12/29/2007

Direction for the next version of kwout

For these 3 days, we have read many many blogs that comment on kwout. And, we have determined the direction.

  1. Improving a grabbing speed, stability and robustness. (We implemented our system so that it can be scaled relatively easy.)

  2. Improving usability, especially a resize feature and a mouse drag feature.

  3. Improving indexability. (One possibility is that some meta data will be added to an embed code, so that search engines can more easily index contents of kwout.)

  4. Expanding availability. (Email, PowerPoint, Vbulletin Boards, Social Networks, etc.)

  5. Fixing defects.


Any others? If you have any ideas, please let us know. Any feedbacks are welcome!

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

You've got the beginnings of a superb tool, I'm sure.
Very pleased to read that you're listening to blog feedback!

The only problems I've found are very occasional peculiar results (clashes with java on target page?) and I keep hitting the 600x600 limit.

How about a proper forum where users can swap ideas and tips?

Thanks again!

Webmaster said...

Hi ceedee-uk,

Thank you for your bug report! Regarding a forum, we will set it up soon.

Dan Keldsen said...

Haven't tested this enough, but I suspect you can't take shots of personalized web pages, as you wouldn't have someone's credentials "at hand" so to speak.

Yes, or no? Interesting idea all around though - intrigued to see where you end up with this.

Webmaster said...

Hi Dan,
Thank you for your comment.
Your suspicion is correct. For now, We can't take snapshots web pages that require some authentication. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We understand the requirements to grab such pages, so now we're investigating solutions for that.

Mrs C said...

Thanks for the great tool - however I am having trouble taking screenshots of my skrbl boards - says I'm locked out (blah blah blah) abd that I need to log in - however I am logged in. Any thoughts?

Webmaster said...

Hi Mrs C,
Thank you for your comment.

For now, it's not possible to take screenshots of web pages that requires logging-in. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Technically, screenshots are taken by our servers, and the servers never have your credentials. That's why they can't take such pages.
We understand the problem/requirement and now are working on that. Please be patient until our next update.

Anonymous said...

is it just me or is the background always black and I can't find the part of the website that I want to kwout?

I have two computers, one at the office, and the other at home, and they both have this problems.

One is a Mac mini and one is a Macbook pro.

Webmaster said...

Hi Mac User,

Could you please let us know the URL you couldn't quote? Or, didn't it work at all?

Anonymous said...

Non of the websites work. I tried using Safari, Firefox 2 & 3 beta2 & Flock.

Non of them seems to be working. I love your service, but somehow the "taking medium screen shot" doesn't work. I get a black screen (which I can use to kuwout, but I just can't see what i'm kuwouting). I'm surprised this is not in the faq, both my computers with different ISPs are having this same problem..

Webmaster said...

Hi Mac User,
Thank you for your reply.
We are investigating the problem, but we still can't reproduce it...
So, could you please give us more information if you don't mind?

After entering the page starts with http://kwout.com/grab?address=, did it show the message "Grabbing a medium screenshot" with circling indicator?
If so, after for a while (up to 30 sec), did it show the message "Select an area you wish to quote" something with two buttons?

When the message "Select an area you wish to quote..." is shown, a screenshot should be generated.
In that case, could you try to change size of the screenshot and see what happens?
And, on Firefox, could you right-click around center of the page and select "View Background Image"?
Screenshots are set as background image, so viewing background image is a way to check whether the screenshot is generated or not.

If it doesn't generate any screenshot, it may be defect in our JavaScript code. We will focus on the code in that case.

Sorry for the inconvenience anyway.

Anonymous said...

I guess My problem went away when I chose "large screen shot" instead of medium. But it does take a bit more time. And yes, show background image does show an image.

Thank you very much..

Webmaster said...

Hi Mac User,
Thank you very much for your reply. We are glad to hear it worked.

It seems there is something wrong with showing a screenshot. We will check that function.

Thank you again.

Yulius said...

I really interesting with this awesome tool.
I just want to report there are some bugs when I want to send the screenshoot by yahoo email, its not working well.
I really hope you can improve this tools so we can save the screenshoot to our computer and then publish wherever we want like forum, blog, and else...

Webmaster said...

Hi Yulius,

Thank you very much for your report.

We checked Yahoo! Mail, and the bug you reported seems to be not our bug but Yahoo Mail's bug. We will try to find a workaround to avoid the bug.