iecaptureandviewer

IECapture

a client-side IE event logger and screen capture add-on for IE

IE Capture notes: May 12, 2007

Installation and setup…

Do this IF AND ONLY IF you have a PC running Windows XP. (It won't do anything at all on a Mac, and doesn’t track any FireFox activity.)

To Install IECapture on an XP machine:

0. Close any active IE browsers you might have running.

1. Unzip the file: http://dmrussell.googlepages.com/IECapture.zip

2. This will create a folder called IECapture

(someplace -- I always put stuff like this

on the desktop until I'm done with it)

3. Look for \ IECapture\Inno Setup\Output\setup.exe. Double click to run it.

This will add a toolbar button to IE. If you don't see it, go to:

IE-->View-->Toolbars-->Customize

.. then find a camera icon with the word "Capture" next to it, then add it to the toolbar. In my installation, I always see that icon, so it's not necessary to add it.

NOTE: If you don't see the file name extensions (something like .bin), you need to go and turn off the "hide filename extensions" feature in XP.

To do that,

1. Open the control panel (on the start button)

2. Open the control panel called "Folder Options"

3. Click on the "View" tab at the top of the page.

4. UNCLICK the checkbox that's called ""Hide extensions for known file types" (you will have to scroll down just a bit)

5. Click the APPLY button in the lower right corner.

6. Click OK.

At that point, all the folders will show filenames with extensions. You should be able to select the .BIN and enter .EXE instead.

Note: if you leave out the period, the system won't recognize that it's an executable file.

After it finishes running, try doing a few things in IE. Go to Google home page, do a query, visit a result site.

Now, look in the folder C:\Program Files\IECapture

There should be a log file (log.txt) and a couple of .JPG files that are pictures of the entire screen, triggered on any URL load event.

To Change IECapture Options

To view the options screen, just click on the camera toolbar icon. The defaults for new installations are to capture the entire screen to the same folder the software was installed on, which is by default to the following: C:\Program Files\IE Capture

For IE Version 6.X….

Notes:

1. The log file, "log.txt", is saved to the same location as the images themselves. Note that it's possible that some images are captured on the same second, resulting in some images being overwritten. The log file will list these duplicates, so you could have more lines in the log than image files. The log file format is tab delimited and it has the following format:

2. If you want to exclude certain domains or page types from being captured, just bring up the IE control (by clicking on the camera icon), and then add substrings to the list.

In this example, any page that has “apple.com” or “mail” in it will NOT be captured to the logs (either as a log entry or as an image).

This setting is kept in the settings.txt file in the same directory as the logs are kept.

If you want to pre-configure IECapture for sending to a remote site, you can edit that file (just use spaces as delimiters) to pre-define pages to exclude from capture.

3. Note that IECapture comes configured to store images at at 10X JPG compression. This might be too much for your taste. If you need more clarity in your images, go to the IECapture control panel and set the JPG Compression factor to 1 (~1Mb / screencapture image, or 5 ~500Kb).

To turn IECapture off….

It's the opposite of turning it on.

In IE, go to Tools > Manage Add-ons...

Scroll down to IE Capture (in the Name column)

And select it.

THEN click on the "Disable" radio button in the lower left. (In the "settings" area.)

That will turn it off. It does not unload it, but that shouldn't matter too much as the extra code space is < 3K bytes. (That is, it's the size of a rather small GIF picture.)

IE7 Notes:

Everything just works the way you’d expect in IE 7, except that the IECapture camera icon is now hidden a bit.

That will bring up a set of IE7 add-ons, like this…

NOTES for Coders:

I used the Inno Setup installer, which is freeware, including for commercial use. It can be downloaded from the link below if you want to change some of the information shown by the installer. Since it creates the setup.exe file, you are not required to install InnoSetup in order to install IECapture. For reference, here is the URL:

http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

DMR: Last Edit: 8/13/07 10:03AM, Edinburgh, Scotland