When I stumble upon an interesting graphical webdesign, I always feel sorry that I can't store a screenshot in a structured accessible way for future reference. Bookmarks just don't really work when you want to store only part of a website or if there are several interesting bits in a design. For a couple of days I had been looking for an efficient way to do just this, e.g. cut out screenshots; tag and store them as pain free as possible and preferable do this in collaboration with a community of webdesigners. So far I haven't found the holy grail yet, I ended up with the following 3 partial solutions: Kwout provides a bookmarklet that when clicked opens the webpage you were visiting with a Javascript area selector. After you select an area, it saves a screenshot onto the kwout server. You can then do some basic processing, submit the screenshot to a number of websites or email it. There's a couple of downsides:
- Your screenshot is made public on their website, so you can only submit pictures where you have the proper copyrights.
- There is a limitation to the screenshot size.
- Since the page needs to be reloaded by kwout, it only works with webpages that are not behind a user login.
The second contender is Screengrab, a Firefox addon. I know there are several addons that will do similar things and you might not want to add another addon to your browser, but screengrab allows you to save parts of a webpage as well as full pages (e.g. not just what's above the fold). So it's useful also for customer interaction. The downsides are:
- Clumsy interface that requires 3 clicks to open up the addon interface.
- Only local storage supported (there is a fork of the addon that allows you to store your pictures on 1 specific picture service).
The third contender patternbrowser I found after a retweet from Bert Boerland. It's a website from the Design Department from the College of Potsdam that has a great collection of design patterns. It's a community site, so I'm sure that there is some great potential here. It will become one of my favorite sites once they:
- Include an easy to use upload system (e.g. maybe similar to what Kwoat is doing?).
- Emancipate design examples and not just store them as examples only accessible from a pattern's page.
- Get their service agreement up in English and not just in German.
Do you know any other tools that could be used for this purpose?
