snip.

Inspiration

In our daily lives we noticed that we were spending a lot of time shopping online and weighing many options. When I was looking to buy a mechanical keyboard last month, I spent over two days visiting countless sites to find a keyboard to buy. During this process, it was frustrating to keep track of everything I had looked at and compare them efficiently.

That’s why we built snip. It’s an ultra easy to use tool that extracts important features from your screenshots using AI, and automatically tabulates your data for easy visualization and comparison!

What it does

Whenever you decide you’re about to take a series of related screenshots that you would like to have saved and organized automatically (in one centralized place), you can create a “snip” session. Then, whenever you take a screenshot of anything, it will automatically get added to the session, relevant features will be extracted of whatever item you took a screenshot of, and will be automatically added to a table (much easier to view for comparison).

How we built it

We used Tauri to create a desktop app with a Rust backend (to interact natively with the device to monitor its clipboard) and a React frontend (to create the user interface). We also used the shadcn UI component library and Tailwind CSS to enhance our design.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is comprised primarily of roboticists, infra, or backend people, and so trying to create a visually pleasing UI with React, shadcn, and Tailwind CSS (all technologies that we’re not used to using) was quite difficult - we often ran into CSS conflicts, UI library conflicts, and random things not working because of the smallest syntax errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to finish creating our hack and make it look like an actual product.

What we learned

We learned to prefer to use technologies that give us more speed, rather than perhaps better code quality - for example, we decided to use typescript on the frontend instead of javascript, but all the errors due to typing rules made it quite frustrating to go fast. Also, we learned that if you want to build something challenging and finish it, you should work with technologies that you are familiar with - for example, we were not as familiar with React, but still decided to use it for a core portion of our project and that cost us a lot of precious development time (due to the learning curve).

What's next for snip.

Provide more powerful control over how you can manipulate data, better AI features, and enhanced ability to extract data from snapshots (and also extract the site they came from).