Annotating Web Pages
I just thought I would quickly mention a nice tool I just found: bounceapp.com
The scenario is this: you or a co-worker are developing a web page, and you want a convenient way to point to certain items on the page to be fixed. You could take a screenshot, load it into some graphics program
(I like ImageWell), draw some labels and arrows on it, save the image, and then email it off to whomever is interested.
At WWDC a couple of years ago a nice extension was demoed for Safari: Coda Notes. You could do all sorts of cool annotations right on any web page that you happened to be visiting, and instantly email it off. Very cool. Unfortunately I found it to be a bit quirky, and I’m not sure it is entirely supported. YMMV.
Today I had the need for this tool again, and decided to give Bounceapp.com a try. You just enter a URL, it
shows you a screenshot of that web page, you draw and comment all over it, right in your web browser, click save and send the URL to whomever. Very nice! It took me longer to write this blog post than it did to annotate the page!
The interesting thing is that you don’t need to sign up to annotate a web page. The annotations are free for anyone to see, if they have the URL, and once you have left the editing page, you can’t edit it again. This is good because you don’t want people changing your notes! But if you do want to restrict access, and have the ability to save and edit your annotated web pages, you need to sign up with Notable, for at least their free plan. This will also give you and your team members the ability to add comments to each annotation. The last nice touch I’ll mention is they associate your annotations with your account after sign up automatically, so you don’t lose anything, though you should send them a new sharing URL – the previous free one still works, but there is a new one for collaboration and they are not connected.
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