Posted on

Why I use Surfulater

I continue to be pleasantly surprised at the diverse range of uses Surfulater is being put to and the diversity of our customer base. This is both a strength and a weakness for Surfulater. It’s ability to be used so successfully by so many people for so many different tasks, is a real strength that speaks well for the underlying design and its flexibility and adaptability. The weakness comes in, in our difficulty in promoting Surfulater to such a diverse user base. It is clearly much easier to sell a product into a narrower, well defined market. That said we are making some steps to be more focused in our marketing efforts, which we hope will be fruitful. Of course for our users, this isn’t a weakness at all, far from it in fact.

And now to the real reason for this article. I’ve always been very interested in getting hold of real life user stories and I know our customers are interested in reading about how others are using Surfulater. J.William LaValley MD kindly stepped up and offered to write an article on his experience with Surfulater, which I present here in full and unedited, of course.

Why I use Surfulater.
 
I’m a “biogeek” physician who uses the internet for many hours each week for medical science research.  My projects require the ability to accumulate large amounts of related scientific articles and the capacity to access them, with annotations, comments and related links – quickly, efficiently and reliably.
 
I must be able to find new undiscovered relationships among complex textual and graphic information that has not been described before.  In the course of this study on the internet over the last 9 years I have tried numerous different applications to help me capture, store and organize the massive amount of information in this endeavor.
 
For a year I used Onfolio and it was slow, very cumbersome and inefficient – and it frequently crashed.  The files created in Onfolio frequently corrupted and could not be re-accessed – “not good”. 
 
Next, I tried Mind Manager.  It helped me map out the general organizational structure of my projects and to link data ‘notes’ and internet links to various topics.  Mind Manager was a better solution for me than Onfolio.
 
However, when using large amounts of textual data and related files (and I do mean really large) Mind Manager was (and is) slow and laborious to capture, link, organize, re-access, and use the information.  The biggest problem is the Mind Manager would frequently “freeze” when I tried to link the Mind Manager topics to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files.  Sure, Mind Manager can perform this function as it describes…the problem is that it takes a l-o-n-g time to do so when there are multiple topics linked to multiple portions of the same Excel file – and frequently the entire app just “freezes” – not good.
 
The result is the data is lost in Mind Manager and the app had to be closed down, restarted and the work was often lost – “worse than not good”.
 
Then, I stumbled onto Surfulater.  “Surfulater” seemed like an odd word to me – yet it made sense because internet surfing is such a big part of my work.  Surfulater has trial version that is risk-free so I tried it.
 
Wow.  My professional life changed.  Surfulater is literally saving lives by the amazing functional ability to gather large amounts of specific, targeted internet information and data – “on the fly” with just a few clicks.
 
Surfulater allows me to now literally ‘zoom’ through large amounts of information very quickly.  With Surfulater, I immediately and easily organize information, link new data to related data in the same file, link new data to related data in external files and folders on the same and other hard drives, and efficiently copy data to easily accessed related databases.   Surfulater lets me easily include comments, highlighting, do text formatting and editing, capture graphics, add links from related web pages…and much more.
 
Quickly and easily, from within Surfulater (and without opening my email application) I send the captured data to colleagues by built-in email function that automatically loads their addresses with a single click.  They can view it in their email without Surfulater.
 
I send this same data by email to other Surfulater users who plug it into their Surfulater databases and can now use it for their work.  I use Surfulater to create quick and simple web pages of simple HTML from the data that I have created myself.  Amazing.
 
Surfulater lets me surf swiftly while nearly effortlessly ‘scooping’ up important relevant information, into efficiently organized, easily accessed information.
 
Surfulater organizes my information in simple-to-use tree format.  Links made in Surfulater are lightning fast – there are no “freeze-up” delays in Surfulater when you are surfing fast, capturing information quickly, and linking it for re-access later
 
Surfulater lets me search any information in the Surfulater database by text word and returns each ‘hit’ with a highlighted reference.  I can see each “article” with one click.   Surfulater lets me sort the information by date captured or alphanumeric order of the title of the “article”.   Surfulater has advanced sorting features that allows me to sort sub-topics only without having to sort the entire database.
 
