This seems cool at first glance... but will users understand that this tool basically hijacks your user session to refresh the screenshots? In other words, this tool can only update a google analytics chart if you give it access to your gmail? That's scary.<p>It also circumvents 2fa, because sessions are leaked to Plus after you've used your TOTP code or Yubi key. How can any business be OK with this??
I worked for a personalization vendor a few years ago and was on an engineering team that built a feature like this. It was ... a major headache, and I don't think anyone was ever completely comfortable with the security implications.<p>So I wish the team good luck, and especially with issues like:<p>* A/B testing. How can you ensure that what your clients are seeing is the same thing you are seeing? Maybe you've been assigned to different A/B groups.<p>* Extensions. What if your clients are using Chrome extensions that affect how the page is rendered? How can you replicate that?<p>* Networking/auth issues. What do you render if you're unable to connect or log in?
Hey, I helped build this! Thanks for submitting this.<p>I'm an engineering manager at Plus — would be happy to answer anyone's questions about our product. You can also shoot me an email at zach(at)plusdocs.com if you'd like to hear more about what we're up to.
This seems like a spectacular way to break permissions restrictions and escape data to non-authorized entities. If it's successful, it's the sort of thing that will be brutally blocked by IT all over the place.<p>Very slick, though.
Love the idea. Execution is tricky like others mentioned, but this is one of those slap forehead ideas on how simple and game changing it is if you can pull it off.
This seems identical to the live screenshots you can add to an easel in the Arc browser [1]. I've created a view with that that shows a collection of different analytics sites, that all update automatically. Only downside is that occasionally you have to login to keep those views up to date.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/ukquBSOpmTk?t=290" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ukquBSOpmTk?t=290</a>
This functionality reminds me a networked version of an obscure (but sometimes useful) Excel feature, the "Camera Tool":<p><a href="https://trumpexcel.com/excel-camera-tool/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpexcel.com/excel-camera-tool/</a><p>Basically, it lets you select a range on a worksheet, and then shows a live updating picture of that range in a new region (possibly in a different sheet). Why is that useful? Well, the range can contain charts in addition to just cells with data. It can be handy to have the charts actually defined in the sheet where the data is stored, so that let you do this while still displaying the chart in the sheet where you want to show it.
The most important page is a bit buried -- <a href="https://www.plusdocs.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.plusdocs.com/pricing</a><p>Free to use for now.
The idea is great, but what about security? When you get the user's cookie and session information (basically you're taking a snapshot of the browser and reproducing it at your end), you can do anything with it. What if someone uses it to take a screenshot of their bank account? (probably not possible due to two-factor authentication)
The landing page seems very focused on the “dashboard” use case for Plus, but the domain (plusdocs.com) sounds to me like it was originally intended to keep product screenshots in documentation updated. Was there a pivot? Is it still suitable for that use case?
Congrats on the launch!<p>Was it an intention to make the design similar to <a href="https://gumroad.com/" rel="nofollow">https://gumroad.com/</a>? Or am I the only one seeing an uncanny resemblance?
Really interesting tool and not even quite sure how the technology works. It's opening it's own browser window (hidden) and capturing the same x/y pixels? Pretty clever.<p>Also, does anyone know what this new design trend is called? The bordered / minimal-but-not look?
This looks really cool and clever. I do have a question about security though. The FAQ states:<p>> Today, we encrypt all sensitive data on your computer before it is sent to our servers, your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our employees do not have access to the private key to decrypt sensitive data.<p>I wonder how this works. I assume Plus works by storing the cookies present in the user's browser so that it can inject those cookies in a headless browser to take a Snapshot. In order to do that, it would need to decrypt the cookie (if it was encrypted in the first place, which the FAQ seems to suggest). For that, the headless process needs the encryption key. That would mean that employees can also access that encryption key.<p>What am I missing here?
I want to use something like this to automatically detect visual breakage after auto updates for WordPress, discourse etc.
Is there such a product? Preferably Open source
Nice. I've been thinking about going the more complicated route of building a screenshot pipeline for our docusaurus based docs. I am currently considering building something that would allow you to embed a ```playwright code block into your markdown, containing a playwright test with the expected output, and then at build time it would execute the tests and replace the code blocks with the images.<p>Anyone do something similar?
This is actually how the FastComments docs works. I did it because I hate taking screenshots.<p><a href="https://github.com/FastComments/fastcomments-docs/blob/main/src/content/guides/customizations-and-configuration/items/absolute-dates.md">https://github.com/FastComments/fastcomments-docs/blob/main/...</a>
Any plans to actually scrape the data instead of just the images? Having the actual data saved in a tabular format would really make this a killer product... You could probably do this by finding the elements within your selection and parsing the rendered HTML.<p>Images are great but for doing anything more complex than just viewing charts scraping the data would be a huge plus
The idea is really cool, but implementation seems hard to get right.<p>Apart from the security issues mentioned by others (related to storing user auth/session data), what happens if there's an update to the website/application where the screenshot is being taken from? Or if they add an announcement banner at the top, all content will be displaced.
For something enterprise scale, check out Tea Leaf. IBM ran the product for a while, I think now Acoustic has it. Many large F500 use this or other similar products:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tealeaf" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tealeaf</a>
As I have mentioned on other posts. Things like this need to be native apps, and not just a chrome extension or a web app. We need to get away from webapps for everything, and go back to native apps. Heck why do we have package tools then?
This is great. I've had to engineer this feature once before (updating an image status tag on Github issues), and was surprised it was so hard to find resources to solve that problem.
I was looking for something like this but for the Windows platform (not browser). The built-in snipping tool is great but I wanted a quicker way to take images. I tried looking up if right-click drag on the Windows desktop could be used to take a snap of the area (via some mouse-action binding). All I could find was that the action was bound to Windows Explorer copy/move semantics.
Awesome work! I think there should be a version that also refreshes screenshots of DOM elements specifically not just pixels - for example you might want to see how a thumbnail of a video changes over time from a rapidly changing page
Sounds a lot like Simon Willison's open source project shot-scraper<p><a href="https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper">https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper</a>
This is pretty cool. It’s more or less a feature that is baked into the Arc browser, except in Arc you take snapshots of html elements instead of selecting an area of the screen.
I created an iOS app for "self-updating" widgets [1] based on the same principle:<p>However with each version, Apple is killing the original, today's widget this app needs.<p>[1] <a href="https://wowidget.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://wowidget.github.io/</a>