Pearl Wisdom

We receive a lot of email feedback about Page Saver. Occasionally people send us feedback but use an email address that doesn’t allow us to reply to them. One such message arrived this morning, and I decided to respond here.

I love this thingie, it’s great! Just wanted to let you know.

Greetings from Europe,
Bettina

Hi Bettina. Thanks for the feedback. We love to hear from our customers. Please let us know if there are any features you’d like added to a future version of Page Saver.

– Kathleen Brade
– Pearl Crescent, LLC

As I write this, I am immersed in CodeMash 2007, a two day conference for software developers. From the conference web site:

CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices, methodologies and technology trends in variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP.

There are plenty of Python fans here as well, and newer solutions like Adobe’s Flex are also on the agenda. There is a lot of talk about frameworks such as Atlas, TurboGears, and Rails. The speakers range from well known people such as Bruce Eckel to people I have never heard of (who are also doing interesting work). In short, there is something for everyone who is a software developer or who aspires to be one.

One of the cool things about CodeMash is that the conference is entirely organized by a group of volunteers who see the value in “cross pollination” among software developers who are working in different areas. None of the organizers will make any money from this conference either. And while there is a full schedule of technical talks, there is also a participant-organized Open Space track taking place in the corridors and in, well, other open spaces. Yesterday afternoon I attended a TurboGears/Flex Widget open space coding session instead of a traditional session. It was fast-paced, fun, and informative.

Every conference has a prevailing culture. At CodeMash, the culture is very relaxed and open. The content as well as the attendees are very technical. Don’t like the session you are in? Use your two feet to move somewhere else. Oops — that reminds me: it is time to get up and go to the next session!

Today we released Page Saver 1.4 (available now in Basic and Pro editions). The most visible change is an updated options window. All of the interesting capabilities such as the file name pattern that we added to the 1.3 release are now available from the options window.

Page Saver Pro Options — Image Capture Tab

Other new features present in both editions include:

• An option to save images in JPEG format (many of you have asked for this).
• A Dutch (nl-NL) translation.

Pro edition customers also get:

• Capability to capture a specific page element from the command line (-saveoptions element=id).
• A corresponding %i character sequence that may be used in the file name pattern to include the element ID in the name.

For details on these new features, please refer to the Page Saver documentation.

Thanks to our customers and friends, 2006 has been an exciting year for us. I would also like to thank the volunteer translators at BabelZilla who have contributed translations of Page Saver.

Best wishes to everyone for a peaceful and prosperous 2007!

Later this month we are planning to make a new release of Page Saver. This new release of Page Saver, when run in Firefox 2, will let you control whether transparency information (also known as the alpha channel) is included in saved PNG images. You will be able to control this from the options window as well as the command line. If you choose to include transparency information, PNG images will be saved in RGBA format; otherwise the format will be RGB.

In previous versions, Page Saver always included a transparency layer but the images did not include any transparent areas. In the new release we plan to exclude the transparency layer by default which will reduce the size of the files produced. Please let us know if omitting the transparency information will cause any problems for you.

The Pro edition of Page Saver 1.3 includes a useful (and fun) new feature: the capability to select and capture an image of a region on the page. To see this feature in action, view a video demonstration.

To begin a region-based capture, press and hold the control key (the command key on Mac OS) while you click on the Page Saver Pro toolbar item. The contents of the browser window will dim slightly and the mouse pointer will change to a crosshair. Click and drag a diagonal path to highlight the rectangular area you want to capture. When you release the mouse button, an image of the region you selected will be saved to a local file, copied to the clipboard, or published to a server. To cancel a region-based capture, press the escape key before you release the mouse button.

You can also set hidden preferences to trigger a region-based capture by default and to create a keyboard shortcut. Learn more by reading the Page Saver documentation.

In the future, we plan to add a “Save Image of Region You Select” item to the various Page Saver Pro menus and to expose the hidden preferences in the options window. Please tell us what other enhancements you would like us to make.