Surfulater lets me copy and paste sub-topics of one database into other Surfulater databases in a simple 2-click step – “very handy”.
 
Surfulater is the best data-gathering tool for any serious internet surfer.  The Surfulater Forum is actually relevant and helpful for answering questions, solving problems, and requesting new features.
 
Surfulater creator and code-author, Neville Franks, is extraordinarily responsive in the Surfulater forum and in developing customer-requested features in each update.
 
If you surf the internet and you want to capture, organize, save, inter-connect, link, search, re-access, send, sort, and otherwise use the information for any reason, then your best solution is to “surfulate” with Surfulater.
 
A dedicated Surfulater


 J.William LaValley MD 

Thanks again William. If you would like to follow in Williams footsteps we would love to hear from you. Contact details in the usual place, here. 

Posted on

Surfulater V2.00.30.10 Released

Surfulater V2.00.30.10 is the second of two releases in quick succession. With the V2.00.10.0 upgrade to enable multiple articles to be selected in the Knowledge Tree, Surfulater came out the other end a little worse for wear. I always knew that implementing multiple selection was going to be reasonably complex and impact on quite a number of areas, but I’m a bit annoyed with myself that two quite serious issues slipped through testing. The fact that they took a while to surface is some small conciliation, however it would of course been far better for everyone if they hadn’t existed in the first place. The most serious problem was fixed in V2.00.30.0 which has been out for almost a week now and the folks that had reported the problem have not had it reoccur so far.

The main new feature in the .30 release is that the Chronological Tree view has been updated with two new ways to group articles in the tree: By Week and By Month. These are in addition to the original Day/Week/Month view.  The “Show Articles in Chronological order” toolbar button, which is above the Knowledge Tree, now includes a drop-down arrow which enables you to select from one of the three available article groupings as follows:

Chronological View Toolbar button

And the resulting trees look like:

By Month

By Month

 

By Week

By Month

 

By Day/Week/Month

By Month

These new groupings follow on from feedback for the V2.00.20.0 release which enabled you to change the Date Created for articles. They will be of particular interest to people using Surfulater as a Journal or Diary. See the Help topic ‘Knowledge Tree Views’ for more information.

The final thing thing I’d like to show is how easy it is to create links between articles (See Also links) by dragging an article from the Knowledge Tree and dropping it on the ‘See Also’ field of the target article. See the Help topic ‘Creating Cross Reference links’ for further information.

(You need to use IE to see the movie. For some reason it doesn’t appear in Firefox!)

The Surfulater Download is in the usual places here and here.

Posted on

Surfulater V2.00.20.0 Released – Balance is important

Developing a product of any sort revolves around many different inputs and ideas. One that is all important is listening carefully to customer feedback and doing your best to meet your customers needs. Balance is also important, you simply can’t go and add every feature that everyone suggests or you’d finish up with a product that no one would want to use and you’d probably be broke because you’d put way too many resources into its development. I mention this because the latest Surfulater release, V2.00.20.0 is all about meeting customer needs.

As products evolve and more people start using them, they may be put to use performing tasks the product designers hadn’t ever considered. This is certainly true of Surfulater. In fact I’m sure I don’t know the half of what people are using Surfulater for. This isn’t too good from my point of view, but it speaks well of Surfulater that so many people find it, not only capable, but well suited to handle a variety of tasks above and beyond its core competencies.

The prime enhancements in this release revolve around the ability to reorder content in the Knowledge Tree using a new Advanced Article Sort, along with the ability to change the Date Created for Articles. Advanced sort enables you to sort the entire Knowledge Tree, or a Folder and optionally its sub-folders. Sorting can be done by Article Title or Date Created, in either ascending or descending order.

To access Advanced Sort right click on a Folder in the Knowledge Tree and select it from the context menu as shown here.

Folder Context Menu  Advanced Sort Dialog

Select from the various Sort options and then click Sort.

