WHERE WAS THAT WEB PAGE AND WHEN DID I SEE IT?
It happened to me again the just the other
day. I was surfing the net and saw something that triggered one of
those serendipitous moments. It's funny how the mind works that way.
You see something and all of a sudden you remember that you saw
something else that causes you to come up with a whole new idea or
move in a direction you may not have otherwise considered. The
trouble is that there's a good chance you won't remember exactly
when or where you saw the website you're now trying to relocate.
Oh sure there's your web browser's history file that keeps track of
every web page you've accessed but have you ever really tried to use
that as a reasonable resource? A browser's history file consists of
a new folder that's automatically created every day. Within each of
those folders is a chronologically ordered listing of every website
you visited for that day.
Now if you only surf onto a few pages a day, chances are that you'll
be able to reconstruct the time and location of the page you are
trying to locate again. But if you're someone who has a whole lot of
Internet interaction, then trying to find a page you saw a few days
or weeks ago is tantamount to finding a virtual needle. And the
website URLs listed in the history file more than likely aren't
going to be much of a help. Website addresses can be really cryptic
in most cases so just looking at long lists of them isn't going to
do you much good in your quest to find that holy web site.
In much the same way as a picture is better than a thousand words,
so is an actual image of a website better than that same number of
text addresses. You will have a much better chance of spotting
that elusive website if you actually see it. And that's exactly what
BrowseBack from Smile On My Mac does for you. And while that's the
basic idea behind BrowseBack, the utility also offers additional
features that let you organize previously visited websites by a
specific topic, and even find websites that might have changed or
even been completely removed since you last surfed in that
direction.
When you initially install BrowseBack, the utility will ask how far
back you want to maintain your browser history. Be careful here
because it takes around ten minutes or so for every day back you
wish to begin the history. For me, I found it best to go back
only a day and then let BrowseBack do its thing from that point on.
Once you have BrowseBack installed and activated, you just browse as
you would normally do. But when the time comes to find a previous
website, no longer do you need stare at cryptic URLs. When you
activate BrowseBack, the entire screen goes to a milky white color
and you see an overlay of every webpage presented to you in a
thumbnail format. Looking at the BrowseBack display reminds me of a
deck of cards that's spread out on a table. As you move the mouse
pointer over the spread of thumbnail webpage images, each webpage
moves up, forward and magnifies making it easier to see and read the
page's contents. This animated action looks much the same way as the
Macintosh Dock does as you glide the mouse cursor over it. Apple
refers to it as the Genie effect and I guess that name is as good as
any.
BrowseBack displays the thumbnail page spreads three at a time with
scrolling arrows at the beginning and end of the page rows. These
let you move to the next row of thumbnails as well as jumping to the
very beginning or end. In addition to seeing the actual page,
BrowseBack will also show you other related information such as its
title, URL and the date it was last accessed by you.
You can further refine your search by the actual content of the
visited web pages via keywords as well as filtering by a start and
end date. And when you do find that elusive web page, just click on
it and you're taken there instantly. BrowseBack will also let you
export it as a PDF file. Currently, BrowseBack supports most
of the major web browsers like FireFox, Safari and Internet
Explorer.
BrowseBack runs on Macintosh OS X 10.4 and later and sells for
$29.95. If BrowseBack lets you find just one of your lost web pages,
it's worth the money.
www.smileonmymac.com
| Craig Crossman is
a McClatchy-Tribune newspaper columnist writing about computers and
technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on
computers and technology, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio
Network® and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network®, weeknights at 10PM Eastern
time. Visit his website at http://www.computeramerica.com |
Jump to:
[ Index of Craig's Columns | Main
Columns Page | Computer America Home Page ]
|
