MyBase and Surfulater

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Posted by Cassius
Mar 16, 2007 at 03:05 AM

MyBase and Surfulater are very similar in function: Capturing Web pages and including notes. I know that MyBase can edit the Web pages it captures (press F2) and I believe that Surfulater can also. I took a quick look at both and decided to try MyBase first.

I used version 4.x of MyBase for a time, but it was pretty slow on my IBM 240x laptop ( PIII 500MHz (256KB) 200))MB RAM, 12.0 GB HDD, 10.4 TFT). My new Toshiba Laptop (Core 2 Duo 2ghz,2gb ram, 120 gb HDD), runs Ver. 5.3 MUCH faster. The folks at WJJSoft say they’ve improved the speed of Ver 5, so I don’t really know how much is due to my new laptop and how much is due to their improvements. It takes a couple of seconds for a file to open, but then operations are quick. You can index a file to get fast searches.

I’ve started putting MB thru its paces. So far I’m happy. It seems to have a lot more functionality than Surfulater. Certainly, I’ve only scratched the surface so far. It also has some batch processing…but that will have to wait.

There was one Web page that MB could not fully capture:

http://www.exp-systems.com/PDFreDirect/Screenshots.htm?1

MB tech support is VERY RAPID. I sent it a notice about this Web page problem. They responded within 4-5 hours and they are in China!. Here’s their response:

“The given webpage contains a IFRAME webpage. If you use Firefox, you can right-click the middle image and select “This Frame -> View Frame Info” menu item, whereby you can find out the webpage URL, and then open the URL in another browser Tab, and capture the page with webcollect.”

By the way, as I have said elsewhere, WebCollect is a MUST. I don’t know why they don’t offer it bundled with MyBase.

I hope to do some testing of Surfulater over the next couple of days and report back.

-c

I did a small test on file size. I opened a new MB file (WJJ calls it a database) and pasted in one Web page with graphics. I then saved the same page as a .mht file. The .mht file was twice as big i mb as was the MB file.

Posted by Cassius
Mar 18, 2007 at 07:03 AM

Here’s the rest of my comparison of MyBase+WebCollect and Surfulater.

I’ve now played with the Surfulater trial version. The trial does not allow one to create a new database and seems crippled in other ways, so I was limited to using the one that was provided. I’ll try to describe how Surfulater and MyBase-WebCollect do some operations they have in common. I’ll assume that I have open both a MyBase file and a Surfulater file, and that I also have a Web page open in either IE or Firefox.

To capture the Web page in either Surfulater or in MB, right-click anywhere in the Web page. This opens a context menu.

To capture the page in MB, find “Save with MyBase” in the context menu and click on it. A window opens with a tabbed interface. The window includes some options one can choose. Without choosing any options click on the “OK” in the window. This creates a new item in the MyBase outline below the one what was open in the outline. The new outline item (containing the captured page) can be at the same level or can be a child. The Web page is displayed in the right pane. Also, a pane may open displaying “attachments.” This pane lists the graphics, etc. that the Web page html pulled into the page. [If you were to save the page using “File - Save Page As…” with the “Web Page Complete” option, the graphics files in the resulting folder are the ones listed in the MyBase Attachments pane. One can hide the Attachments pane.

At the top of the right pane are two tabs. One displays the captured Web page. The other displays a blank pane into which one may type notes, paste a graphic, etc. So one has a captured page and notes associated with each outline item. One can also create a new outline item without having an associated Web page.

To capture the Web page in Surfulater, the context menu gives you four choices:

(1) Add new Article
(2) Add Article plus Page
(3) Attach Page to Article
(4) Bookmark this page

One can also add different types of articles (“Notes”) using the Article menu or by right-clicking on
the outline.

If one highlights something in a Web page and selects (1) or (2) a new item will be created in the outline with any highlighted material from the Web page being placed in the right pane along with some info about the page content. (AMAZINGLY, in my testing, I had a case in which the info about the page WAS NOT SOMETHING COPIED FROM ANYTHING VISIBLE IN THE PAGE!!! Is Surfulater using paranormal tools?)

(2) and (3) copy the Web page. (2) displays a thumbnail of the page that, when clicked on, displays the page in an EXTERNAL browser (IE or Firefox). Surfulater apparently can show the page internally in the right pane, but in the trial version, I could not get it to do so with outline item and page I added. One can also open a saved page by clicking on its description under “Attachments.” If a page thumbnail is not shown, a hidden link to the saved page is where the thumbnail would be!

EDITING:

Both programs can edit both text and html. One has to invoke the editor in both cases. The MyBase editor has more features than that in Surfulater, with everything most people would need.

MISC.:

Surfulater has the same problem capturing the page

http://www.exp-systems.com/PDFreDirect/Screenshots.htm?1

as does MyBase.

Because I could not start a new file in the test Surfulater, I can’t speak to file sizes. Also, I could not find the cloning feature Surfulater supposedly has.

CONCLUSIONS:

Both programs have many features in common. Each also has some features lacking in the other. I HAVE NOT tried everything in either, but MyBase seems to have more, including a more robust editor and more robust search function. If you buy MyBase, be prepared to also buy WebCollect.
Surfulater is less expensive. It’s pretty much a tossup as to which is easier to use. (I’ve found a small bug in MB and have notified the developer.)

My Choice? MyBase + WebCollect. This choice is mostly influenced by the more robust editor and the fact that I already had Ver 4 of MB and had the current version of WC, so I needed only to pay an upgrade fee for MB ver 5.x.

-c

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 21, 2007 at 12:26 PM

Cassius wrote:
>Because I could not start a new file in the test Surfulater, I can’t speak to
>file sizes. Also, I could not find the cloning feature Surfulater supposedly
>has.

The cloning feature is simple: just copy an article to another folder; the article will only be saved once, but both folders will “point” to it.

Overall, Surfulater looks very simple but hides a very powerful infrstructure. (The only similar program I’ve seen is Macromedia’s Contribute; it is a full web editor that looks as simple as Wordpad.)

In any case, Surfulater is targetted at a much more limited niche (collecting and organising info from the web) than MyBase so I don’t expect it ever to include advanced editing features. You can read more about the program’s perspective and underworkings here: http://blog.surfulater.com/?p=49

alx

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