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Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots
- TOP-HACKER 4y ago[flagged]
- breck 4y agoThis is so clever. Love it. Would love a version that just runs locally without sending things to the cloud.
- pphysch 4y ago<iframe>?
- jszymborski 4y agoThe nice thing about this approach, to my mind, is that it can turn interactive interfaces and make them "read-only". It also seems like a pretty safe way to send data from behind your firewall.
- andrewmunsell 4y agoThe Arc browser has something like this with their Capture + Easels feature (example of this post: https://arc.net/e/A6D1FE0C-063A-4500-8D19-46581D16181E https://arc.net/e/A6D1FE0C-063A-4500-8D19-46581D16181E), and it supposedly does update. Truth be told, I have no clue how the live-updating feature works when I share an Easel but it does capture the page as I see it Edit: It does change on my local "Easel" almost instantly with my reply, but we'll see if that screenshot updates for others. A little experiment, I guess.
- nickphx 4y agoThat's great and all but it seems one can not easily download the 'arc' browser.. Arc wants contact information to join a 'wait list'.. ?
- marktani 4y agowhat's an Easel?
- andrewmunsell 4y agoIt's their term for a board you can add shapes and captures of webpages to, and you can share it. Might be good for building a personal dashboard composed of multiple monitoring services
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoI’ve long seen a need for this, brilliant.
- themanmaran 4y agoThis is great. I've had to engineer this feature once before (updating an image status tag on Github issues), and was surprised it was so hard to find resources to solve that problem.
- babelfish 4y agoVery cool. How does Plus handle updating screenshots taken on authenticated pages once that authentication has expired?
- joegahona 4y agoThis is covered in the documentation. You have to log back in, and Plus prompts you. Hence it's discouraged for sites that log you out a lot, like financial sites.
- remixz 4y ago(I'm an EM at Plus) It's a bit complex, and not quite perfect, but I'm pretty happy with what we've done so far. The first method is by looking at the HTTP status codes. Since we're running a full browser on our side, we can tell if the status codes that returned are different than the initial capture. We also have been training an image classification model on pictures of log-in screens — this has worked surprisingly well, honestly. We've started expanding it to other types of "incorrect" screenshot scenarios as well, like loading screens, and we're seeing some cool early results.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chairhairair 4y agoWhy would running a full browser be relevant to knowing HTTP statuses of requests?
- remixz 4y agoOur product works by taking a screenshot using a headless Chrome instance. In this case, it's helpful because we can look at not just the status code of the HTTP request to the page itself, but also any resources the page may fetch. This is particularly useful for SPAs, since they may return a 200 for the page itself, but an API call they make might return a non-200 when logged out.
- 4y ago
- lancesells 4y agoReally interesting tool and not even quite sure how the technology works. It's opening it's own browser window (hidden) and capturing the same x/y pixels? Pretty clever. Also, does anyone know what this new design trend is called? The bordered / minimal-but-not look?
- efnx 4y agoIt feels like a call back to 90s print, like the magazines I remember as a kid. 3-2-1 contact and the like.
- chaboud 4y agoThis seems like a spectacular way to break permissions restrictions and escape data to non-authorized entities. If it's successful, it's the sort of thing that will be brutally blocked by IT all over the place. Very slick, though.
- jszymborski 4y agoIs it all that much more a risk than taking a screenshot, putting it on cloud storage like OneDrive/GDrive, and sharing with a "anyone who has the link" permission? B/c I feel like that is super common and kind of impossible to stop with a permissions approach.
- ceejayoz 4y agoYes? When you take a screenshot, its contents are known and fixed. When you regularly and automatically refresh a screenshot of a particular x/y coordinate part of a specific screen on a website, what happens when "positive customer interactions" gets moved, and "internal notes on this customer, not for sharing with them" gets put in that spot?
- marktolson 4y agoPerhaps they can make it so that the element's XPath / node id is stored and used for capture rather than X + Y coordinates. Still prone to failure I know, but ultimately more reliable.
