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UltraRecall vs Web Research... my findings
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Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 12, 2007 at 01:55 PM
Jan - (I am assuming WB refers to Web Research)
>I reported this to support but haven’t heard back from them.
In my experience, WR staff usually answer emails within 24 hours. I expect the time-difference in office hours slows things up a little.
>Meantime, I’m wondering if there is not an easy way to link your WB pages to a UR item.
Yes; see my comment elsewhere [http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/397/20] on ...“the ability of WR to provide hyperlinks to its content that can be pasted into external programs - something the Admiral kindly ensured that Zoot could handle. Currently in WR the hyperlink is only to the saved file, not to its contents (paragraphs, sentences, words, etc). But this is still extremely useful if one wants to use WR as a well-organised repository for webpages, images, and so on, when used in conjunction with Zoot or other similar programs. (Incidentally, I am at something of a loss to understand why this feature is so rarely commented on when discussing WR, especially as it has been praised here in relation to Whizfolders: see http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/1833.)”
You can find the command on the Edit>Copy>Web Research Address of Document menu.
Derek
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 12, 2007 at 07:49 PM
JJ-
Like you, I’m a fan of WR, but - leaving the UR comparison aside for the moment - one thing that lets it down in comparison with Scrapbook on NetSnippets is the length of time it takes to get ready for saving, especially the first time it is used on opening my browser (I use Firefox, so can’t comment on its performance with IE, which may be faster).
Similarly, opening the program itself outside the browser seems to take an age. I’m running on a 2gig thinkpad with 780RAM, so I think things should be faster. I found this to be an issue with ContentSaver, its predecessor.
Do you find the same thing with WR?
Mind you, now that many programs use Net (although I don’t think WR does), this slowing down of response seems to be becoming more common…
Derek
Posted by JJ
Jul 13, 2007 at 02:50 PM
Derek Cornish wrote:
>JJ-
>
>Like you, I’m a fan of WR, but - leaving the UR comparison aside for the moment - one
>thing that lets it down in comparison with Scrapbook on NetSnippets is the length of
>time it takes to get ready for saving, especially the first time it is used on opening my
>browser (I use Firefox, so can’t comment on its performance with IE, which may be
>faster).
>
>Similarly, opening the program itself outside the browser seems to take
>an age. I’m running on a 2gig thinkpad with 780RAM, so I think things should be faster. I
>found this to be an issue with ContentSaver, its predecessor.
>
>Do you find the same
>thing with WR?
>
>Mind you, now that many programs use Net (although I don’t think WR
>does), this slowing down of response seems to be becoming more common…
>
>Derek
Derek,
I run WR on a older Dell laptop (celeron w/1GB of memory)...
When I start WR I open 3 collections (85MB + 90MB + 25MB) and it takes about 5 seconds to load.
I also run WR on my home PC (Athalon 3800 x2 w/1 gb mem) and it loads even quicker.
I use FireFox and find that some pages do take longer to save than others…. BUT in every case I find WR is much faster than UR when capturing a page. PLUS, I know WR will capture the page… with UR I also have to check.
I think I read that WR was developed with Visual Studio and does not use the .net framework.
I have one question…. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I was using NetSnippets long ago, it did not index the web pages captured…. Is this true????
-jj
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 13, 2007 at 11:24 PM
JJ -
Interesting. It must be some sort of resource issue for me, I guess. It took about 34 secs for WR to load for the first time on my notebook just now. I had three other programs open at the time and around 55 services running. Running from a standing start - no other software loaded apart from services of one sort or another - it takes around 30 secs. This is loading four collections of 32mb, 16mb, 81mb, 121mb - only 50mb more than you, but 6x longer to load! Must be something wrong somewhere, although I recall long loading times with ContentSaver on my previous Thinkpad.
I looked at the Taskmanager CPU and Pagefile usage and saw nothing out of the way in terms of poor performance while it was loading. I have always assumed that it was just one of those programs that take a long time to load. I’ll have to drop Macropool a line about it.
After WR has loaded, capturing web-pages in FF is quite quick, and my figures are similar to yours. The main difference is I don’t use WR in quite the same way you do. For obvious reasons I tend not to load WR routinely; it takes so long. This means that when I first go to use WR in Firefox it first has to load part (most!) of itself temporarily in memory in order to manage the saving process. This adds to the time taken to actually save the web-page, etc. One way or another, then until all or part of WR is in memory - at start of the day or at the point of first saving a document - I am kept waiting for quite a spell.
> I have one question…. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I was using NetSnippets long ago, it did not index the web pages captured…. Is this true????
Absolutely correct. NetSnippets has no indexed search, but because it does so little - just captures web content - there is very little waiting around. It’s similar in this respect to Scrapbook and both simply use the windows folder system as their “archive”. And although it doesn’t index its archive, any desktop indexed search engine will do so. This is very helpful if you want to search through both NS saved docs and other ones on your HDD at the same time. So sometimes less can be more.
Derek