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Surfulater V1.95, B0.10 released

I started writing about the new Surfulater release a few hours ago, and that turned into One or many Knowledge Bases and Tree Filters, so here I am again.

The reason I wrote about whether to use one or many knowledge bases, relates to the most important new feature in this release, which is the ability to copy or move folders and articles from one knowledge base to another. This has been needed ever since I updated Surfulater to enable you to use multiple knowledge bases.

A message I received earlier today from David Britton sums this up nicely.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for this latest version, especially the ability to cut and paste articles between databases.

I have a lot of databases that need consolidating and better organization, and now I can do that.

I don’t tend to plan ahead very well, so the ability to clean up things after several research binges is very welcome.

Sincerely,
David R. Britton Jr.

I suggest you read the Help Topic Copy/Move Articles & Folders across Knowledge Bases before using this new feature.

Other enhancements in this release, include the ability to expand and collapse the entire tree or all folders in a branch, the ability to only show articles for a given folder, so that it is easier to move articles around in the tree, reorganization and updates to the Help, plus other bits and pieces as documented in the Release Notes which are here and in the Surfulater Help.

While I was writing the previous article I discovered a nasty bug in yesterdays V1.95.0.0 release where Surfulater would  crash when you copied or moved an article in the tree. I couldn’t believe my eyes when this happened. It was caused by a a silly oversight I made while writing the code to copy across databases. The good news is it was easy to fix, as you can see by this rapid release of V1.95.0.10 which can be downloaded here.

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One or many Knowledge Bases and Tree Filters

Their are two schools of thought when it comes to filing information; store everything in one big file or break things up into smaller, easier to manage, separate files.

When I designed Surfulater I went down the path of one big file, thinking this would make Surfulater easier to use, because you didn’t need to go around opening, closing and creating files. It didn’t take long at all for our users to tell us they really did want to use multiple files and Surfulater was changed to suit. Their is no right or wrong way to handle this, although some may disagree. It is a matter of what works best for each individual.

The argument for one big file stems from the point of view that all content should be stored together in one place, and the software provides sufficient means to view and work with various subsets of information, to overcome the problem of managing and working with what otherwise might be overwhelming. For example you could hide all folders except those in a specific branch, or only show articles that match some search criteria. You can think of these as filters which strain out most content, leaving behind only the juicy relevant bits.

Surfulater already has some capabilities that let you restrict the content shown in the Knowledge Tree. For example you can hide all articles except those in a specific folder or hide all articles period, or show all folders fully expanded, without any articles. And there is the Chronological tree view that shows content according to when it was added. These are a good start but we need to do more and will.

Fortunately the tree control I’ve written for Surfulater is very fast and was designed to enable tree items to be shown or hidden at will, without having to re-populate the tree from scratch. You can see this for yourself by using F9 or Show Articles and notice that the tree is instantly updated, even when it contains a large number of items. Without this capability, filtering a large tree would be impractical.

So the groundwork has been laid to enable us to provide more ways to filter information to help you focus on what’s important at a particular point in time. I’ve got several ideas for filters including letting you create your own via say a search string. I’d welcome your suggestions on this.

I need to wrap up as I’m told some of my posts are getting a bit long. I’ll end with a few comments. Multiple knowledge bases currently work best for me. This may change as more sophisticated capabilities are added like filters and keywords, but I somehow doubt it. Trees are well trees, and the bigger they get the more time you waste working the tree, instead of getting things done.

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Our first release for 2006. An exciting year ahead.

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.

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Surfulater V1.94, B0.0 released

A new year, and a nice new release to get everyone off to a great start. There are two specific new capabilities in this release I’m very pleased about.

