

Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site - agurha
https://urlbox.io

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bpatrianakos
This is a great idea. I was actually working on something similar yesterday!
The beauty of this is that it has so many uses! I think all the haters need to
chill and think about this for a minute. Yeah, it's probably a wrapper around
webkit2png but outside of HN people...

1\. Don't know how to use the terminal

2\. Can't install webkit2png themselves (there are _a lot_ of things that can
go wrong - just ask me because they all went wrong for me yesterday.
Everything from QT4 libs missing to $DISPLAY not being set, to the PIP package
not installing correctly, to X-server connection problems)

3\. Even if they had webkit2png they wouldn't know how to write a wrapper that
took a damn screen shot, _then_ resized it as a thumbnail, _and_ changes the
screen size so you can see a preview for multiple devices.

4\. Don't have a Linux (or even POSIX compliant) machine locally or hosted
somewhere.

This may seem simple here (well, to me it's more intermediate) but outside HN
people will probably go nuts over this. Shameless sorta plug: I just started a
project yesterday that does a very similar thing except it's meant for
designers to take and store screenshots for inspiration and then plop them
into a pretty UI/gallery. I'm going to open source it and host it though.

~~~
adrr
Issue is that it isn't unique, there's other players like
<http://blitline.com/docs/blitshot>. They are also a lot more expensive.

~~~
bpatrianakos
I don't think that's an issue at all. I get what you're saying though. I know
many times I've built something that already exists and whenever it happens my
version falls into one of 3 categories:

1\. Something that someone else is doing better. Fail.

2\. Something someone else is doing exactly the same. DRY/don't reinvent the
wheel fail.

3\. Something that does something seemingly the same as others but because it
adds something others don't.

I think urlbox falls into category 3. There are lots of ways that a new
entrant can be successful. Just tailoring it to a specific use-case honestly
goes a long way towards success in my book. For example, Blitshot seems to be
all about image processing of screenshots in general (and if it's not let's
say it is for the sake of example) - you get an API for screenshots and image
manipulation and it's up to you to find a use for it. But if someone else
enters the fold, like urlbox perhaps, and says "our API is for purpose X and
you can only use it in these ways" they could actually be very successful
despite not offering what someone else is. There are a lot of people who'd
rather use a product with less features in general but whose features are
tailored to their use case than another product which offers the same and more
but with no specific focus. Look at Pinboard. It's basically Delicious for a
specific user group. All it lacks is the social aspect of it which you're not
forced to use with Delicious anyway plus Pinboard is far more expensive
(anything is "far more" expensive than free). I think Pinboard is a great
example even if it doesn't fit exactly.

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micheljansen
For a single-purpose app like this, at least it could do a better job at
rendering the screenshots, if you ask me. I tried it out on my site (no custom
web-fonts, pretty standard stuff) and the font-rendering looks awful:

<http://cl.ly/image/3S2E3Z3i412n>

~~~
mnutt
It's probably related to linux font rendering.

~~~
bpatrianakos
Not necessarily. I'm going out on a limb and guessing at what they're using
under the hood and if I'm right then font rendering wouldn't be the issue. I
assume it's some sort of app that uses webkit to render pages then x-server to
create the png. So in my experience, what's usually the problem for me is my
own markup. If you're not meticulous about cross-browser consistency then this
sort of stuff happens. It's not that it looks terrible, but it's just
disappointing as it's not what you're used to seeing or what you want people
to see.

~~~
mnutt
I can't guess at exactly what they're doing, but when I built something very
similar we noticed bad font rendering across the board until we tweaked the
font rendering. It's often as simple as choosing a better font to use as the
default when one is not specified.

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bluetidepro
Is this product trying to compete with free plugin-in's like _Screen Capture
(by Google)_ , or is it trying to be more of a "live site" preview generator
that you see on like inspiration-esq sites or theme seller sites? I don't
think that is fully clear in the marketing site.

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jrnkntl
So, this is a web based API wrapped around webkit2png starting from 9.99 a
month?