- croes 4y agoOne manually taken screenshot vs dozens of screenshot taken automatically
- graypegg 4y agoThat screenshot possibly becomes outdated the second after it’s snapped. This seems to be able to store session data from the user that took the screenshot, and will happily allow anyone access to view it. The example video shows him taking a screenshot of an Amplitude dashboard using a browser plug-in. Thinking about how that’s possible, it must be skimming the session cookie off the browser, and using it to request the same page on Plus’s side to generate an image. You can imagine how that might be compromising. Edit: you log in within the plus web app itself, which feels a little better. Still no totally secure way to do this but seems really useful.
- remixz 4y agoHey, I helped build this! Thanks for submitting this. I'm an engineering manager at Plus — would be happy to answer anyone's questions about our product. You can also shoot me an email at zach(at)plusdocs.com if you'd like to hear more about what we're up to.
- koalalorenzo 4y agoMinor thing: I can't watch the video because of the tracking system and my adblock. but cool project!
- remixz 4y agoI'll flag this to our designer. Thank you!
- ddalex 4y agoAny Googlers in the team ?
- remixz 4y agoNo Googlers, but we do have some ex-Meta and ex-Microsoft! https://www.plusdocs.com/company https://www.plusdocs.com/company
- sippeangelo 4y agoThe landing page seems very focused on the “dashboard” use case for Plus, but the domain (plusdocs.com) sounds to me like it was originally intended to keep product screenshots in documentation updated. Was there a pivot? Is it still suitable for that use case?
- jacooper 4y agoI want to use something like this to automatically detect visual breakage after auto updates for WordPress, discourse etc. Is there such a product? Preferably Open source
- netcraft 4y agosomething like https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/ might fit your needs.
- adieuadieu 4y agoSpecifically writing some tests with the "Visual comparisons" feature might work. https://playwright.dev/docs/test-snapshots https://playwright.dev/docs/test-snapshots
- artur_makly 4y agoLots of our customers use https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com just for that. It's great for also keeping track of Competitors/Markets, besides internal QA.
- arikr 4y agoInsanely cool. Nice work to the team!
- joegahona 4y agoThe most important page is a bit buried -- https://www.plusdocs.com/pricing https://www.plusdocs.com/pricing Free to use for now.
- dsmmcken 4y agoNice. I've been thinking about going the more complicated route of building a screenshot pipeline for our docusaurus based docs. I am currently considering building something that would allow you to embed a ```playwright code block into your markdown, containing a playwright test with the expected output, and then at build time it would execute the tests and replace the code blocks with the images. Anyone do something similar?
- tuukkah 4y agoThis is similar for Jupyter + Robot Framework + Selenium: https://marketsquare.github.io/robotframework-seleniumscreenshots/ https://marketsquare.github.io/robotframework-seleniumscreen...
- gizmo 4y agoThis seems cool at first glance... but will users understand that this tool basically hijacks your user session to refresh the screenshots? In other words, this tool can only update a google analytics chart if you give it access to your gmail? That's scary. It also circumvents 2fa, because sessions are leaked to Plus after you've used your TOTP code or Yubi key. How can any business be OK with this??
- rejectfinite 4y ago[dead]
- interroboink 4y ago> How can any business be OK with this?? First step is probably "don't look too closely" (: I agree though — I would not want this thing doing who-knows-what-unverifiable-fiddling with my data and credentials.
- city17 4y agoThis seems identical to the live screenshots you can add to an easel in the Arc browser [1]. I've created a view with that that shows a collection of different analytics sites, that all update automatically. Only downside is that occasionally you have to login to keep those views up to date. [1] https://youtu.be/ukquBSOpmTk?t=290 https://youtu.be/ukquBSOpmTk?t=290
- ayewo 4y agoCame here to say the same thing. The easel feature in Arc can do this. Arc browser https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/
- jawns 4y agoI worked for a personalization vendor a few years ago and was on an engineering team that built a feature like this. It was ... a major headache, and I don't think anyone was ever completely comfortable with the security implications. So I wish the team good luck, and especially with issues like: * A/B testing. How can you ensure that what your clients are seeing is the same thing you are seeing? Maybe you've been assigned to different A/B groups. * Extensions. What if your clients are using Chrome extensions that affect how the page is rendered? How can you replicate that? * Networking/auth issues. What do you render if you're unable to connect or log in?
- ganoushoreilly 4y agoI had the same thought, It's a novel idea but the security / practicality of it all is a nightmare to think about.
