Beta Testers Wanted

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike

Hi all,

We are looking for beta testers of our first product - Fragmento.

Fragmento is great for people who want to select only a small portion
of a web page to print, save, transfer to a handheld, etc. Full
information about the product is available at
http://www.acmeta.com/fragmento/index.html.

If you are interested, please send us a message at (e-mail address removed).

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Mike Sanders, Acmeta
http://www.acmeta.com/
 
Mike said:
Hi all,

We are looking for beta testers of our first product - Fragmento.

Fragmento is great for people who want to select only a small portion
of a web page to print, save, transfer to a handheld, etc. Full
information about the product is available at
http://www.acmeta.com/fragmento/index.html.

If you are interested, please send us a message at (e-mail address removed).

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Mike Sanders, Acmeta
http://www.acmeta.com/
Click to expand...

Works on IE only and expires on August 31st.

Not anything close to freeware or freeware friendly.
 
Eric wrote:

Works on IE only and expires on August 31st.

Not anything close to freeware or freeware friendly.
Click to expand...

That's truly disappointing. I was interested by the concept, but if it only
works with IE then I wouldn't have a use for it and therefor wouldn't be
interested in helping beta test it.

--
--
Ben Thomas - Melbourne, Australia
The essentials: Kodak DX6490, Nikon D70, Canon i9950, Pioneer DVR-109,
Hitachi W37-PD2100, DGTEC 2000A, Harmon/Kardon AVR4500, Denon DVD-2800,
Whatmough Synergy, Sony Ericsson K700i, Palm LifeDrive.

Disclaimer:
Opinions, conclusions, and other information in this message that do not
relate to the official business of my employer shall be understood as neither
given nor endorsed by it.
 
Ben said:
Eric wrote:



That's truly disappointing. I was interested by the concept, but if it
only works with IE then I wouldn't have a use for it and therefor
wouldn't be interested in helping beta test it.
Click to expand...

Also, this software does not even run on hand held computers. It only runs on
desktop Windows and allows you to manually copy the clips to a handheld device.
 
Galley said:
No support for Opera? No thanks.
Click to expand...
Why don't the authors read the clipboard instead of data from some specific
program like Internet Explorer?

Seems to me that by working with the clipboard they would make a much more
useful program.

The user would select the area of interest, from *any* Windows program and
do edit/copy to get the selection onto the clipboard. From there Fragmento
could do its thing.

Given that clipboards exist in other OS's, it would also be easy to make
versions for Mac, Linux, etc.

I have not charged and will not charge for this idea.
 
Harold said:
Why don't the authors read the clipboard instead of data from some
specific program like Internet Explorer?

Seems to me that by working with the clipboard they would make a much more
useful program.

The user would select the area of interest, from *any* Windows program and
do edit/copy to get the selection onto the clipboard. From there Fragmento
could do its thing.

Given that clipboards exist in other OS's, it would also be easy to make
versions for Mac, Linux, etc.

I have not charged and will not charge for this idea.
Click to expand...
Oh, I forgot. There's a *free* program at
http://www.netadmintools.com/art346.html that prints the contents of the
Windows clipboard.
 
http://www.acmeta.com/fragmento/index.html.
Click to expand...

I'd be more worried that the website takes ages to load (DNS?).. not a
good start for a product.

SNIP
Oh, I forgot. There's a *free* program at
http://www.netadmintools.com/art346.html that prints the contents of the
Windows clipboard.
Click to expand...

Problem with this idea is that not every thing will be captured. The
above program you suggested doesn't capture formatting, enbeded images
etc... along with the text. It is one or the other depending what you
select.

Opera web browser does not copy images alongside text.

Internet explorer uses some standard windows interface so will copy
text, formatting and images from itself and can be pasted directly
into Word (although I suspect it downloads the image rather than
taking that on clipboard...)

The fragmento thing says it clips everything so I suspect that is why
it needs to be browser specific as all browsers will do this in a
different way.

It is likely Fragmento just hooks into the way IE allows copying
through to other MS products?

Pete
 
Pete said:
I'd be more worried that the website takes ages to load (DNS?).. not a
good start for a product.



Problem with this idea is that not every thing will be captured. The
above program you suggested doesn't capture formatting, enbeded images
etc... along with the text. It is one or the other depending what you
select.

Opera web browser does not copy images alongside text.

Internet explorer uses some standard windows interface so will copy
text, formatting and images from itself and can be pasted directly
into Word (although I suspect it downloads the image rather than
taking that on clipboard...)

The fragmento thing says it clips everything so I suspect that is why
it needs to be browser specific as all browsers will do this in a
different way.

It is likely Fragmento just hooks into the way IE allows copying
through to other MS products?

Pete
Click to expand...
Pete said "The above program you suggested doesn't capture formatting,
enbeded images etc... along with the text. It is one or the other depending
what you select."

I wasn't suggesting you could use this program as is. It *obviously* won't
handle copying stuff to a PDA. I was suggesting that the folk writing
Fragmento should look to it as a model; perhaps even get in touch with the
authors and see if they can come to some arrangement for code-sharing or
whatever.

Copying stuff to the clipboard does a pretty good job of capturing text and
images although formatting can be an issue. However, I *think* that the
formatting issue is with the paste operation rather than with the copy. I
could be wrong here though. The reason I think it's correct is that the
results are different depending on what you paste into.
 