Earlier in the year my good friend, musician and software developer Russell Robinson mentioned he wanted a way to easily add more content from a Web page to an existing article. You can of course use Copy in the Browser and Paste in Surfulater, but this is a bit clumsy and takes more steps (and time) than one likes. Russell suggested adding a new item to the Browser context menu, something like “Surfulater: Append content to Article”. While I basically liked the idea there were two points against it. First Internet Explorer has a limit to the number of items that will fit on its context menu, and once you exceed this, items fall off the bottom and can’t be used. Next I feel there is a need to keep the decision making process within the Web Browser as simple as possible. The more “Surfulater: xxx” menu items we add, the more the user has to stop and think about which one to use, which gets in the way of what we are trying to do. In the end I added Russell’s request to the todo list to ponder on some more.

The next call to action came from John Rivera’s Forum post Adding web content to an existing article. My first reply was along the lines of what I said above, but fortunately for us all John persisted and suggested adding “Append clipboard contents here” within Surfulater itself. I really liked this, as it fits nicely with the new Clipboard Hotkey and “New Article from Clipboard” features and doesn’t add more clutter to the Web Browser context menu. Further it has an extra advantage in that you can append the contents of the clipboard to any field in an article.

 

Append Clipboard to Field
 

The bottom line is you can now quickly and easily add more content from your Web Browser, a Word Document etc. to an existing Surfulater article. Thanks Russell and John.

The next new feature I want to mention is Attach File… which makes it easier to attach a file to a Surfulater article. Attach File uses a File|Open style dialog where you select the file you want, press OK and it gets added to your Surfulater knowledge base, appearing in the Attachments field. You can still use Windows Explorer + Paste to attach files, but the new method provides a quicker and easier way to permanently save files inside your Surfulater database.

 

Attach file to the current Article
 

Other changes in this release affect menus and toolbars, with new items added to both and a new toolbar layout.

The Article menu now includes Send To…, Go to the Search Results, plus the new Attach File…

 

Surfulater Article Menu
 

If you’ve been following my writings you’ll know how much I’m trying to keep Surfulater as uncluttered as possible. Adding the Article menu to the main menu bar (in the last release) wasn’t an easy decision, as it only duplicates items already available elsewhere and I don’t much like duplication. In the end I decided it was worthwhile having, especially for new users, as it puts some commonly used commands where they can’t easily be missed.

The ability to add content from the Windows Clipboard has been on the todo list for some time, but I have to say I didn’t realise how important and truly useful this was and how pleased I am with Clipboard capabilities added in the last release and this one. These latest features expand Surfulater into new dimensions for saving content from most any application, beyond its main role of saving web content. Together with the ability to attach files, you can truly keep all of the information that’s important to you, in one easy to find spot.

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Surfulater V1.93, B0.0 released

I’m really pleased with this latest release of Surfulater. It includes several important new features that have been on the todo list for a while.

First up you can now highlight important fragments of text (think highlighter pen on paper), so they are easy to spot the next time you look at an article. I had a few problems coding this and went off down the wrong track, loosing several days in the process. It turned out to be quite easy in the end and I was able to build on some code I’d already written a while back.

Simply select the text you want to highlight (or markup) and click on the text highlighter toolbar button. You can also choose from a range of highlighter pen colors.

Text Highlighter Toolbar Button
Text Highlighter Colors
 

Highlighting can just as easily be removed by selecting the highlighted text, right clicking on the selection and choosing Remove Text Highlight from the context menu. You can also use the context menu to highlight the text. I was quite surprised that some other programs I looked at, didn’t have any way to remove highlighting.

Selection Context Menu
 

See the Help topic Power Features|Highlighting text for more information.

The next important new feature is the ability to create new articles from content in other Windows Applications. For example lets say you have some information in a Microsoft Word document that you’d like placed in a Surfulater article. You can do this in a few simple steps. First in the Word document select the text and images you want in the Surfulater article, copy this to the Windows Clipboard and finally press the Surfulater Clipboard Hotkey or use Article|New Article from Clipboard from the main menu. You will now have a new Surfulater Article containing what you had selected in Word.

