Show HN: Computer vision to track and notify website changes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Computer vision to track and notify website changes

obvious.io

16 pointssthambyah17 comments

Please don't hijack scroll behavior, ever. Effects that happen on scroll are one thing - but actually interfering with my ability to navigate the site via scroll is unacceptable.

As an aside, can anyone shed some light on the value generated by this behavior? Surely there's a good reason that I'm missing, because otherwise this is a scourge upon the web.

Thanks for the feedback. We do have scroll effects, but aren't intentionally trying to hijack the scroll behaviour. Are you able to provide some more info eg, browser/os - if you could provide any screenshots to me, that would be super useful: shaun@obvious.io

Sure, it happens for me both on OS X 10.10 (Chrome) and Windows 8.1 (Chrome). It looks like you might be picking up the scroll event and then using that to scroll smoothly, rather than letting the browser actually scroll. The experience on my Macbook is that I sort of "swing" from one place to the next, rather than gliding like I usually do. On Windows (using a scroll wheel), I notice that the scroll is more of a glide, as opposed to the natural "jumpy" scrolling I experience with the scroll wheel.

It could be the case that the Macbook, being much more sensitive to scroll, is exaggerating the smoothing effect, causing the "swing".

Just a heads up - The Regex on the cell phone Number verification was so bad I couldn't create an account. I tried every possible method of entering my number.. couldn't get past the form.

Maybe sometimes you need more than a visual check =)

I ran into the same problem, then found that the phone number wasn't required to make an account.

Thanks very much, yes it's optional, but validated - very confusing, we'll drop out the hard validation and make it a little more intuitive to enter a number

Thanks very much for that feedback! it needs to be in the format of [country code][phone number] for example +1555555555

We'll push through an update that should make this a little better - drop down for country then free text for phone number (that accepts spaces etc)

How does this compare to Huxley (https://github.com/facebook/huxley) ?

Huxley is a great tool for testing. I think there is a big problem to solve around visual regression testing (I also think visual "unit testing" could be an interesting concept).

Obvious.io is focused on website monitoring, if you think about New Relic monitoring your backend and perhaps Pingdom monitoring your webserver, then Obvious.io is about the customer - does your website look like it should for them? And does it look right consistently over time.

On a side note though, we do have an API in the works so technically if you wanted to plug obvious.io into your CI pipeline, you could do that quite easily. E.g. you want to check that your release into prod is visually the same as the one that's currently in UAT.

Very cool. I suppose Huxley could be scheduled to run repeatedly to keep track, but then you'd have to build a whole monitoring system.

I'll definitely look into this tool, thanks.

Good idea and nice design.

1. I'd prefer to see monthly pricing.

2. I found the scroll behavior to be quite jarring.

Good luck.

Thanks very much! We started originally with monthly pricing but decided to experiment with per check pricing. I'd be keen for any feedback on what the subscription price should be and how many monthly checks should be included in that.

Thanks for the feedback around the scrolling - I assume this is on the content site? Can I ask what browser/os this occurs on?

This would be super amazing if it crawled entire sites.

Thanks for the feedback. This features us actually in testing right now and should be released shortly. The plan is to spider the site at a less frequent interval (say, once a day), and aggregate everything that's changes across all pages in a nice report. The hypothesis is that this would be useful for people with large content based sites and CMS's.

I think you're targeting the wrong use case. Sure, some people will want to monitor their own sites for breaking changes. But I assume far more people want to monitor multiple (as in dozens, hundreds) of other websites looking for changes. Think price changes, etc.

In fact I had to implement a similar system before any of these nice technologies existed. I was working at a small company in Texas that managed your electricity bill for you in the complicated and deregulated Texas utility market. When I got there, they were manually checking ~100 different utility websites for price changes once a week. When I left, thanks to a system like this, they spent 20 minutes a day manually inputting the price change only on the plans that the system alerted them had changed.

Agreed. This is the first system that checks websites I've seen that isn't focusing on competitive intelligence. Maybe that's their idea, is that they're going to a different market. I'll be interested to see this progress, whether they maintain or pivot. However, a service like this that charges per check, and allows API access...and allows you to check multiple/unlimited pages/sites...very powerful in competitive intelligence.

Good to hear. Thanks to the reply. :D

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