- Guillaume86 4y agoTangentially related question, what are the most successful products built around browser extensions? I sometime have ideas that would require browser extensions, but it feels like the target market must be computer literate for any chance or success (no mobile support for example).
- rejectfinite 4y agoThere seem to be a lot of those chrome video recording/school ones, like Loom. Seems like a lot of schools use it to record lessons. Being on Chromebooks I would think they are used to installing extensions, if allowed! Usually that is on a whitelist basis. Do not know how much money it brings in though.
- wongarsu 4y agoIt depends on your definition of success, but the list is bound to include Adblock, Grammarly, Honey and some password manager. And at least Grammarly and Honey are not specifically targeted at computer literate people.
- vood 4y ago
- cphoover 4y agoAny plans to actually scrape the data instead of just the images? Having the actual data saved in a tabular format would really make this a killer product... You could probably do this by finding the elements within your selection and parsing the rendered HTML. Images are great but for doing anything more complex than just viewing charts scraping the data would be a huge plus
- yigitkonur35 4y agoYes. This is what we need too
- ed_mercer 4y agoWhat’s your usecase? Can you define “more complex”?
- cphoover 4y agoSay I want to plug historical data into a predictive model? Or a probably another common potential use-case... I want to create an alert if a value is above/below a certain threshold.
- yigitkonur35 4y agoThe idea is great, but what about security? When you get the user's cookie and session information (basically you're taking a snapshot of the browser and reproducing it at your end), you can do anything with it. What if someone uses it to take a screenshot of their bank account? (probably not possible due to two-factor authentication)
- eigenvalue 4y agoThis functionality reminds me a networked version of an obscure (but sometimes useful) Excel feature, the "Camera Tool": https://trumpexcel.com/excel-camera-tool/ https://trumpexcel.com/excel-camera-tool/ Basically, it lets you select a range on a worksheet, and then shows a live updating picture of that range in a new region (possibly in a different sheet). Why is that useful? Well, the range can contain charts in addition to just cells with data. It can be handy to have the charts actually defined in the sheet where the data is stored, so that let you do this while still displaying the chart in the sheet where you want to show it.
- imranq 4y agoAwesome work! I think there should be a version that also refreshes screenshots of DOM elements specifically not just pixels - for example you might want to see how a thumbnail of a video changes over time from a rapidly changing page
- remixz 4y agoThank you! We actually do have the functionality you're mentioning. We call it "Smart capture": https://guide.plusdocs.com/snapshots-and-pages/snapshots/sites-with-smart-capture https://guide.plusdocs.com/snapshots-and-pages/snapshots/sit... Right now, we've only enabled it on sites where it works well, but we're hoping to bring it to more sites soon.
- Birkeholm 4y agoThis is pretty cool. It’s more or less a feature that is baked into the Arc browser, except in Arc you take snapshots of html elements instead of selecting an area of the screen.
- DandyDev 4y agoThis looks really cool and clever. I do have a question about security though. The FAQ states: > Today, we encrypt all sensitive data on your computer before it is sent to our servers, your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our employees do not have access to the private key to decrypt sensitive data. I wonder how this works. I assume Plus works by storing the cookies present in the user's browser so that it can inject those cookies in a headless browser to take a Snapshot. In order to do that, it would need to decrypt the cookie (if it was encrypted in the first place, which the FAQ seems to suggest). For that, the headless process needs the encryption key. That would mean that employees can also access that encryption key. What am I missing here?
- nmjohn 4y agoI assume they mean by default, employees do not have access to the KMS key necessary to decrypt the sensitive data. (They mention using an individual KMS key per customer) I suspect there must be a handful of SREs who, who could access it if they really wanted to - though that access would still be logged in cloudtrail.
- remixz 4y agoYou've got it right! The KMS keys used to encrypt sensitive data are generated per customer, and the majority of our engineering team cannot access any sensitive production data at all. In theory, it would only be the select team members with privileged access that could access it, but as you mentioned, it would be logged in CloudTrail. We also have GuardDuty enabled, and it would likely alert on anomalous activity. Personally, I think we could do a better job explaining our security model in our FAQ. I'll bring it up with the team.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago> Our employees do not have access to the private key to decrypt sensitive data. So this is literally a lie?