To change the Date Created for an Article right click on it and choose Set Date created from the menu.

Set Date Created menu and Date Picker

Choose the new date from the date picker window or click on Today or None, the latter leaving the date as is. When the current date is selected the time is set to the current time, otherwise it is set to 12:00AM.

These new capabilities are useful when you use Surfulater as a Journal or simply wish to move articles in time.

While we are talking dates one thing I’ve personally wanted in Surfulater is to be able to set Reminder or Follow Up dates in articles. Sometimes when I capture content I know I don’t have the time to read it then and there. The ability to pop-up a reminder in a week or so would be very handy here. Alas no one else has requested this yet, so it sits on the sidelines awaiting.

For the other changes and bug fixes in this release see the Release Notes in the Help or on the Forum.

Posted on

True Stories

I’ve collected some great stories from Surfulater users recently and with their permission I’d like to share some with you.

Hi Neville,
 
It has been a while since I’ve emailed you about your product but I just want to say that it has been over two years since I purchased Surfulater and I find myself using it for everything from research for work and graduate school papers, to my kids homework assignments, to keeping recipes, tracking travel information,etc. I do a lot of purchasing on the internet and I use it for those tasks also.  For school research I use it to track the results from my first line of investigation, eventually transferring some of the information into EndNote once I have made my final bibliographic selection.
 
I have a very short list of software products that I recommend to colleagues, friends, and family and Surfulater is always on my list.
 
Great product…still going strong!
 
Thank you,
Fiona Best

Why I bought the program: In the late 1960s, I took photographs for a Chrysler Motors comic book in which my parents had the only speaking parts. I still have an old, mouse-chewed copy of that comic book; the comic was published on the Internet two years ago, but taken down after only a month on-line. I wish I’d made a copy.

Finally, I hope Surfulater can help me to organize some of the mess of Internet
pages and illustrations I already have stored on my computer. This is something
I need more than a web spider or another note-taker.

M.B.

I thought I’d let you know that the reason I decided to purchase Surfulater after weeks of researching and testing different type of Web research management tools is because of your courteous and fast response to all my questions (not so common to see great customer service these days especially I wasn’t even a customer yet) and also the features that I was looking for in tool like this seem to be missing from the others (there were a few things also missing from Surfulater, but I’ll mention them later).  I literally have tried or looked at all the similar software out there.  I’ve tried Onfolio, NetSnippets (which has stopped their development), Web Research Professional (it came down to this one and Surfulater), Evernote, General Knowledge Base, iMiser, Furl, and quite a few other ones. 

Another big reason that I decided to purchase Surfulater is also because that you seem very open to the input to your customers’ suggestions and endeavor to improve the product.  The active and continual development of this software convinces me that this software will continue to get better.

A. Chang.

I’ve always encouraged users of our software to tell us what they honestly think about what we’ve delivered so far and where we are heading and I’m very pleased that quite a few do. At the same time there are many folks we never hear from, which may be a good thing or then again, may not be. It’s just as, if not more important, to be told any bad news, so we can ensure we address issues in the best way possible. Our support forums along with e-mail provide effective means to have these conversations.

If you’ve been holding back, reluctant to contact us why don’t you go and do it now. If we never hear from you, how can we meet your needs.

Posted on

New Surfulater release, V2.00.10.0 ready and waiting

A slower than I’d like start, release wise for the year, but there is lots happening behind the scenes. As I mentioned in my last blog post one of the most requested Surfulater capabilities has been the ability to select multiple articles in the Knowledge Tree. Well as they say, the wait is now over.

Multiple articles can now be selected and managed in the Knowledge Tree. This enables you to Copy/Cut and Paste multiple articles at once, Drag & drop them, Remove them, Add reciprocal ‘See Also’ references and use ‘Send To’ with them. This works both within and across Knowledge Bases making it easy to move or copy a selection of articles from one KB to another.

Harold Hauer has just posted on our Forums:

I couldn’t wait to try this feature –FANTASTIC!

