Some time ago a user tried to monitor google maps what was not possible with WebSite-Watcher. He also made the interesting suggestion to monitor a page by screenshot which should make these kind of pages trackable.
Here’s the concrete suggestion that was posted in the forum:
to compare pages by ‘screenshot’
I would like to be able to watch the Google Maps maps:
- for looking at when the details of my zone are improved
- for looking at when the Street View (orange man) is added to my zone
- for looking at when new places are “tagged” for example on this map: http://www.portel.it/mappeAll these tasks could be performed by WW easily by taking and comparing screenshots of the page, or of a given rectangular part of the page.
WebSite-Watcher 5.1.0 Beta-5 has now a new checking method to automatically load a page in a hidden Internet Explorer window, make a screenshot and save it to a PNG file. When you open the bookmark, you will see this screenshot that can be used to detect updates.
To use this new method, open the bookmark properties, click the button “checking method” and select “Screenshot”.
You can optionally define a custom window size and/or the region you want to capture. By default, WebSite-Watcher uses a window width of 1024 pixels and calculates the height automatically.
But that’s not all, WebSite-Watcher is also able to highlight changes in a screenshot as shown in the following picture.
This new functionality to highlight changes in images will also work if you monitor a GIF/JPG/PNG graphic file directly by entering the image address into the URL field of a bookmark.
Wow, now that is smart!
I’m stunned. Seems like I have to renew my license, soon.
I agree. The plug-in functionality and this screen shot monitoring feature are definitely killer features.
Hi, seems very nice. What would be even better, is to have such an option to check changes in pdf or picture being part of a standard html or php page.
Fantastic new feature, thank you very much!!!
Thank you very much for this new feature. It expands the (already very wide) capabilities of WSW. Since you are interested in users’ opinions, I would like to make a suggestion regarding a possible improvement of this feature.
Could it be possible to add the screenshots to the WSW report?
Even better, could you add thumbnails of the screenshots to the interface?
That would help to give an overview of all the changes.
Vince, this is something I have in my mind for a longer time now and something like that might be considered in a future version…