Copying stuff to the clipboard does a pretty good job of capturing text and
images although formatting can be an issue. However, I *think* that the
formatting issue is with the paste operation rather than with the copy. I
could be wrong here though. The reason I think it's correct is that the
results are different depending on what you paste into.
Click to expand...

Opera for example simply does not capture formatting or images. It
just captures to clipboard text unless you specifically select to copy
a single image. In which case you get no text... and so on..

The problem here is asking Opera development to implement an IE \ MS
style copy... but then I suspect people would moan about Opera selling
out :)

I still suspect this software simply taps into the MS specific
clipboard service.

I double checked how IE copy pastes to Word. It does not copy over the
images but actually pastes the link (URL) and then downloads the
images.

(This program may simply cache the page locally then use the local
images.)

You can test this for your self. Write a page on your PC with a little
text and an image. Select all in IE then change the name of the image
on disk (break the link).. Paste into word and you get no image.
Rename the image back and paste again.. You get the image..

I guess it will be down to the developers but to some degree I was
just speculating that even if no one likes IE this software may
actually be unable to work otherwise.. at least without the developers
of other browsers re-writing the way their copy function works.

Be interesting to see what you get with firefox when copying a
selection of text and images and then pasting into Word for example.
(I don't use FF so can't test..)

Even using the clipboard (which I do for text into notepad for my
Palm) will not give satisfactory resolution of the inter application
translation.

The problem (if we stick to windows for a moment) is not with how IE
copies a selection into the clipboard but that not every non-MS
program will follow the same method and more than this how this data
can be understood and parsed correctly on output \ paste.

The problem is probably both input and output. If this company
implements plugins for example then it might just be what we are all
looking for..

Pete
 
Copying stuff to the clipboard does a pretty good job of capturing text and
images although formatting can be an issue. However, I *think* that the
formatting issue is with the paste operation rather than with the copy. I
could be wrong here though. The reason I think it's correct is that the
results are different depending on what you paste into.
Click to expand...

The Windows clipboard can contain different data formats. It often has
several formats of the copied item alongside each other. Let's assume
you select some text and a picture inside a browser and copy this to
the clipboard. In that case the clipboard might contain one data stream
representing pure text. (Which could be read by a very broad range of
programs.) Another stream might hold a Html-, Xml-, or Rtf-object. A
third might be a pure bitmapped representation, containing all of the
text and the picture as one large bitmap. (Although this is unlikely.)

What's stored inside the clipboard is entirely up to the program which
sends the data to the clipboard. It also gives each stream a kind of
type-tag. Some of these tags are implemented by Windows itself, like
CF_TEXT, CF_OEMTEXT, CF_UNICODETEXT, CF_BITMAP, CF_WAVE, and so on.

Other formats come with specific applications. A CAD program will store
an exact representation of its data using its own format, for instance.
As do many, many other programs.

The program which wants to *read* from the clipboard first checks,
whether there is data inside which it understands. Let's assume you
just copied a picture into the clipboard. If you select paste inside
a plain-text editor, nothing will happen. That's because your editor
will enumerate all data formats stored inside the clipboard (which
might be CF_BITMAP and CF_TIFF). But it won't find one it understands.

That's also the reason why your suggestion of one universal clipboard
reformatting program will be a *very* heavy task to implement. It is
something like a universal file viewer. There are some programs which
do fine with (some) more or less common formats. But to also support
the less frequent and/or more complex ones, you have to input that
many effort, that you need to sell it in the end. (As long as you
have to earn a living from your time...)

BeAr
 
Pete said:
Opera for example simply does not capture formatting or images. It
just captures to clipboard text unless you specifically select to copy
a single image. In which case you get no text... and so on..

The problem here is asking Opera development to implement an IE \ MS
style copy... but then I suspect people would moan about Opera selling
out :)

I still suspect this software simply taps into the MS specific
clipboard service.

I double checked how IE copy pastes to Word. It does not copy over the
images but actually pastes the link (URL) and then downloads the
images.

(This program may simply cache the page locally then use the local
images.)

You can test this for your self. Write a page on your PC with a little
text and an image. Select all in IE then change the name of the image
on disk (break the link).. Paste into word and you get no image.
Rename the image back and paste again.. You get the image..

I guess it will be down to the developers but to some degree I was
just speculating that even if no one likes IE this software may
actually be unable to work otherwise.. at least without the developers
of other browsers re-writing the way their copy function works.

Be interesting to see what you get with firefox when copying a
selection of text and images and then pasting into Word for example.
(I don't use FF so can't test..)

Even using the clipboard (which I do for text into notepad for my
Palm) will not give satisfactory resolution of the inter application
translation.

The problem (if we stick to windows for a moment) is not with how IE
copies a selection into the clipboard but that not every non-MS
program will follow the same method and more than this how this data
can be understood and parsed correctly on output \ paste.

The problem is probably both input and output. If this company
implements plugins for example then it might just be what we are all
looking for..

Pete
Click to expand...
If the developers build something that only works on IE then they won't be
popular and, as far as I am concerned, are wasting their time and money.
That's why I was suggesting an alternative route. If that's impractical then
the developers have a decision to make ...
 
Back
Top