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A word on Surfulater (today on Bits du Jour)
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 22, 2007 at 07:09 AM
Surfulater is on 50% discount at Bits du Jour today
http://bitsdujour.com/blog2/wordpress/?p=387
A few words on the application, which I have been using for a few months now. For anyone looking for a straightforward web content saver / anotator / editor, I think it’s an excellent choice. I started using it in the course of my recently resumed studies, where saving content as plain text (with Brainstorm and Zoot) was often not an option. Till now it has performed very well, quickly saving most text & graphics content accessible by Internet Explorer.
Neville, the Surfulater (and Ed for Windows) developer, is helpful and responsive; he takes into account user input and requests without getting off course. He’s chosen to build a focused, solid application that is straightforward to use and anything but feature-bloated.
One of the interesting ways that the powerful infrastructure shows in the user experience is the data tree, which can be automatically re-organised by date; apparently, more such re-organisation modes will be available in the future.
For those wanting to keep everything in one place, Surfulater can probably facilitate collecting the content. For sharing content, the trial version of Surfulater can now work as a permanently free viewer.
Last but not least, a rather obvious disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Neville’s business other than being his customer.
alx
Posted by Cassius
May 22, 2007 at 07:56 AM
Personally, I prefer MyBase+WebCollect (at wjjsoft.com). I’ve tried Surfulator, but I’ll try it again, if I can.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
May 22, 2007 at 02:47 PM
I also use Surfulater, and have found it to be the best of the web saving research tools I have used. I especially appreciate the easy ability to clone information so it can appear in more than one place in the tree, and also the “file last saved item here” feature.
I have found that when other programs are unable to save text material without deleting lines separating paragraphs, Surfulater often is able to do so. So even if I eventually want some material in another program, such as UltraRecall or InfoHandler, I will save it to Surfulater first, then copy it and paste it in the program I ultimately want it in.
Daly
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Surfulater is on 50% discount at Bits du Jour
>today
>http://bitsdujour.com/blog2/wordpress/?p=387
>
>A few words on the
>application, which I have been using for a few months now. For anyone looking for a
>straightforward web content saver / anotator / editor, I think it’s an excellent
>choice. I started using it in the course of my recently resumed studies, where saving
>content as plain text (with Brainstorm and Zoot) was often not an option. Till now it
>has performed very well, quickly saving most text & graphics content accessible by
>Internet Explorer.
>
>Neville, the Surfulater (and Ed for Windows) developer, is
>helpful and responsive; he takes into account user input and requests without
>getting off course. He’s chosen to build a focused, solid application that is
>straightforward to use and anything but feature-bloated.
>
>One of the interesting
>ways that the powerful infrastructure shows in the user experience is the data tree,
>which can be automatically re-organised by date; apparently, more such
>re-organisation modes will be available in the future.
>
>For those wanting to keep
>everything in one place, Surfulater can probably facilitate collecting the
>content. For sharing content, the trial version of Surfulater can now work as a
>permanently free viewer.
>
>Last but not least, a rather obvious disclaimer: I am in no
>way associated with Neville’s business other than being his customer.
>
>alx
>
Posted by Bob Mackreth
May 22, 2007 at 04:28 PM
I’ll put in a good word for Surfulater, too. I registered a copy a couple months ago. As a hybrid between a web clipper and a two-pane outliner, it does what it’s designed for very well. Surfulater parses HTML more accurately than any other knowledge manager I’ve tested, and it has a very useful search function.
On the down side, the UI is just a bit quirky- eg, no “Edit” item in the menu bar, though cut/ copy / paste /undo functions are available through toolbar icons or right-click. You can set most font aspects for text you enter, but not color. Right-clicking the document icon in the tree pane- intuitive for most of us - does not bring up the normal set of choices; you have to select the label TEXT instead. Odd!
I’ve still got my fingers crossed that the much more powerful MyInfo will do a better job with web documents in version 4.0 as promised (broken record time!) but if Milenix disappoints me on that score, I’ll probably find myself choosing between Surfulater and OneNote for storing web content.
Posted by Cassius
May 23, 2007 at 12:57 AM
Well, I’ve tried the Surfulater trial again. It would not allow me to create a new article, nor even paste clipboard contents into an existing article. In both cases it told me that these are disabled in the trial version. NOT MUCH OF A TRIAL IF ONE CANNOT TEST IT!!!
From Surfulator’s help file, I learned that Surfulator saves Web pages as Attachments that one has to open in an external browser. But the single supplied file, “Knowledge Base” has 0 (ZERO) attachment, so I couldn’t even try that..
MyBase+WebCollect can save Web pages and display the saved pages automatically within MyBase. One can have more than one database open at the same time. Corresponding to each tree node is both a display of a saved Web page and a display of an RTF editor screen which displays clippings. One uses taps or CTRL-TAB to switch between them.
It can also edit the saved Web page and has full RTF editing capabilities. It also has indexed search, file compression, a “local” recycle capability (which can be cleared), file size optimization, and,a pop-up window that allows one to paste a copied (CTRL-C) selection into a MyBase file in a number of ways.
UNLESS SOMEONE CAN TELL ME HOW TO GET THE SURFULATOR TRIAL VERSION TO ACTUALLY ALLOW ME
TO TRY IT, I’LL STICK WITH myBase.
-cassius