The ability to capture clipboard content considerably broadens Surfulater’s information gathering capabilities and opens the doors to a range of new uses and users. Just like Web capture, Clipboard gather can happen with Surfulater minimized to the Windows System Tray or hidden behind other programs, so that it doesn’t interrupt what you are doing. And of course the Clipboard Hotkey is customizable. See the Help topic Power Features|Creating New Articles from the Clipboard for more information.

The final main change in this release is the addition of the Article menu to the main menu bar. If you’ve been reading this blog or our support forums you will know that my goal is to keep Surfulater as uncluttered and simple to use as possible, while still being incredibly useful. So I had to toss and turn a bit before adding the Article menu, as it does add a bit of clutter. However I feel it is justified, as it directly exposes important Surfulater capabilities that may not be all that obvious, especially to first time users. It also includes functions that are not available elsewhere and is a placeholder for future features.

There are some other nice new touches in this release and a few bug fixes, all of which are described in the Release Notes in the Help and in the Download Forum.

As always please do let me know what you think about this release and Surfulater in general. I’m waiting for your call.

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Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road

I’ve been asked to write about my vision for Surfulater and decided a Blog post would be a good place for this. I’m afraid it is a bit long winded as I want to lay down some background material so readers will know where I am coming from. I’m told vision statements contain lots of motherhood gobbledygook. Excuse me for excluding such fluff and for not being as visionary as some may like.

I’ve been designing, developing and publishing software for over 20 years. For a number of years I worked with a team of programmers on vertical market applications, in a company of which I was a director. For the past 15 years I’ve worked predominantly on my own, on a product named ED for Windows which is a full featured programmer’s editor. ED is a very large and complex application, with a large and diverse user base who place many demands on it. It is a highly configurable application and can be extended via a built-in scripting language. It also supports some 35+ programming languages. Bottom line – a big, complex, powerful application that most people will never fully utilize.

For quite some time I’d been keen to develop other products and I finally made a small start in late 2003. I spend a lot of time on the Internet researching all manner of things. A lot of the time it is to do with programming, but also business, travel and other personal interests. I was very frustrated by the poor tools available to collect and save information that I found while surfing, and needless to say Bookmarks and Favorites just don’t cut it. So the idea for Surfulater was born. Continue reading “Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road”

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Surfulater web site updated – Your Help needed

I’ve just spent some time updating the Surfulater web site, due largely to some prodding by Stephane Grenier. At Stephane’s suggestion I’ve added a new page Success Stories and Testimonials which contains some great stories from our customers and a range of testimonials from users and reviewers.

We continually hear from people how impressed they are with Surfulater and how much it is helping them, which is absolutely fantastic, however it is quite difficult to get detailed success stories. They take a lot of effort on your part and everyone is so stretched for time these days. I’d like to give a special thanks to Anthony Yeats, Cambridge Earth Sciences Limited for his great story.

I’m very keen to get more of these stories for two reasons. The first and obvious one is to put them on the Web site, but more importantly I want to get a better picture of what kinds of projects or tasks Surfulater is being used for. I do know that Surfulater is being used by lots of people for lots of different purposes, but if I can get more detailed information I can apply that towards the future development and direction that Surfulater takes. So I’d like to issue this small plea for your assistance – help!!

Moving right along. I’ve also added a Site Guide page that will be of particular interest to our first time visitors. The Site Guide includes links to each page, along with a brief description of the topic of the associated page.

Other than that I did a few little tweaks here and there.

I’ve been asked on another forum:

Could you share your product “vision” with us? From its name and description it seems clearly web-content targetted, however its feature set –and the development planned- sound more ambitious.

This was definitely pause for thought and I’ve already put pen to paper. I’m not into motherhood statements, so it might not be your normal “vision” statement, but hopefully I’ll convey what I think has been asked of me. Expect to see something quite soon.

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Surfulater Content Style Issues

A few people have mentioned that sometimes content they capture from Web pages into Surfulater doesn’t display using the same styles used on the originating Web page. I want to explain why this occurs.