And Perry Mowbray writes:

Hey 2.00.10 looks great!

Another common request has been to provide folks with a Free Surfulater Reader that anyone could use to view Surfulater Knowledge Bases. Well the good news is we’ve now delivered this with V2.00.10.0.

The plan was to actually create a new product which was just a Reader, much how Adobe Reader works. Ideally this would be a single .EXE file with no installation required. I’d still like to do this, down the track, but for now I’ve opted for a simpler solution. And that is folks download and install the Surfulater Free Trial, which reverts to a Free Reader at the end of the trial period. This gives them the extra benefit of being able to fully evaluate Surfulater, should they want to.

Another related and important change in this release is the ability open and view any Knowledge Base whilst Surfulater is in free trial mode, and not be restricted to just opening the MyKnowledge.Surfulater KB. This enables Surfulater to be used as Free Reader from day one, not just when the trial period is over. It also enables our users to get view access to their content on any PC they want to install Surfulater on, not just their licensed PC’s.

You can see the full release notes for V2.00.10.0 here.

Posted on

Surfulater, the next release …

One of the most requested Surfulater capabilities is the ability to select multiple articles in the Knowledge Tree. In hindsight it is clear that omitting this in the original design was a mistake. When you develop any type of product you have to work through an array of trade-offs, otherwise the product may never reach the market and will likely be cost to much. Opting not to include multiple selection was such a trade-off.

Leaving this out was a mistake for two reasons. First I didn’t realize how much our users would want to work with multiple articles and second it has turned out to be quite a chore to rework the code to implement multiple selection. It sounds simple enough on the surface, but it is quite complex once you dig down a bit.

Selecting multiple items is reasonably straightforward, apart from Ctrl+click which toggles the selected item. However the user interaction that follows is complex and tends to vary for each type of action. For example if you select three articles, right click on one and choose Copy then right click on a Folder and choose Paste what should happen with the selection. In the version of Surfulater you have now the selection moves to the pasted article. In the next version it keeps the selection on the original three articles. This brings it in line with how other Windows programs, such as Explorer, behave. But what happens when the original three articles are no longer selected when Paste is used – does the newly pasted article get selected or does the selection stay wherever it was?  And Paste is just one of a range of actions and associated outcomes that can be performed on a multiply selected set of articles.

Working though the possible permutations for each command is tedious and deciding on what is the most desirable outcome isn’t necessarily straightforward. And what I think is desirable you may not!

I’ve also changed the behaviour of Right mouse click for the next release so that it no longer changes the current selection. These and other changes make it easier and more intuitive when working with selected items in the Knowledge Tree.

Posted on

A Great Surfulater Review

Just after Christmas Ercan Cem contacted me about reviewing Surfulater on his blog Digital World, which was most welcome, and is in fact something we’d like to see more of. We’ve had some good coverage recently, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but there always seems to be more pressing things occupying my time.

James Fallows mentioned Surfulater in The Atlantic in Nov 2006 in his article Making Haystacks, Finding Needles.

A relatively new entry, Surfulater, created by a veteran developer in Australia, differs from most of the others in the elaborate ways it allows you to comment on, classify, and even edit the material you have collected. For instance, if you’ve copied and stored a blog entry or a passage from a Web site, you can enter notes of your own—“There he goes again!” “This detail is interesting—right alongside the clip, and search for those comments later on. It also has a variety of special categorization tools.

A few weeks back a new customer mentioned he heard about Surfulater in the Washington Post, but I’ve yet to find out any details. Library Clips wrote an article Surfulater for PIM back in August 2006. Bob Stumbel’s EVERYTHING 2.0 list includes Surfulater in his OS 2.0 – Update section, which doesn’t seem the right spot to me.

Back to Ercan’s review which you can find at Great Information Manager: Surfulater. Ercan does a very good job of explaining the need people have for Surfulater and how it fulfills this need. Best if you go and read it for yourself.

If you write a blog or a newsletter or know someone that does and would like to help more people find out about Surfulater, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

Posted on

Surfulater V2.00 Released. The 11th and final release for 2006.

