Self-updating screenshots

I think this might be the neatest thing I’ve built in Jelly that nobody will ever notice.

If you’ve ever maintained a help centre or documentation site for a web application, you’ll know the particular misery of screenshots. You write a lovely help article, carefully capture a screenshot of the feature you’re documenting, crop it, maybe add a border and a shadow, upload it, and it looks great. 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.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Either way, I decided to fix it. The help centre in Jelly has a build system where screenshots are captured automatically from the running application, and they update themselves whenever you rebuild.