Self-updating screenshots
- CyberShadow - 39641 sekunder sedanSame, I've added a .#screenshots derivation. High up-front effort but almost zero maintenance afterwards.
Bonus: since you're generating screenshots programmatically anyway, you can generate a pair of each with your app's light/dark theme, and swap them in/out depending on prefers-color-scheme: dark. <picture> elements work in GitHub READMEs, too: https://github.com/CyberShadow/CyDo#readme
- Nashooo - 20142 sekunder sedanHey, you need to make your code examples horizontal scrollable on mobile! I could still guess their content based on context clues but still.
- spuz - 2173 sekunder sedanThe only problem with this idea I can forsee is that the application and therefore the screenshots can change but the documentation does not. For example, if the documentation says press "Options > Customize" but the application is updated so this becomes "Preferences > Advanced" then the screenshot will show the new text but the documentation will still show the old labels. This would be very confusing as it would be hard to correlate what is being shown on the screenshot with the text. If the user saw the old screenshot they could more easily identify that they were looking at an out of date documentation.
Having said that, have a process to automatically grab screenshots is going to make it significantly easier for a developer to update the docs so the motivation to keep the text up to date is going to be much higher.
- amiga386 - 7043 sekunder sedanIf the author is reading this, please note your code blocks don't scroll (and in fact overflow the white text onto the white background) on mobile layouts. You need an "overflow-x: scroll" or such.
- furyofantares - 39834 sekunder sedanVery cool.
For the small casual games I've been vibe coding, I always start from a place where the application has a CLI where it can run headless, rendering to offscreen texture, with a a screenshot command as well as performance instrumentation. It takes no time to include all this, and gives the agent a way to automate the ui and inspect important things. It also lets me trivially have the agent update screenshots.
Not as neat as being part of the build process, but I will now add that.
- merelysounds - 32929 sekunder sedanThis is very useful in mobile projects.
App stores require screenshots, but generating N images for NUMBER_OF_SCREEN_SIZES times NUMBER_OF_LOCALIZATIONS can be a chore.
In the past I wrote my own scripts for that, today tools like Fastlane[1] help.
I use Fastlane for my logic puzzle game Nonoverse[2], you can see sample screenshots in its App Store page.
I also automated App Preview video recording, complete with multiple scenes. If anyone wants to read more let me know, perhaps this is a good topic for an article.
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6...
- amelius - 1925 sekunder sedanSpeaking of screenshots.
Can we please agree that the OS should not send any event to applications while a screenshot is being made?
It is very annoying if you press a screenshot button and suddenly menus disappear. Or much worse, the application sends a "screenshot taken" message back to the social media platform.
- LeoDaVibeci - 81436 sekunder sedanI've needed this so many times. BTW this should be a meme: "I think this might be the neatest thing I’ve built in X that nobody will ever notice."
- Mackser - 16698 sekunder sedanSuper cool! Love that you can declare the screenshots inline in the markdown document.
For my desktop app I created a solution that generates screenshots in multiple languages, light/dark mode, removes noise and adds Windows/macOS window frames.
Wrote about it here: https://maxschmitt.me/posts/cakedesk-website-redesign#screen...
It's currently a separate script (which is a pain to maintain). I should look into making it a part of the markdown/mdx. Thanks for the inspiration!
- schneems - 38187 sekunder sedanThis is neat. I wrote https://github.com/zombocom/rundoc. It has a similar feature. The main driver is to produce tutorials so it also puts the output of commands run back in the document.
- cocoto - 23735 sekunder sedanWouldn’t a real live render approach work in this case? Have a live preview of your tool inside a rectangle. If the tool is light it should be optimal visually: it will respect browser rendering settings like accessibility parameters or custom addons.
- taspeotis - 40759 sekunder sedanI’ve wondered about doing screenshots from the e2e test run, even keeping docs/ all together in the same repo so when you update the documentation and need a new screenshot you add a new test
- maderalabs - 36947 sekunder sedanNice! I actually started to build this exact thing a couple years back, and ended up abstracting it out to something more generic with https://picshift.io/. That said, I still love the screenshot use case - the original name of this project was ScreenSync ;)
- Biganon - 22276 sekunder sedanYou should set DEBUG=False in your Django settings.
