Has anyone here tried Surfulater? I am curious to know what you think of it. It appears it may be like an Onfolio on steroids.

http://www.surfulater.com/index.html

Daly

Daly -

At a cursory glance, it looks a lot like ContentSaver, which it cites as a rival. After starting with SurfSaver (which had at the time a lot of problems, now largely resolved, I believe), I moved to ContentSaver, but finally ended up with Net Snippets on Graham's advice.

What finally determined matters for me was the fact that Net Snippets does not tie one to a proprietory method of saving web pages, but saves them as htm ones. Although this means one loses the benefits of compression, it allows me to index the the NS content with an indexed search program (e.g, dtSearch, Wilbur) - along with all my other research documents on my hard disk - and query everything at once.

Ideally, one wants to be able to search everything one has (IMHO) at one and the same time. Having parts of one's data locked up in various proprietory database formats makes this difficult to do. I am not sure how Surfulater handles this issue, but it would be a tie-breaker for me :-).

Derek

Daly,

Your post made me take another look at Surfulater. I intend running a quick trial on it next week.

I'm not sure why I'm going to try it, as I'm perfectly happy with Onfolio, which I've been using for several months. And I'm not sure why you think Surfulater might be "Onfolio on steroids". Onfolio has a very powerful feature set (particularly in the Pro edition). On a quick scan of the Surfulater feature set, I can't see anything that makes it stand out.

Derek raises a good point, of course. If you're bothered by having your data in a proprietary database, Onfolio is not for you. The developers have created a basic database to XML conversion widget, but it won't satisfy the concerns of those who are uneasy about locking data in a particular program.

This didn't bother me until recently, but I have now become quite attached to the Opera browser. Only Onfolio (and Roboform) keep me using Firefox. Onfolio's integration with Firefox and IE is superb and addictive. And Surfulater won't solve the problem, as, like Onfolio, it only integrates with IE and Firefox. That integration is vital for efficient copying of data. Choices, choices...

JohnK

Hi Daly, Derek & John,
I'm the author of Surfulater and just found this thread after looking at my Web stats. I'd like to make a few comments.

First I don't think of Surfulater as being OnFolio on steroids, but that is for you folks to decide not me. All the products mentioned have various strengths and weaknesses.

Surfulater uses open industry standard XML for storing content you save from Web pages. There is no proprietary lock-in and being XML means your information can easily be accessed by other applications.

Further Surfulater does not lock you inside a Browser unlike OnFolio, ContentSaver etc.

In Surfulater all content for a Knowledge Base (Database) is stored in just two files. This makes it very easy to carry your KB's around on say a USB stick or move them to another PC.

Surfulater does not limit itself to just storing Web content. It uses a simple open concept of templates which enable us or you to easily add new types of records. It comes with templates for: To Do list, Contact details, Music catalog, Code Snippets and Web Info.

Surfulater also lets you edit all saved content, add notes, add See Also links between articles, store content in any number of folders at once and more, e-mail content, search using full text search and lots more.

It is also under very active development with interesting new capabilities in the pipeline.

Surfulater V1.92, B0.0 has just been released on 10 Nov 2005.

I welcome feedback from all readers here. We have a blog at http://blog.surfulater.com support forums at http://www.softasitgets.com and the Surfulater Web site is at http://www.surfulater.com E-mail details are on the Contact/Support page.

Thanks,
Neville Franks.

PS. Daly, I have sent you several e-mails and have not had a reply. If you haven't seen them please check your spam filters.

I have used several of these apps. Here's my history & comments:

NetSnippets:
Started with NetSnippets.

+ Is it easy to add new content to an existing snippet.

- The program does not index nor can you search your content. The search engine only searches for keywords, comments... but not the content. This was a deal breaker for me and I moved on.


Onfolio:

+Integrates into browser....

-Integrates into browser.... at first I thought this was a good idea. but after a while, I had too much content and I felt the need for more "real estate" and looked for a stand-alone app.


Evernote:

Nice idea.... But never warmed up the paradigm of an endless roll of paper. I wanted more order.

Surfulater:

+Nice stand alone app.

+Ability to have multiple knowledge bases open at one time.

+Like the tabs for each knowledge base.... nice!

+Liked the idea of viewing all the content in a folder at once.

-Capturing a whole web page is not perfect.

-Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it seems like it is more focused at capturing parts of the page... not the entire page. For me, I'm more interested in grapping the whole page... But I'm sure for lots of people who are doing research, Surfulater is the perfect tool.
?Don't know if you can mark-up saved content???

ContentSaver:

+Nice interface

+Captures whole pages & snippets with ease

+Solid

+Can mark-up content

-A little slow

-Can't view all the content in the folder at once.



Right now, I'm happy with ContentSaver...

-jj

JJ -
Thanks for your comments on Surfulater.

"-Capturing a whole web page is not perfect."

There are pages it doesn't capture properly. We've done a lot of work on this but it is very difficult to guarantee that each and every page will capture ok, for all sorts of reasons. It also takes time to hear about pages that cause problems and then address. If you can let me know the URL of the page you had problems with I can look into this.

"-Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it seems like it is more focused at capturing parts of the page... not the entire page. For me, I'm more interested in grapping the whole page... But I'm sure for lots of people who are doing research, Surfulater is the perfect tool. ?"

Thanks. Our focus is on capturing selected text and images from a page. This avoids waisting space with advertisements and other irrelevant content. It also enables us to display more concise information and do things like show all content for a folder at once. Along with other advantages. But of course you can capture complete Web pages as well, if that's what you prefer.

"Don't know if you can mark-up saved content???"

We will be adding a mark-up capability fairly soon. Right now you can edit content and in doing so use Bold Italic etc.

We have a range of interesting features coming down the Surfulater pipeline.

Hi Al,
Thanks for your feedback. Great to see someone reading the Help.

Text markup and creation of new articles from Clipboard capture are right near the top of the todo list.

"Gathering facilities" - can you please explain what you mean here? You can already paste content from other applications into Surfulater.

Keyword tagging is also a high priority. I've been doing quite a bit of research on tagging etc. these past few weeks and am close to having a plan for its implementation. I feel that there is a real need to get guidance when adding keywords, otherwise you can end up in a mess with too many similar words identifying the same thing. Comments most welcome.

Filtering is also near the top of the list. By filtering I mean the Knowledge Tree will display a subset of the article in a KB based on criteria such as a search specification. In other words the tree would only display articles that matched the search spec. Is that what you mean?

Thanks for the link. I'll read this with interest.