample code).

Please take a look and let us know what you think.

We are pleased to announce that Page Saver Basic and Pro 1.5 are now available.

Improvements to Page Saver Pro include the display of large cross hairs when selecting a region to capture and additional command line options (top, left, bottom, right, and scale).

Improvements to both editions include the display of “Welcome” and “What’s New” pages at start up, the capability to specify the browser window size on the command line, improved window height calculation, and improved command line error reporting.

We also added two new translations: Traditional Chinese and Ukranian. A big thank you to our friends at BabelZilla for their help.

The Page Saver documentation has been updated to describe the new features and to provide more command line examples.

As always, we like to hear from you. Make a comment here, or use our feedback form.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver is used in many different ways. We enjoy reading blog postings like this one from mitten that describe an interesting use of our software:

In working on the new blog design, I’d like to display some thumbnail pictures of various websites I frequent. There’s probably a dozen or so of these and they update their content frequently, so I’d like to change my thumbnails accordingly - maybe not in real time, but certainly weekly or maybe even daily. I started looking around on the web for a solution, and there just didn’t seem to be one in my grasp - either hardware platform or cost-wise.
…
I was already using Page Saver, a Firefox extension from the local web folks at Pearl Crescent. It’s a great tool for taking screen shots - you literally just click and you’re done. It has a bunch of options, including whether to save as jpg or png. I thought for a moment that I might just do that manually every day, but quickly thought better of it. However, if you pony up $15 for the Pro version, first off, you can save the thumbnails directly to an FTP server, and second, you can run it from the command line, which means you can automate the captures. Awesome! (Furthermore, you can specify an ElementID within a page if you only want that one part - double awesome!)

If you read her entire posting you will learn that you cannot save to an FTP server from the command line (maybe we should fix that, although there are many tools to automate that kind of thing). Many of our customers use Page Saver Pro from the command line, which is a great testimony to the flexibility of Firefox and to people’s creativity in finding useful ways to use small tools such as Page Saver.

And mitten — thanks for the great posting on Page Saver. Feel free to use the “Send Feedback…” option in the Page Saver menu to send us feature requests. We try to implement the most requested features.