Tools to help generate an offline demo

Hi,

I’m interested in generating an offline demo of my app using these
rough steps:

  1. Decide some pre-determined paths for demoing and create a demo user
    on a test system.
  2. Walk through the demo steps on the test system outputting the
    resultant HTML for each page into the demo directory.
  3. Modify the output HTML so any steps that would hit the server (i.e.
    login) instead just go to the next page in the flow.

In this way I can basically provide most of my apps functionality
offline but in a non-persisted way. My question is if there are any
tools that would help with this? Like something that I can specify
the steps/urls and it will auto walk and generate the HTML output for
me? And something that will inspect said output for the unsupported
items (POST form for login) and either auto-set them to the next step,
or at least tell me so I can manually go change them?

Thanks,
\Peter

On Feb 15, 2012, at 1:29 PM, Peter wrote:

login) instead just go to the next page in the flow.

In this way I can basically provide most of my apps functionality
offline but in a non-persisted way. My question is if there are any
tools that would help with this? Like something that I can specify
the steps/urls and it will auto walk and generate the HTML output for
me? And something that will inspect said output for the unsupported
items (POST form for login) and either auto-set them to the next step,
or at least tell me so I can manually go change them?

That’s a really cool idea. Sounds like it could be a much lighter
weight/higher screen quality than a screencast, too. I don’t know how
you could do the “select a list/path of pages” part, but I usually use
wget to spider through a site and convert it to offline (static HTML)
using this recipe:

/usr/local/bin/wget --html-extension --recursive --convert-links
http://www.example.com

That’s not going to fix your forms, but maybe some post-processing in
TextMate or BBEdit (or another editor that can search through folders)
might help find all the method=“post” strings and give you a starting
place.

Walter