~~~
blowski
Seems like it, though that could come in handy.

~~~
dubcanada
By the looks of the terrible font rendering it's most likely khtml2png.

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ch0wn
I wanted to sign up, but the form had autocomplete disabled and you lost me
there. What's the incentive for doing that? I never understood it.

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porter
This looks great. I've been having one heck of a time trying to get good
screenshots lately. It takes up a lot of my time. I'm really interested in
your service, but for whatever reason when I punch in a url it won't render a
screenshot. It just hangs on the ajax spinner.

~~~
agurha
Hi porter, Our servers were overwhelmed by the number of requests coming
through. You should try again maybe?.

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nayefc
Anyone else doesn't get it?

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onassar
While there appear to be a number of sites operating in this space (documented
some here: [http://web.onassar.com/blog/2012/11/19/web-based-
screenshot-...](http://web.onassar.com/blog/2012/11/19/web-based-screenshot-
services-and-software/)), this looks simple and straight-forward. While the
cost is prohibitive for me since there are free alternatives
(<http://immediatenet.com/>), it's great to see more competition in this
space.

For what it's worth, I'm using it on my site <http://imnosy.com>

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joshcrowder
This is a good idea, I actaully created something similar using PhantomJS the
issue is web fonts there isn't a solution to rendering typekit webfonts using
a headless webkit implementation see
<http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/issues/detail?id=247> for more details.

As soon as webkit is updated to have better support for OTF fonts urlbox will
become so much better

~~~
dubcanada
I'm confused as to why OTF will make everything better?

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anty
I played around with the sign-up form because I'm designing something similar
at the moment. Once I get a "username not valid" error, I can't re-enable the
submit-button anymore. You might want to fix that. Also I don't think that the
username was already in use, because I entered a random email. Probably a
validation error.

To say something positive: I like that the headline changes the last word
periodically. That caught my attention.

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Argorak
Interesting question, especially as the Sony/KDE-Icon-thing is such a topic
today:

Is this copyright infringement? They use apple.com as an example. The grabbing
process clearly doesn't happen on the client side. Even if it did, what would
be the implications of using Apples website, logos and trademarks embedded in
your content without user interaction?

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machbio
Thanks to URLBox, Implemented on my URL Shortner <http://xgd.in/>

Checkout - <http://xgd.in/viewdnsinfo+>

Note: I am removing it, since it does not work when a person is not logged
into the system - its a shame and a sham

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highace
What makes these screenshots "gorgeous" or "beautiful"? They look like pretty
standard screenshots to me.

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TobbenTM
Seems to not be working in Opera 12.14. Cant see any screenshots. Anyone else
with same problem?

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matthewrudy
You may need to install some unicode fonts.

Try a url like <http://renren.com> and it only has certain characters.

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agurha
Here is an example of multiple screenshots rendered on same page.

<https://urlbox.io/demo>

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grakic
No flash plugin.

That was a hard to solve problem for me I would love to pay for. What they are
offering does not look competitive.

~~~
bpatrianakos
I know how to get Flash working in case you're interested. I'm assuming here
that you (and they) are both using Webkit2png. In that case what you do is
install Flash ([package-manager] install flash-plugin) then...

Well, the gist of it is that once you have Flash installed you need to enable
plugins (-F plugins -F javascript) as well as set the wait ('-w 10' for 10
second wait before shot's taken) option so that the Flash has time to load.

This article helped me quite a bit. Apparently there's a problem with the wait
time so you may need to dig into webkit2png's source to fix it.
[http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org/2012/08/making-web-pages-
screenshots-...](http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org/2012/08/making-web-pages-screenshots-
with-webkit2png-flash-included/)

~~~
grakic
Wait was making me a trouble. I solved it by doing a few shots by hand. But
thanks for the future reference.

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rplnt
The webpage does not work in Opera. The top image with search is missing and
the bottom ones are just empty image tags.

~~~
stevekemp
It just sits and spins for me in firefox too - maybe it is too overloaded at
the moment.

(I did wonder if it was because the sites I tested it with were IPv6 only, but
even IPv4 sites are doing nothing.)

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handelaar
That thing where it says "web font support" apparently means the opposite, I'm
afraid.

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wesbos
Is this running on phantomJS? Looks like webfonts aren't supported.

~~~
samwillis
I use PhantomJS for something and they aren't supported, I believe there are a
few workarounds though bu injecting additional js into the page.

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flippyhead
This seems pretty handy

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jchung
Why?

