Have you tested your Web site in different browsers and on different platforms? Web designers tend to focus on the one or two that they deem most important and often forget to test their Web sites in other browsers and on other platforms. That normally means testing sites in IE and Firefox, but the different versions of IE and Firefox and different versions of operating systems are ignored. Besides, very few have access to all the different browsers and operating systems, not to mention the hundreds of combinations that you get when you include screen sizes, Javascript versions and Flash enabled.

Browsershots is a free, open source solution for your problem. Browsershots takes screenshots of sites and displays the screen captures in .png files. You can use Browsershots as a free online service, but what makes this product cool is that it’s available as an open source (written in Python) download so that you can run it on an internal server. This is very useful when you need to test a site that isn’t live or accessible from the Internet yet. (more…)

WinSnap is a great little application that can replace regular Windows screen captures. Previously mentioned FastStone Capture is great for scrolling screen captures like Web pages in browsers, but WinSnap is great for regular CTRL+Prnt Scrn replacement. It can be configured to automatically modify the image border to rounded corners or PhotoShop-style shadows.  This is particularly useful for us bloggers who like to capture images and post them to our blogs. Older versions are free (for personal, educational and non-commercial use) and as a bonus they have a portable version, so this application needs to be added to my list of essential portable applications. The free version is available here.