Forum Posts Feed
Looks like a new version of Surfulater is about to be released.
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Oct 21, 2008 at 02:38 PM
Michael, I have yet to see Vista’s search tool give instantaneous results on any computer. It is better than in previous Window versions…but still nothing to write home about.
Surfulater’s search gives results within “seconds,” and highlights the search words in items containing it. It’s one of the best search tools I have worked with.
Surfulater’s tag system is very good - nested tags give you an “and” relationship - which is very helpful if you have 100s of items that fall under the top level tag, say Election 08. Nested tags would be, say, McCain, Obama, Palin, Fact Checking, etc. Selecting Election 08 and Obama would give all items tagged Election 08 AND Obama, but not all items on either the election or Obamma.
As well, Surfulater’s ability to clone items and to make cross reference links is very handy and well executed. I have no fears, as I have had with other programs of this type, of losing info because there are so many ways to get at it, and to see that a particular item is there. I use cloning and tags a great deal.
I like the fact that items show up complete with metadata fields.
Surfulater works equally well with Firefox.
And as I have said before, Surfulater offers the most accurate clipping ability that I have yet seen, including WR.
It is now better than Evernote 3. If one is interested in a desktop web clipping system Surfulater is the top choice IMHO. It beats EN 3 - EN 3 is a cross platform program, and in developing it some important chunks of EN 2 were left out, making EN 3 less useful for desktop web research.
I am thinking seriously of moving all my info stuff to Surfulater from MyInfo, with the exception of items that need metadata columns - if Surfulater developed that, I would use it for everything.
Daly
Michal wrote:
>Daly,
>
>WebResearch has a feature similar to Surfulater’s tags - only it’s called
>“categories” instead of “tags”. You can assign each WR item a category or a
>subcategory, and view the categories as a tree.
>
>I wonder though, are Surfulater
>items indexed/searchable using windows search (as JJ mentioned in a previous post)?
>With WR, when I type a word in the search box of Vista’s start menu, I instantly see all
>related WR items as well.
>
>Michal
Posted by Michal
Oct 21, 2008 at 04:57 PM
Daly, thank you for an elaborate reply.
I just downloaded Surfulater 3, will be comparing it to WR over the upcoming days. I hope the trial version is fully functional.
Damn. I tried to resist downloading another web clipper (I also have EN3)... But just when I thought I was out..they pull me back in…
Regarding windows search—well, matching search items start appearing as you type—since windows has already indexed the files—but I admit that for a complete word or more it might take about 2-3 seconds on my laptop (Dell XPS M1210, I think Dell stopped manufacturing the model over a year ago).
Michal
Posted by Graham Rhind
Oct 22, 2008 at 02:57 PM
Daly,
I know you are, or were at one stage, an enthusiastic user of Zoot, which also has the capability of archiving web pages. This being the case, apart from the very obvious differences in the way the data is presented and searched, what is for you the reason to use Surfulater above Zoot?
I’ve been slowly stabilising the programs I use for information management, and have been working at reducing their numbers (I even managed to get rid Ultra Recall by better use of Zoot). Most of my data archiving goes on in The Brain, but that only links to URLs (unless one feels inclined to save webpages as files or to cut and paste them to item notes, with various dodgy results ...). Surfulater, along with Zoot, has the ability to store the page so that the information remains available if the online page disappears (which does sometimes happen to me). Upgrading to Surfulater will put a spanner in the works of my nice neat information management strategy, but I’m keen to hear how the two programs compare :-)
Thanks!
Graham
Posted by Derek Cornish
Oct 22, 2008 at 08:50 PM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>Daly,
>
>I know you are, or were at one stage, an enthusiastic user of Zoot, which also
>has the capability of archiving web pages. This being the case, apart from the very
>obvious differences in the way the data is presented and searched, what is for you the
>reason to use Surfulater above Zoot?
Graham and Daly,
Tom (Zoot’s developer) has spent a lot of time getting the Zooter’s “Archive Web Page” feature to work properly. Using IE or Firefox it now reliably saves web pages as mht files to the windows directory you select, indexes them, and opens an item in the relevant Zoot database (also selectable) that is linked to the saved mht file. This item also contains the text of the web page.
I have found this feature so useful that I no longer use WR at all.
Derek
Posted by quant
Oct 23, 2008 at 12:05 AM
seeing that people are replacing UR or WR by Zoot, I thought I would install it ...
1. NOD32 recognizes it as a virus (NewHeur_PR virus)
2. after stopping NOD32, install fine
3. trying to run in:
“In order to run Zoot you must change the locale for non-unicode programs to a non-unicode language.” - program dies.
Never mind, are you talking about the same Zoot that has the following limitations?
- A single database may contain up to 32,000 items.
- A single database may contain up to 250 folders.
- A single item may be assigned to no more than 25 different folders.
- An item document may contain no more than 32,000 characters (around 10,000 words).
- plain text items only
or is that info old?