- efortis - 95381 sekunder sedansame here, but linking to the screenshots used for pixel diffing, which get committed to the repo.
https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/tree/main/pixaton-tes...
- kalb_almas - 34803 sekunder sedanI'm sometimes getting
NoMethodError at /self-updating-screenshots undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass
Ruby title-for: in handle, line 12 Web GET interblah.net/self-updating-screenshots
followed by a very detailed traceback when I try to access the page
- xp84 - 31866 sekunder sedanBravo. This is incredibly useful, and really improves the quality of documentation, especially for many applications whose design and UI are always in flux.
- willm - 27458 sekunder sedanI approve of this approach.
The docs for Textual (TUI library for Python) build screenshots along with the docs. Technically not really screenshots, they are SVGs, but principle is the same. They never get out of date.
- bobek - 29018 sekunder sedanPlus we had a visual diff on the top of that as a part of the CI pipeline. It prevented a bunch of mishaps ;)
- est - 39717 sekunder sedanI maintain an internal wiki, the contents were generated by each CI/CD and always reflects from latest running code.
- borplk - 15091 sekunder sedanSite appears to be down intermittently with a Django error
If author sees this: Turn off Django debug mode
- boxed - 18551 sekunder sedanFor web projects, consider not doing screenshots at all and just embedding the html: https://kodare.net/2025/01/14/iframes-not-screenshots.html
You can get responsive design in "screenshots" with this. Super nice, and people can copy paste, look at the code (useful for dev tools), etc.
- dhruv3006 - 24972 sekunder sedanThis is very cool - I think I will try having this in https://voiden.md/.
- davidtio - 21191 sekunder sedanInteresting app, definitely will reduce a lot of work updating documentation.
- ekjhgkejhgk - 10437 sekunder sedan> Your users might not notice, but you know, and it gnaws at you.
The users WILL DEFINITELY notice if the screenshots don't match what they have in front of their eyes.
- npodbielski - 12274 sekunder sedanI do not know why but looking at the title I was sure that this involves something like webserver that updates static file it serves by some external webhook.
- 3eb7988a1663 - 39330 sekunder sedanshot-scraper is another project in this vein.
- sublinear - 15380 sekunder sedanWhy wouldn't you want to version the screenshots along with the text? That's a feature, not a bug.
At best, this seems to require an unpublished draft state for all automatic screenshot updates until explicitly approved so that mistakes don't leak out to everyone else.
At worst, this is an unrealistic level of discipline to keep things in sync that is far greater than just updating the docs normally with the next major version release.
My alternative suggestion would be to make sure your test suite takes screenshots with every build. They're already perfectly organized and in the context of what you're documenting.
- irishcoffee - 38197 sekunder sedanI wrote a gui app once that ran on a safety-critical platform. I ended up stuffing a rendering of the gui (rendered offscreen) into shmem at I think 24hz, and rendered that screenshot into the safety critical application. I passed clicks (no typing for this gui) back from the statically rendered image updating on a cadence, to the offscreen GUI.
Worked well. Not quite the same as this, but that’s what this reminds me of.
- erikmay - 25161 sekunder sedanAwesome! Now you could even go a step further and add satori to the pipeline to add content to the the fresh screenshot. This way annotation could be easily added to the screenshot.
- devmor - 31950 sekunder sedanReally love this, it should be standard practice!
- immanuwell - 104087 sekunder sedannice, embedding the capture instructions right in the markdown as comments is a dead-simple solution that'll age way better than any fancy external tooling
- TranspectiveDev - 32823 sekunder sedan[dead]
- Xmd5a - 29822 sekunder sedan> Then you change the UI slightly – tweak a colour, move a button, update some copy – and suddenly every screenshot that includes that element is stale. You know they’re stale. Your users might not notice, but you know, and it gnaws at you.
F
Related: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890799
Nördnytt! 🤓