I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service

jooplicate.com

18 pointsandrewdavey18 comments

That's cool, I wasn't sure if I'd get HTML or an image, I guess HTML makes sense, but could get big for large app with scripts (although I'm guessing you strip those out.)

Did you consider using canvas, which I think can get image data from the current page? Obviously less supported, but might help people with browser bugs that are harder to reproduce, even with the HTML.

Yes, scripts are removed.

I will need to have a closer look at the canvas API and see what actually works across different browsers. It could well be a simpler way to generate images - even if IE6/7/8 will miss out.

Thanks.

Speaking of canvas, can you grab canvas/svg content embedded in the page?

I'm not capturing canvas content yet. It should be possible - but I'll need to look into it.

SVG content appears in the DOM so should be captured.

very cool, worked exactly as expected.

great landing page and demo, value proposition is very clear and the demo works exactly as expected.

thoughts:

1. that title bar takes up a LOT of valuable screen real estate, pushing some of informative content below the fold -- don't need quite as much title space

2. draw more attention to the "demo" links. Its easy to miss the link as is. The demo is great, takes 2 seconds only, and was very convincing. You should want EVERYONE who makes it to the landing page to convert to a demo.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad you like the site. I'll chat with my designer about alternative header designers. Drawing much more attention to the demo is a great idea. I'll see what I can do :)

I'm the developer behind Jooplicate. If you have any questions please let me know. Thanks!

That's great--how do you do the snapshotting in pure Javascript? (If that's your secret sauce, fair 'nuff, but any hints would be appreciated.)

Edit: Oh, wait, it's just HTML you're sending--I see. You're not capturing a screenshot.

Yes, for now it's HTML, which is better than nothing. My plan for the future is to pass the HTML to a server-side browser renderer (using the user agent captured in the snapshot). So then you'll get a JPEG as well.

Do you know how http://www.snapengage.com/ takes screenshots? I'm not sure if it's HTML or an actual image, but it might be work looking into.

I hadn't see that site before - I'll have a look into it. Thanks!

Interesting. It looks like it depends on Flash to take that screenshot.

Great idea and nicely presented... but can't help but think that I could whip this up with jquery in under an hour?

I'm trying to keep things simple for this initial version and iterate based on feedback. Jooplicate is doing some tricky stuff in the background. For example, it's working cross-domain and sanitizing the HTML.

Is there a future plan to maybe provide an option to pay for the ability to host the jooplicate service on our own machines?

I work for a university that still is very hesitant on using cloud services, because they don't want student data going outside our machines.

I can certainly look at offering a privately-hostable version eventually. It's running on a typical asp.net stack, so shouldn't be too hard to install elsewhere.

I'm currently focused on getting the public service out there, but if you're keen to get Jooplicate running locally please drop me an email andrew@equin.co.uk . It would be useful to know what kind of requirements you have.

Thanks.

How can you garantee that you won't show any private information? Suppose the user was filling a contact form with some private info that he wouldn't like you to see, do you strip this out? What about password fields? You might want to get an option asking the user if he allows the screenshot to be sent... Other than this, the only thing would be the afforementioned jpeg screenshot. Great job.

I can see privacy being a issue. I think at least I will need to add a message to the form to inform the user. Having a checkbox to enable/disable the snapshot may be a useful option too. So then the user can still send a message, but without the snapshot.

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