Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots

https://www.testmo.com/guides/automating-marketing-screenshots

by dgurock • 4 years ago

22 8 4 years ago

rudasn2• 4 years ago

Yes! I'm so pleased to see this, only because I had the same idea and went ahead and implemented it with playwrite. I also added the ability to add annotations, ie overlayed text, and outlines, ie borders, on certain elements I want to highlight, focus on, explain.

My main problem is that I still had to write the code to do the work (go there, click there, wait for that, etc etc). The good thing was that it took video and screenshots, and embedded them into docusaurus markdown that then built our docs pages.

Seeing other people doing the same makes me think it wasn't such a bad idea after all.. Maybe I should get back on it..

Thanks!

dgurock2• 4 years ago

Thanks! One of the main benefits of this approach for me is that I can easily set up all the sample data programmatically in the database. It would be near impossible to manually set up all the data and charts by hand. And when it comes to updating the screenshots for new product releases, it would be very time consuming to redo all of this again.

bradknowles• 4 years ago

Did you mean PlayWright, from https://playwright.dev/ ?

If so, then the above statements make sense to me.

If not, then I’m curious to learn about this PlayWrite you mention.

rudasn2• 4 years ago

Yes that's it, I always get it wrong..

prisout64• 4 years ago

Wow, that is a nice idea! I will try out something like it for our docs. we don't have a lot of screenshots because it's so much effort to keep them up to date.

taubek2• 4 years ago

If you have an app that has frequent UI updates this could save you a lot to time. Another scenario that I see is possibility to create localized version of screenshot for different languages. I used to maintain docs on a site that was translated to 10 languages, app was localized to even larger number of languages but I've always used screenshots only on source (original) language.

dgurock2• 4 years ago

Good point regarding localized UIs; I haven't thought about the benefits of this approach for translations

taubek2• 4 years ago

When dealing with localized UIs and documentation creating screenshots is one part of the task and another one is getting the right image into the right document, but that is beyond the scope of your app. I'm glad that you have found this scenario also useful.

Show HN: How we automate our (complex) product screenshots

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