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I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could ge

I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time. I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware update or something so a manual power cycle was in order. I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to use them "seriously".

vog 17y ago
WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform. Or did I miss something?
- blasdel 17y ago
  The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype. If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    Yep, that's exactly it. Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Undoubtedly it was I who missed something! It just came down to "well, I have a working script right here for mac, or I can spend the next days/weeks/maybe never trying to get it working and looking nice on linux". I guess people don't hear "we went with the mac to save money" too often but in this case, that's what it was. But even so - I generally don't much like linux's font rendering. Doing it on mac meant that the images looked beautiful, basically exactly like Safari, which was to the client's (and my) taste.
petercooper 17y ago
I'm probably going to rig up a colocated Mac Mini to do exactly the same thing. I asked around on Twitter if other people were interested in chipping in to share the service and people were keen. There's a business opportunity here. The existing screenshot services are mostly slow (I want my imgs within a minute, ideally - not 10+), hideous quality or use browsers on operating systems with shoddy rendering. As it is, I think I can max out a Mac Mini to producing around 500-700k screenshots a day and lease a Mac Mini with the required hosting for ~$130 a month, so the costs divide down quite nicely.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  There's a business opportunity here. You reckon? I have to admit I didn't even think of that. I wouldn't have thought people would pay for screenshots, but then again I didn't think people would pay to send emails, either. This was part of a value added service, sadly it never really got off the ground. Shall I send you an email telling you more about what was envisaged? Maybe we can cooperate.

vog 17y ago

WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform. Or did I miss something?

blasdel 17y ago
The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype. If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Yep, that's exactly it. Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
sailormoon 17y ago
Undoubtedly it was I who missed something! It just came down to "well, I have a working script right here for mac, or I can spend the next days/weeks/maybe never trying to get it working and looking nice on linux". I guess people don't hear "we went with the mac to save money" too often but in this case, that's what it was. But even so - I generally don't much like linux's font rendering. Doing it on mac meant that the images looked beautiful, basically exactly like Safari, which was to the client's (and my) taste.

petercooper 17y ago

I'm probably going to rig up a colocated Mac Mini to do exactly the same thing. I asked around on Twitter if other people were interested in chipping in to share the service and people were keen. There's a business opportunity here. The existing screenshot services are mostly slow (I want my imgs within a minute, ideally - not 10+), hideous quality or use browsers on operating systems with shoddy rendering. As it is, I think I can max out a Mac Mini to producing around 500-700k screenshots a day and lease a Mac Mini with the required hosting for ~$130 a month, so the costs divide down quite nicely.

sailormoon 17y ago
There's a business opportunity here. You reckon? I have to admit I didn't even think of that. I wouldn't have thought people would pay for screenshots, but then again I didn't think people would pay to send emails, either. This was part of a value added service, sadly it never really got off the ground. Shall I send you an email telling you more about what was envisaged? Maybe we can cooperate.