Introducing: Autocap!
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About once a quarter at Trunk Club, we’ll host a hack day where we give our engineers and designers the freedom to work on something that will help improve the business outside of their traditional workflows. Our latest hack day focused on our Member Experience team, which is directly responsible for making sure the customers are happy. They answer questions about orders, schedule pickups and move mountains to get the job done — they are the best 🎉🎉🎉
With this team in mind, we built a tool using Electron that is designed to create and share operational procedures quickly and easily.
We’re calling that tool Autocap, and today, we’re open-sourcing the project!
A little more background
Typically when our Member Experience team figures out a new way to help our customers, they’ll document the steps to more easily share the process across the rest of the team.
For example, if we wanted to create a procedure for scheduling a trunk pickup, the Member Experience associate would go through the process of gathering information from Trunk Club’s internal systems, logging into UPS and processing the trunk pickup. Along the way they take screenshots each time the screen changed in a meaningful way so that future Member Experience associates can follow along.
Autocap takes out the screen-capturing step by taking screenshots continuously, and only saving the screens where something significant actually changes.
How does it know what to keep?
Autocap determines which screenshots to save by taking pictures at half-second intervals, and keeping only the pictures which have a difference greater than 1% (using the Resemble.js library). The interval/difference threshold is currently static, but we’d like to make that adjustable in the future.
How do I use this?
Install Autocap:
1) Download a copy of the disk image
2) Move the application to your applications folder
Using Autocap
Say, for example, you wanted to send a procedure to a relative about how to connecting to a new Wi-fi network. The process would look something like this:
1) Open the app and start recording
2) Open up the computers system preferences and connect to the new network
3) Once you’re finished, click on the Autocap logo to reopen the app
5) Click Stop
6) Select the screenshots you want, uncheck the ones you don’t
7) Hit the export button
8) Check out your PDF! 🎉
I’d like to help ️🙋🏽
Autocap is open-source and hosted on GitHub under the MIT license. We’ve just started using it, so it’s pretty bare bones and there’s sure to be some bugs abound.
A big part of the Trunk Club Tech’s mission is figuring out new ways to help support our non-technical teams. We’re guessing that other teams at both technical and non-technical companies have a use for something like Autocap — if there’s a feature you want or something is bugging you, open a PR or file an issue!
Like building tools to make others lives easier? Want to help create the future of retail? Send an email to techblog@trunkclub.com and let us know!
Thanks to the original Autocap team: @arnesaupe @jessefurmanek @jjyoon @oscillot @wSnarski @zperrault , as well as @migreyes for logo and design help. Shout out to @alexainslie for the inspiration for this app, and to @jasontheblock for editing this post.
