My blog has been moved to ariya.ofilabs.com.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

capture the idea, before it is long gone

Using WebKit, it is quite trivial to create a tool that grabs the contents of a web page and then saves everything as an image. Together with the new full page zoom feature, we can have the zoomed in or zoomed out version of the page, even at different viewport sizes (which may simulate different screen resolutions). In fact, that is what I describe in Qt Labs on the topic of Capturing web pages.

Just imagine you can have that small utility and you can run something like (web address, zoom factor in percent, output filename, optionally also the viewport width):

webcapture www.trolltech.com 50 trolltech.png

what would you do then?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't that exacly what CutyCapt does?

http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/

Ariya Hidayat said...

@Olivier: CutyCapt does not use full-page zoom (yet).

Kraplax said...

Hm.. Interesting idea. There're some similar utilities, but i doubt they have that zooming feature.
About the usage:
1) bookmarks with screenshots
2) maybe semantic search results now could show us the screenshot of the page (from point 1)
3) integrate such a tool into "quanta plus" if it will ever be released for Qt4.

maybe more. can't really think out any for now, though.

Anonymous said...

I would drop information and abuse storage size this way. ;)

Rather than a dump as an image, I would like to have a dom document which represents that part of the original, then save it as (x)html.

So I can zoom the "snapshot" even afterwards :) And do all other things, like copy texts, have metadata extracted I did not think of before, change colors, yadayada. :)

Kraplax said...

i don't actually get it - why not just save the page with default browser's "Save as..."? You'll have the page, you'll be able to zoom out/in, you'll have some sorts of metadata - what's the point of this tool, then?

Anonymous said...

There is a search engine which gives thumbnails of the results (can't recall its name), good to see if it is a porn site or a unzip's tutorial :p

Anonymous said...

Such a search engine could be Exalead (http://www.exalead.fr)

There is also some webservices for such thumbnailing, like ArtViper's (http://www.artviper.net/website-thumbnails.php)

Anonymous said...

Exalead is probably the BEST search engine on the web today. I think that this will become common knowledge very soon. Additionally, they offer superior information access/search solutions for the enterprise- and they scale BIGTIME on less hardware than any of the legacy players out there!!!!