New Screenshots Capability

Posted Mon, 08/31/2009 - 20:04 by ken

Crossbrowsertesting.com now has automated screenshots.

We know that other sites have screenshots too. What we feel is the "killer" feature is the linkage to a live testing session.

With our screenshots you can take a screenshot and then quickly click into a live session for that screenshot. That means if you run a set of tests and see from a screenshot there is a problem you are only one click away from being able to see that web site in a live test.

We think that this feature is a game changer. There are other websites with screenshots and there are sites that offer live testing, but no one is merging those concepts together. Once you see live testing you will wonder why you ever tested any other way.

Another neat feature of our screenshots is the ability to see the screenshots in two formats: windowed and full.

With windowed view you will see the screenshot and the browser just like you would if you were running the screenshot by hand. With full view you will see the entire screenshot. If the screenshot takes up more vertical space you will get a really long screenshot. We are still working on perfecting the long screenshot, but it is working fairly well.

Screenshots take from 30 seconds to 90 seconds each to process, depending on the length of the page and the platform it taken on. Our screenshots are just like the other sessions on crossbrowsertesting. That means that each time you launch you get a clean system. That does cost in terms of speed of rendering, but you are guaranteed privacy. Privacy is important to companies working on concepts which they do not want publicly exposed, and becomes very important as we head towards enterprise support for direct VPN connection to test internal sites.

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Comments

good work

by helloari - 09/09/2009 - 00:44

great work - kudos to all of you for coming this far. i, for one, was happy to sign up for some credits but found i never needed them since all my testing needs were so brief.

some feedback:
-free. free was nice and i wonder if offering a few minutes free each month to all those users would be a nice incentive to keep them coming back - make the site sticky. that way some will convert to paid accounts as their needs change. i think there is a huge market of casual users that you are already targeting with your low monthly price. but some users will be happy to turn their paid monthly accounts on and off as needs change.
-screenshots. great start but some bugs. connecting to flickr is a great idea but just did not work for me. making a slideshow is a nice idea but not as useful as allowing clients to browse a gallery of images clearly labeled. also, i often want to share a full test and not just a few images. so sharing by test not by image makes more sense. i like how litmus does it - the same interface i use i can expose to my clients.
-another thing i keep finding so useful from litmus is a bookmarklet that let me jump into a test of the page i'm viewing. slick. and once i take that test i can with 1 more click make it shared. very slick.

and congrats for using drupal it's great.

Thanks!

by ken - 09/09/2009 - 09:52

Thanks. The project was actually a little bigger than we scoped out - next time, we will try not to change hardware, web site, implement Drupal, and add major functionality (screenshots) - all at the same time! It has, however, put us in a great spot to add some new capabilities quickly in the future.

Great feedback - I will try to address all of it:

Free / our low monthly price. Thanks - we really did make an effort to hit a low price point for the casual users. Without it being free, it will never be priced low enough to please everybody, but we did break out of the industry norm pricing with the basic plan.

Screenshots / bugs. Thanks for pointing out the error with uploading photos via Flickr - this is fixed now. Sharing a full test makes a lot of sense - I could see us enabling you to publish a test result as a slideshow (in one click - you can do it now by selecting each photo).

Enabling a direct link to jump into a test - this is the second time in a week we have had heard this request. It should be easy - we will put it on our list.

Drupal - really interesting tool. We learned it inhouse - it had (still does have) a steep learning curve, but I love what it provides and the design choices behind it. Great product!