- kreas 4y agoThis is sick! Thank you
- hecticjeff 4y agoSounds a lot like Simon Willison's open source project shot-scraper https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper
- gidis_ 4y agoSo this is just URL or bookmark with a screenshot as a thumbnail.
- Graffur 4y agoThis is like doing integration the wrong way.
- dandellion 4y agoA video with no volume slider, really?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rejectfinite 4y agoDespite my comments, the tool looks VERY cool and useful.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- djxfade 4y agoReminds me of the WebClips feature from Safari that Apple killed
- shazar 4y agoCongrats on the launch! Was it an intention to make the design similar to https://gumroad.com/ https://gumroad.com/? Or am I the only one seeing an uncanny resemblance?
- KomoD 4y agoI agree, looks a lot like Gumroad
- flailwielder 4y ago(I'm a designer at Plus) It wasn't our intention to look specifically like Gumroad, but some of the visual patterns are definitely similar. This aesthetic is making the rounds right now: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-neubrutalism-or-neo-brutalism-ui-design-trend-641714825fed https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-neubrutalism-or-neo-brutali... We were looking for something that felt approachable and fun, magical but not mysterious. After trying a bunch of different things, this is where we landed.
- burkaman 4y agoThey look very different to me. Maybe a similar-ish color palette is what you're seeing?
- sam0x17 4y agoThis could get pretty funny on days when the numbers go really badly lol
- J-H 4y agoCool tool! Just a suggestion - building something like this for Zendesk (or any help center) would be an absolute game-changer!
- ctvo 4y agoLove the idea. Execution is tricky like others mentioned, but this is one of those slap forehead ideas on how simple and game changing it is if you can pull it off.
- gondo 4y agoI created an iOS app for "self-updating" widgets [1] based on the same principle: However with each version, Apple is killing the original, today's widget this app needs. [1] https://wowidget.github.io/ https://wowidget.github.io/
- bojanbabic 4y agoI'm wondering if you can automatically extract image features using AI?
- qwertox 4y agoA word of warning: The video is LOUD and has no mute button or volume slider.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sirjaz 4y agoAs I have mentioned on other posts. Things like this need to be native apps, and not just a chrome extension or a web app. We need to get away from webapps for everything, and go back to native apps. Heck why do we have package tools then?
- deskamess 4y agoI was looking for something like this but for the Windows platform (not browser). The built-in snipping tool is great but I wanted a quicker way to take images. I tried looking up if right-click drag on the Windows desktop could be used to take a snap of the area (via some mouse-action binding). All I could find was that the action was bound to Windows Explorer copy/move semantics.
- winrid 4y agoThis is actually how the FastComments docs works. I did it because I hate taking screenshots. https://github.com/FastComments/fastcomments-docs/blob/main/src/content/guides/customizations-and-configuration/items/absolute-dates.md https://github.com/FastComments/fastcomments-docs/blob/main/...
- chevman 4y agoFor something enterprise scale, check out Tea Leaf. IBM ran the product for a while, I think now Acoustic has it. Many large F500 use this or other similar products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tealeaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tealeaf
- KomoD 4y agoThis is not remotely close to "Plus"
- XCSme 4y agoThe idea is really cool, but implementation seems hard to get right. Apart from the security issues mentioned by others (related to storing user auth/session data), what happens if there's an update to the website/application where the screenshot is being taken from? Or if they add an announcement banner at the top, all content will be displaced.
- joegahona 4y agoI was thinking through similar scenarios. I think there will be tons of fringe cases that this won’t work well with, but for the core use cases (Google Analytics, Amplitude, etc.) it will work more predictably. An analytics tool should have minimal announcements, pop-ups, A/B tests, etc. This isn’t the right tool for perpetually updating screenshots of a specific region of CNN’s homepage.
- XCSme 4y agoWait, I tried this, but there is now way to simply get a link to the image to use it in an IMG tag?
- XCSme 4y agoIt also says that I am "logged out" for a screenshot on a landing page where there is no login needed: https://i.snipboard.io/5INswy.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/5INswy.jpg
- werber 4y agoThis product looks great, but I can’t get over how fresh the design of the landing page is. Great work
- robertlagrant 4y agoI was hoping this would autoupdate user documentation based on the latest version of my app.