Ok the dust has settled, and there have been no real problems to speak of, with the Surfulater V2.00 release, I’m very pleased to say. I want to briefly run through some of the new features in this release, so go and grab a cup of tea or coffee and read on.

Our first stop is the Knowledge Base (KB) Tab Bar which enables you to quickly switch from one knowledge base (database) to another.

Knowledge Base Tab Bar

This has been enhanced to include the drop down KB selection menu, shown above, a new IE7 style Close button on the active tab, the ability to rearrange tabs in whatever order you want by dragging them to the desired location, and a new right click context menu that lets you Close, Open and Create KBs, as shown below. The KB selection menu is handy when you have lots of KBs open, as it saves having to scroll the tabs to locate the KB you want.

Tab Bar Context Menu

If you haven’t ventured as far as using multiple knowledge base files, you should give it some thought. Don’t go overboard creating lots of KBs though. I’ve got 24 at last count, with a number past their use by date. For example I used three KBs when planning a trip to Europe last year, but these are of little use right now. They may be in the future though.

See the Help topic: Power Features|Knowledge Base Tab Bar for more information on the Tab Bar and The Basics|Working with Files (new/open/close) about creating new KBs etc. 

Next up is the new Add Links to Files… capability. Surfulater has had the ability to attach and permanently store external files in its knowledge bases for some time, but sometimes you simply want to store a link to a file and not store the file itself. You were able to do this, but it was cumbersome to say the least.

Add Links to Files works like adding Attachments with the only difference being the end result. You can select and add links to multiple files using a standard Windows File|Open style dialog. 

Another new way to add links as well as attachments is to drag files from Windows Explorer and drop them on the Attachments field of an Article or Folder.

 

Attachments & Links

 

When you drop the files (release the left mouse button) a menu lets you choose whether to add links to the files or attach them to the article. Also new in this release are the images shown in the screen shot above, which indicate whether a file is a link or an attachment. New CSS styles have also been added, so the mouse over hover color is different for links and attachments.

See the Help topics: Power Features|Attaching & Linking Files to Articles and the Release Notes for more on this.

Next is a most welcome new and quick way of appending content to existing articles without having to switch to Surfulater. For example let’s say you’ve just added a new article from your Web Browser and then want to add more content from the same web page or even a different page. To do this select the content you want to capture, copy it to the Windows Clipboard and then press the new Append Clipboard to Article Hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+. by default). Surfulater can then either stay hidden in the Windows System Tray or come to the foreground. You can of course append new content from any program, for example MS Word, Adobe Acrobat etc.

For more on the Append Clipboard to Article Hotkey see the Help topic: Power Features|Appending content to Articles.

Ok sit tight, just two more new features to go for this wrap up.

It has been brought to our attention that not everyone wants to use My Documents\My Surfulater as the default Surfulater data files folder, so we’ve added a new item to the Preferences dialog that lets you set the Data Folder as you desire.

 

Updated Preferences Dialog

 

See the Data Folder field at the bottom of the screen shot, well that’s where you set it. I personally use the Shared Documents folder, as you can see above (indicated by “All Users”). This screen shot also shows the new Append Clipboard to Article Hotkey setting.

For more on Data Folders see the Help topic, Power Features|Preferences.

And to conclude there are six new UI (User Interface) Themes, which include various Office 2007 themes and a new UI Theme Toolbar.

Surfulater Screen Shot with new Office 2007 Theme

This screen shot shows the Office 2007 Obsidian Theme, along with the new UI Theme Toolbar.

And for anyone interested that’s the mATX Case I’ve just bought for a new mini PC I’m going to build over Christmas. I’ve never built modern day PC before and am looking forward to this, albeit with some trepidation.

There are a more things in this release, including all important bug fixes, which you need to go and read about in the Release Notes in the Help or on our Support Forums.

