

Show HN: Computer vision to track and notify website changes - sthambyah
http://www.obvious.io/

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notduncansmith
Please don't hijack scroll behavior, ever. Effects that happen on scroll are
one thing - but actually interfering with my ability to navigate the site via
scroll is unacceptable.

As an aside, can anyone shed some light on the value generated by this
behavior? Surely there's a good reason that I'm missing, because otherwise
this is a scourge upon the web.

~~~
sthambyah
Thanks for the feedback. We do have scroll effects, but aren't intentionally
trying to hijack the scroll behaviour. Are you able to provide some more info
eg, browser/os - if you could provide any screenshots to me, that would be
super useful: shaun@obvious.io

~~~
notduncansmith
Sure, it happens for me both on OS X 10.10 (Chrome) and Windows 8.1 (Chrome).
It looks like you might be picking up the scroll event and then using that to
scroll smoothly, rather than letting the browser actually scroll. The
experience on my Macbook is that I sort of "swing" from one place to the next,
rather than gliding like I usually do. On Windows (using a scroll wheel), I
notice that the scroll is more of a glide, as opposed to the natural "jumpy"
scrolling I experience with the scroll wheel.

It could be the case that the Macbook, being much more sensitive to scroll, is
exaggerating the smoothing effect, causing the "swing".

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Selfcommit
Just a heads up - The Regex on the cell phone Number verification was so bad I
couldn't create an account. I tried every possible method of entering my
number.. couldn't get past the form.

Maybe sometimes you need more than a visual check =)

~~~
cpcarey
I ran into the same problem, then found that the phone number wasn't required
to make an account.

~~~
sthambyah
Thanks very much, yes it's optional, but validated - very confusing, we'll
drop out the hard validation and make it a little more intuitive to enter a
number

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tylermauthe
How does this compare to Huxley
([https://github.com/facebook/huxley](https://github.com/facebook/huxley)) ?

~~~
sthambyah
Huxley is a great tool for testing. I think there is a big problem to solve
around visual regression testing (I also think visual "unit testing" could be
an interesting concept).

Obvious.io is focused on website monitoring, if you think about New Relic
monitoring your backend and perhaps Pingdom monitoring your webserver, then
Obvious.io is about the customer - does your website look like it should for
them? And does it look right consistently over time.

On a side note though, we do have an API in the works so technically if you
wanted to plug obvious.io into your CI pipeline, you could do that quite
easily. E.g. you want to check that your release into prod is visually the
same as the one that's currently in UAT.

~~~
tylermauthe
Very cool. I suppose Huxley could be scheduled to run repeatedly to keep
track, but then you'd have to build a whole monitoring system.

I'll definitely look into this tool, thanks.

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ctb9
Good idea and nice design.

1\. I'd prefer to see monthly pricing.

2\. I found the scroll behavior to be quite jarring.

Good luck.

~~~
sthambyah
Thanks very much! We started originally with monthly pricing but decided to
experiment with per check pricing. I'd be keen for any feedback on what the
subscription price should be and how many monthly checks should be included in
that.

Thanks for the feedback around the scrolling - I assume this is on the content
site? Can I ask what browser/os this occurs on?

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eglover
This would be super amazing if it crawled entire sites.

~~~
sthambyah
Thanks for the feedback. This features us actually in testing right now and
should be released shortly. The plan is to spider the site at a less frequent
interval (say, once a day), and aggregate everything that's changes across all
pages in a nice report. The hypothesis is that this would be useful for people
with large content based sites and CMS's.

~~~
chatmasta
I think you're targeting the wrong use case. Sure, some people will want to
monitor their own sites for breaking changes. But I assume far more people
want to monitor multiple (as in dozens, hundreds) of other websites looking
for changes. Think price changes, etc.

In fact I had to implement a similar system before any of these nice
technologies existed. I was working at a small company in Texas that managed
your electricity bill for you in the complicated and deregulated Texas utility
market. When I got there, they were manually checking ~100 different utility
websites for price changes once a week. When I left, thanks to a system like
this, they spent 20 minutes a day manually inputting the price change only on
the plans that the system alerted them had changed.

~~~
richardbrevig
Agreed. This is the first system that checks websites I've seen that isn't
focusing on competitive intelligence. Maybe that's their idea, is that they're
going to a different market. I'll be interested to see this progress, whether
they maintain or pivot. However, a service like this that charges per check,
and allows API access...and allows you to check multiple/unlimited
pages/sites...very powerful in competitive intelligence.

