Work Assistant: Testing resolutions

Not new year resolutions. Just plain old screen resolutions.

Gertrude is staring at the sloppy blinds on the window from her seat in a tenth floor building meditating on the application the team is building for a possibly mass audience.

There are a couple of brilliant utilities available on the internet created by very kind people that would help her QA/tester colleagues test pages on different screen resolutions in increasing order of easiness to set up, but in reducing order of control.

1) The Web developer plugin for firefox. Install as you would any plugin for firefox. Techies would take more kindly to it for tailoring screen resolutions. And for a heap of other things as well.

2) A website called Viewlike that works like a charm. You can instantly see what your application would look like on an iPhone, a Wii browser and a range of resolutions between 800 x 600 and 1920 x 2000.

Morris, her imaginative colleague wishes that this could work on any virtual browser. Kit, the person on the other corner, however is simply thrilled that this works on an internally hosted application.

(Post script: Gertrude finds on more searching that there are indeed many more sites that offer this feature - test website resolution,  testsize, markhorrell, chrome extensions etc etc. But these above two remain her favourites visually)

Work Assistant: The camera crew

Gertrude is undecided about which tool to use. She needs to design a modified version of the existing screens in the application they are about to build. She also needs to record an error on the screen that happened after a few taps and clicks.

There is a plethora of tools to pick from. Each name rolls off the tongue quite differently.

Happily enough Gertrude's first option, Fireshot a Firefox add-on, works on Internet Explorer as well! For free. Fireshot takes still pictures. It has a very easy to use set of options for image-screen-window copy-paste-edit-email-upload. The blur and the glow features for edit are significantly likeable.

The Fireshot Pro version has additional printing and usability benefits.

The only tiny flaw: although it says it can capture screenshots with Flash movies, it ends up restarting the movie in progress and therefore this image captured is never satisfactory to Gertrude. It could well be a case of PEBCAK (problem exists between chair and keyboard), but she won't admit it.

Aviary has a handful of tools for image editing. They are named after splendid birds like the Toucan and Phoenix. Talon seems to be the firefox extension for the screen shot part. At first glance it seems to insist on getting a user account, but it turned out to be a suggestion, not a constraint.

When she chooses to edit, it opens Aviary's own set of in-browser tools. They take a few seconds to open up, but they are honestly very very grand. Much joy in annotating, pinching, resizing and viewing the image and the modifications as 'layers'. Gertrude has to remind herself that all of this was happening in the browser!

SnagIt is a paid-for tool from Techsmith with a 30 day evaluation license. Images can be tagged as a bug, important, personal and so on. The tags acquire meaning only when viewed within SnagIt's editor. All the annotation and highlight features are crisp and bold. The interface seems very straightforward. And it happily works on any kind of application - browser or non-browser! Remarkably,when she hits the Print Screen key with the right-click menu displayed, she can easily take snapshots of the menu options!

It can even record videos. Sadly, the experimental one turns out a bit grainy.

Another tool, Screengrab does exactly like the name says - helps copy and save portions of the screen. It is a firefox extension. Even without an email or edit feature, Gertrude finds it pretty functional and immediately useful.

On a small detour: Picnik is not strictly a work assistant, but it delights Gertrude immensely with what it can do to photographs! It is very mentionable! The interface is marvellous and Gertrude marvelled. Even when it is starts up, instead of the stiff status bar filling "Loading ...23%" type messages she sees adorable text like "Painting Sky", "Growing grass" .... ooh!

Techsmith has another treasure. Jing, Gertrude spells out the name in disbelief. It is a desktop application that perches on the top of her screen like a twenty-watt-bulb. It can capture images. The screencast it creates can be described as superlative. It tempts her to say that old-fashioned text-heavy defect reports should be banished where possible and replaced with these easy swf replays from Jing. And the best thing is that it is all free! Wonder what the Pro-version can do!

At least one decision is made. Gertrude urgently needs to get over the habit of Alt+Print Screen > (Start > Run > MsPaint) > Ctrl+V.