It has been a great year, made all the more so by your support, feedback and words of encouragement. There is still plenty of important and interesting work yet to be done and I look forward to watching this unfold in 2007, as no doubt you do. I also look forward to continued growth of our customer base in the year ahead.

If I don’t post again before Christmas thanks again to everyone, have a great Xmas and a very Happy New Year.

Neville Franks 

Posted on

It’s the 13th, but not Friday and Version Two-dot-oh has been released

A short and sweet post to let everyone know that Surfulater Version 2.00 has been released and is available for download.

With some releases everything just falls nicely into place and away you go. This one was just a bit on the troublesome side. Some problems were of my own making and others were in the latest release of a 3rd party code library that Surfulater uses. Together they conspired against me and delayed the release by at least a week.

But the good news is a new release is out and better still we’ve progressed to Version 2 which I’m very pleased about and is a great way to end the year. This is the eleventh release for 2006, each one building on the last and moving Surfulater further along the path to world net to knowledge domination. Whoops, sorry. I meant it is continuing its journey to meet your needs and wishes, to make it the absolute best program of its type out there.

On a more serious note I plan to write about the new features and enhancements in Version 2 shortly. In the meantime you can jump on over and read the release notes.

Now I just have to hope that the 13th (not Friday) is reasonably uneventful. I nearly waited another day to put the release out, true dinks.

Posted on

Its not unusual to… (feel free to sing along)

It’s not unusual for folks to tell us how much they love using Surfulater, but we don’t get much feedback about the Surfulater web site. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I received the following e-mail from Deborah Merritt who has recently discovered and purchased Surfulater.

Neville,

I’ve been playing with this for just a short time, but I love the program.  I have no experience at all with programs like this.  But for a long time I have wanted some sort of program to organize my research.  I’m a professor and started out in the days when we used notecards!  Just out of curiosity, I put “research software” into google and started looking at a few of the programs that turned up.  I hadn’t even thought about a program that primarily organized material from the web.  But as I thought about it, I realized that most of my research now–even from scholarly journals–is online.  So I kept browsing.  I liked your site because (1) it referred to full text searching, and (2) there were “fun” features and it didn’t seem to take itself too seriously.  I decided to give the free download a try.

After just an hour or so, I was hooked.  I happily purchased the software and have been continuing to enjoy it.  Thanks so much for developing this.  I’m starting slow, with the basic features, but I’m sure that soon I’ll be checking the blog and forums for more advanced ideas.  Cheers!  Debby

Deborah J Merritt
John Deaver Drinko/Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law
Moritz College of Law
The Ohio State University 

When we designed the Surfulater web site I wanted to make sure it looked good and got our message across as quickly and simply as possible. Often you visit a Web site and leave without having any idea what the site was about. I’ve read statistics that indicate you have about 5 seconds to grab someone’s attention, before they’ll give up and move on. When your business relies on sales from your Web site, you really do want folks to stay somewhat longer than those 5 small seconds. I’ve written here before about having to pander to search engines, instead of writing for your readers, which is really infuriating. Getting the balance right is the hard part, a bit like writing software.

So it was great to get Deborah’s e-mail and as I told her at the time it made my day, which hadn’t been a particularly good one! We’ve had a few more exchanges since and I’m pleased to say Deborah is one very, very happy Surfulater user. This is an excerpt from an e-mail I received from Debby yesterday

I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record, but this really was a tremendous help in gathering info.  I read lots of medical journals online, in addition to more popular websites, and it used to drive me crazy keeping all of this stuff straight.  So thanks again for everything!  Debby

In closing I want to let you know how we can help folks by providing Surfulater discounts. If you run a Forum, a Blog, a Web site, a User Group, a Newsletter etc. we can provide your readers or members with a discount. Of course this helps us by getting more people to find out about Surfulater and it helps you with special offers you can provide to your readers. It was opportune to mention this here as Debby moderates a forum and I’ve provided her members with a discount. So let’s help each other. Just drop me an email and we’ll get started – see the Surfulater Contact page for my e-mail address.

Until next time, have a great week,
Neville

PS. Another great new Surfulater release out soon.