First let me say that if you capture complete web pages, this isn’t an issue. It only occurs with content displayed in the Surfulater content window, and that’s the key.

All content in Surfulater uses HTML. HTML has default styles which can be overridden by Cascading Style Sheets or CSS as commonly referred to. By styles I’m referring to things such as font size, color, bold, italic etc.

As an example lets look at how a paragraph style works. Text inside a paragraph tag <p> will either use a default style dictated by your Web browser, a style embedded in the web page or and style in an external style sheet. The last two cases override the browsers default style and cause all paragraph text to be displayed in some other style, a larger bold font for example.

Surfulater enables you to view all of the articles in a folder at once, which is a great feature that many people want and one that sets Surfulater apart from the competition. What this means however is that you are most likely viewing HTML captured from a whole range of Web sites, each with its own Cascading Style Sheet. So paragraph’s on one Web site may well be displayed with quite different styles to its next door neighbour .

This mix of styles (CSS) from different Web sites basically makes it very difficult, if not impossible for us to use the same styles as the original site, simply because they will all conflict with each other. For this reason we don’t even bother bringing across external CSS information when we capture selected content.

The story is quit different when we save complete Web pages though. In that case we are only ever dealing with a single web site and only ever display a single page from the one site at a time. We capture all embedded and external CSS when we capture the web page and use that in turn when we display the page again.

Surfulater does use its own Cascading Style Sheets, so we can offer a good degree of control over the styles used in the content window. At present we have two CSS’s. One is used when E-Mailing content from Surfulater (surfulater.css) and the other is used for the Content window and is embedded inside Surfulater. I plan to pull this out and make it an external file in a future release. This will enable styles to be set for headings, paragraphs etc. In fact my example above which used paragraph’s, wasn’t a very good one as heading tags are the ones that show up worst.

So the bottom line is we can improve on the current situation and will, however it is unlikely we’ll see the exact same styles as on the original web page, unless of course you save and attach the entire page!

Update 26 Nov 2005 Putting ones thoughts in writing often helps you to see things that were hidden away before. And such is the case here. I can now see a way clear to get the styles to match up correctly. I just need to write the code and see if I’m right.

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Surfulater V1.92, B0.0 released

I wrote last week that Surfulater V1.92, B0.0 would be released this week and it has. It is great to see another new release hit the streets, especially one with new features you’ve been eager to get hold of. These include Printing, Print Preview and Page Setup, along with the ability to sort articles and folders, plus a few other bits and pieces. It is also great to be back coding again and to watch Surfulater take a few more important steps in its evolution.

As always please do tell us how we are going with Surfulater and what capabilities you’d like to see added to make it ever more useful to you.

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New Surfulater Firefox Extension available

Unfortunately the Firefox Extension we wrote for Surfulater stopped working in Firefox V1.5. After a bit of digging around and head scratching it seems that the Firefox developers have changed some code in Firefox which broke our extension, and I imagine others as well.

I happened to mention this to Stephane Grenier and he replied about similar problems he’s had:

That’s actually one of the issues we’ve encountered too with LandlordMax with open source software, they have a tendency to make more drastic changes in their code base with less attention given to who may be using it.

I tend to steer away from using open source software for a range of reasons, and this will be just another one. Backwards compatibility is extremely important in software development, it is a burden we simply have to carry.

The good news is that I’ve been able to update the code to use alternate methods and now have a new release of the extension which works with the latest Firefox 1.5 RC1 release as well as earlier releases. I’ve also updated the Surfulater images the extension uses, to the latest ones.

To install the new Surfulater Firefox Extension go to the Download page and install the extension as per the instructions there. This will replace your current extension with the new one. Remember to restart Firefox after installing. The new Surfulater Extension is V1.5. You can check this using Tools|Extensions in Firefox.

Hopefully the extension will continue to work as future releases of Firefox come out.