Show Me What's Wrong - a tool for helping with "computer issues" | Hacker News Reader

Show Me What's Wrong - a tool for helping with "computer issues"

showmewhatswrong.com

32 pointssabon19 comments

This is really nice. We are going to try it for hard-to-reproduce browser issues in one of our apps.

Feature request: Could you add some meta-data to the notification email with user-agent info? Would be nice to get browser, OS, screen res, js and flash support, and anything you can get about network properties (DSL, dial-up, hostname and location, etc).

Fog Creek Copilot (http://copilot.com/) one-ups this by allowing you to just fix the broken machine--and it's free on weekends. No, it's not perfect, and yes, Show Me What's Wrong and its ilk definitely have their place, but if it's just family and friends, why not cut out the frustrating reinterpretation of the screencast?

I'm not sure how you process a video "102%", seems like that might be a bug. Other than that seems like it could be pretty useful.

Really easy to use. I love it. Would be nice if you could choose custom URLs (instead of http://showmewhatswrong.com/submit/c6VbeeTi I could have http://showmewhatswrong.com/submit/reedlaw)

Would also be nice if you could white label it. So I could have showmewhatswrong.xyz.com

This counts as something that is so obvious that everyone is going to think "why didn't I make that?"

I just sent it to my team and we're going to try it. My only worry is that I have no data about the java install base size.

Otherwise, think of all the issues this solves!

Customer: I can't get on the site.

Me: What are you trying to do?

Customer: I want to get the log on!?

Me: OK. Did you go the the home page and click signup?

Customer: What?

Me: OK. Type in www.xyz.com

Customer: Oh, yeah, I did that.

Me: OK. What are you trying to do?

Customer: Etc

continue for 20 more e-mail exchanges

Me: OK. This looks like a new IE6 issue that we havne't run into before. Joy. We'll take a look and try to have it fixed within the next week.

This app would solve the above problem.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tech_support_cheat_sheet.png

This could easily be used to share development/design feedback with a team. One of the more frustrating limitations of working from home is the difficulty in showing a few someones a quick screen share. We've used iChat for this in the past, but it proved to be buggy and crash prone. This looks like it might fit the bill.

Nice. How about live streaming ? Often my "friends & family" simply get confused by some gui and the best way to help them starts by asking them to click on the 'tightvnc server' icon on their desktop.

www.copilot.com does this

Nice, but I didn't get: what software is used to record the screen?

Seems like a java app.

This is awesome! Does it work on Linux too?

Works on OSX, at least.

Nope. Blew up my KDE4 session.

Looks good.

The only thing is that I find I'm often solving "the internet is broken" issues these days, so there might be a circular problem there.

What about security implications? Can anyone view the uploaded recordings? Maybe an optional password protection will be cool.

How is it better than using zolved.com?

seems to me that you need to install some software to share your screen. that is much more complicated than what was showed in this screencast. since most people that need help with fixing a problem on their computer probably also would have trouble installing and using the zolved.com screen share utility this site is a vast improvement.

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