A new year and the first of many new releases await with V1.94, B0.0 ready to go. As each week comes and goes we get more and more people finding out about Surfulater and the terrific capabilities it has to make saving and building knowledge so quick and easy.
For a product like Surfulater to be a success and thrive we need to keep building our customer base, which takes time. And of course to turn folks into customers, we must produce a product they want, one that meets a need and isn’t a pain in the backside to use. It is clear from the feedback we keep receiving that we are on the right track, both in meeting a need and having a product that is nice and easy to use.
One of our newest customers is Ville-Matti Niemi from Finland who wrote the following a few days back.
Hi Mr Franks
Thanks for your email and the fantastic product. My freetime is currently continuing studying utilizing the internet, and Surfulater is the best help i can imagine and ever used. I’ve been using it now for some days and i can say the program is worth every penny i paid for it.
Congrats for a very good, useful and first of all, very well made program.
Best regards and season’s greetings from the snowwy Finland.
Surfulater has proved itself popular in other ways too, with the last release being downloaded a record number over 12,400 times in just over two weeks. Most of these of were from China and other parts of Asia and if you haven’t guessed by now these were people trying to get a pirated copy. The same thing happened earlier in the year! It is very nice to be popular, but this isn’t quite the sort of popularity we are after as it doesn’t help our bottom line and diverts our attention away from what we need to be doing.
I received a great response to my recent post Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road, both in comments, e-mails and posts on other forums. Respondents were impressed to see the level of openness put forward, which is apparently unusual in the ranks of software developers. I’ve always been forthright in my writing as I don’t want folks to think that we might be doing something that we’re not. This blog is a new and interesting way of communicating with you and I hope you get as much out of reading it as I do in its writing.
One area where we are stumbling a bit is getting people to appreciate all that Surfulater can do. When my good friend Sue Robinson suggested the name Surfulater, I took to it straight away, and I still think it is a great name. The problem is Surfulater does more than just save content from web pages, especially with all the new clipboard capabilities that make it so easy to capture information from other Windows Applications. Plus you can manage other information like todo lists, contact lists, music catalogues etc. The name “Surfulater” is a bit of a hindrance to get the broader message out, something we just need to keep working on.
I’m excited about seeing where Surfulater goes in 2006. Number one priority is not to deviate from our overriding goals of keeping Surfulater simple and staying focused on what Surfulater is all about – capturing information so you have a permanent record all in one place where you can easily find stuff again.
Fundamental to Surfulater’s future are suggestions from our users, so please do give us your thoughts. It won’t cost you a cent and the rewards could be… well, rewarding.
I wonder if you could succinctly describe why Surfulater is better than Contentsaver. Contentsaver’ weakest link is its searching abilities–is Surfulater better (faster or allow searching across knowledge bases) and what’s the evidence? Thanks for your engagement.
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for you post. Peoples product requirements vary all over the place, so what is best for one isn’t necessarily best for another. As for which one is best, that’s for you to decide, not me. I can point you at our “Success Stories” page http://www.surfulater.com/success_stories.html and tell you our customers think Surfulater is great, as I’m sure the CS folks can.
Surfulater includes full text boolean search. You can use and, or, not ()’s and wildcards * and ?. It is fast and I have not had any comments from our users to indicate it isn’t fast enough. I will be adding advanced searching capabilities in a future release. It doesn’t search across KB’s at present.
Areas where Surfulater may better meet you needs than CS include:
– Surfulater includes a range of Article Templates which enable it to be used for Personal Information (PIM) tasks. These include Todo list, Contacts, Music Catelogue, Code Snippets etc. You can also create you own templates.
– New Articles can be created from Clipboard content. This lets you create content from other Windows applications, such as MS Word etc. in addition to the Web.
– Clipboard content can be appended to any article without having to use edit, move to position and paste.
– Related Articles and Folders can be cross referenced using ‘See Also’ links. This lets you build a web of related information.
– A single instance of an Article can be in any number of folders at once. This gets around the common problem of “which folder is best”.
– A Chronological view of all content shows articles in date added order, making it easy to locate your most recent articles.
– Articles include Metadata, Comments, See Also links, Attachments and Thumbnails. Everything is in the one place and is edited in situ.
– You can see the full content of all Articles in a Folder at once vs. just one Article (Document) at a time.
– Articles are (optionally) included along with Folders in the Tree so you don’t waist screen space with a separate window listing documents.
– Text is stored in open industry standard XML, not an Access Database. Further Article Templates are plain HTML and also stored in the XML File.
– Files of any type can be Attached to Articles and Folders. eg. Word Docs, PDF Files, ZIP files etc. They are then opened in their native application. You can also Link to external files.
There’s more, but I’ve already gone a bit beyond succinct. 🙂
I suggest you also look at the “Compare Us” page: http://www.surfulater.com/compareus.html and “Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road” http://blog.surfulater.com/2005/11/21/surfulater-under-the-hood-and-down-the-road/
I hope that’s been of help.