Self-updating screenshots (interblah.net)

nice, 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

same 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...

I'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."

I’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

Very 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.

I maintain an internal wiki, the contents were generated by each CI/CD and always reflects from latest running code.

Same, 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

shot-scraper is another project in this vein.

https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper

I 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.

This 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.

Nice! 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 ;)

I'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

This 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.

[1]: https://fastlane.tools/

[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6...

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Really love this, it should be standard practice!

Bravo. This is incredibly useful, and really improves the quality of documentation, especially for many applications whose design and UI are always in flux.

> 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

I 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.

https://textual.textualize.io/widgets/markdown/#example

Awesome! 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.

This is very cool - I think I will try having this in https://voiden.md/.

Wouldn’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.

You should set DEBUG=False in your Django settings.

Interesting app, definitely will reduce a lot of work updating documentation.

Hey, you need to make your code examples horizontal scrollable on mobile! I could still guess their content based on context clues but still.

For 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.