The Surfulater Web site is overdue for a major makeover, both visually and its words. We aren’t doing a good enough job at quickly explaining what Surfulater does and why it can be so useful for people who spend any time doing research.
Firewalls are wonderful things except when they aren’t.
All PC users are faced with a never ending onslaught from rogues trying to gain access to their PC. They may want to steal your personal details or hijack your PC and use it to send out a flood of spam.
There are various things you can do to prevent such nefarious events from occurring.
Continue reading “Firewalls are wonderful things except when they aren’t.”
Surfulater Version 3.30.0.0 released with Tree Snapshots & updated Firefox Extension
This latest release builds on Surfulater’s useability, especially when working with larger knowledge bases, it enhances Knowledge Tree Filters and provides an updated Surfulater Firefox Extension enabling Surfulater to work once more for clean installations of Firefox Version 3.6.
Firefox Version 3.6 and the Surfulater Firefox Extension may not work
The current Surfulater Firefox Extension does not work if you do a clean installation of Firefox Version 3.6. If you upgrade to Firefox V3.6 from an earlier version of Firefox the Extension will continue to work correctly.
Continue reading “Firefox Version 3.6 and the Surfulater Firefox Extension may not work”
It’s a wrap – Surfulater Version 3.20.0.0 released for Xmas
Surfulater Version 3.20.0.0 is now available and includes some great new features to end another great year of Surfulater development.
Our new Screen Clipper lets you capture any area of your screen and save it as an image in a Knowledge Base. You can create a new article which includes the screen clip or append screen clips to fields in existing articles.
Continue reading “It’s a wrap – Surfulater Version 3.20.0.0 released for Xmas”
What’s coming next Surfulater?
The very short answer to this even shorter blog post is for you to go and have a look at this New Web site I’ve just finished the first cut of and the answer should reveal itself.
After that if you are interested in a sneak peak of a pre-release of Screen Clipper, let me know. You might also want to sign up to be notified when it is released. And if you have friends or colleagues who could be interested in Surfulater, tell them to sign up and take advantage of the special Surfulater discount we currently have on offer.
This is the main new capability coming in the next release, but there is more which we’ll let you know about in due course.
Hope is not a plan
I was contacted by a long time ED for Windows customer yesterday who had visited our Surfulater Web site and commented on the quotes we have there, adding his own “Hope is not a plan”. I’d not heard this before and it took me aback thinking how appropriate it was in terms of Surfulater and more broadly anyone who uses a PC.
Most everyone with a PC spends time on the Internet, sometimes just stumbling almost randomly from site to site, but often searching for specific information to solve a particular problem. It could be researching the purchase of a new TV, Camera, Car etc. or trying to gather information on a medical condition, plan a family holiday, get help with a school assignment and on it goes.
We all know the Internet is an addiction and that we can and do spend countless hours trying to wheedle out every last piece of relevant information we can. But what happens with all this hard won information? For most people, not much. They’ll read as much as they can and do their best to absorb it. They may also set a bookmark in the hope they can find the page and content again, so they can research some more.
But “Hope is not a plan”; can you find the bookmark, if not, are you prepared to put the time and effort into trying to find the web page all over again. And if you do just happen to find it, will the content you think you saw before still be there now! Worse still the entire site may no longer exist.
The internet has the potential to greatly enrich our lives by presenting us with a wealth of incredibly useful information. Wise readers will plan to copy and keep this information, not hope that they may be lucky enough to find it again in the future. And there is a good chance they’ll use Surfulater to do just that.
“Hope is not a plan” is a truism that applies everywhere. People hope that the hard drive in their PC never dies, if it does they hope they have a “good” and recent backup to recover their many, many important documents, financial records, family pictures etc. They hope that if a fire comes racing through their house they will survive.
So the takeaway from all this is make plans, test the plans and work the plans, because “Hope is not a plan”.
Surfulater Version 3.16, Build 0.13 released
Not a lot to say other than this release fixes a particularly nasty crash that has been in Surfulater since Tagging was added in Version 3.0. Thanks to Nick Kneen this finally came to light a week and a bit back and has now been fixed. This release also gets Ctrl+V, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X etc. working again when editing items in the Knowledge Tree. They broke in V3.16.0.0 as recently reported by Alexandros Deligiannis in our support forums. Other than that please see the Release Notes in the Surfulater Help when you install this new release. The download is available in the usual places on our Home and Download pages.
Surfulater Version 3.16, Build 0.12 released
We’ve had some great feedback on the new Knowledge Tree filters introduced in the last release and I am very pleased that it has been so enthusiastically received. A comment we did get from a few people is they wanted the expand/collapse state of the filter pane to be retained across sessions, which is the main update in this release. Some folks also reported random crashes in V3.16.0.0 which turned out to be caused where Internet Explorer Version 6 was still being used. We have resolved this as well, however we would urge people who have yet to upgrade to IE7 or IE8 to do so as soon as possible, as there may well now be other problems related to IE6 that we are not aware of.
I have also updated the Knowledge Tree Filter to maintain independent settings for the Normal tree view and Folders Only tree view, fixed some bugs related to the new filter code and addressed some other recently reported issues.
The complete release notes are in the Surfulater Help and the download is on the Surfulater Download page.
Knowledge Tree Filters have arrived in Surfulater Version 3.16.0.0
My last blog post was about the new Surfulater Knowledge Tree feature that allows items in the tree to display text in bold, and italic and use background and foreground colors, so tree items can have a greater visual impact. I also hinted at an ulterior motive behind this, which I can now tell you is related to the big new feature in today’s Version 3.16.0.0 release, which is Knowledge Tree Filters.
Knowledge Tree Filters enable you to choose specific items and only those items to display in the tree. This lets you quickly drill down and locate a set of items of interest and then work with them, while everything else remains hidden out of your way. You can filter by Folder name, Article title or Tag name. For example you can elect to display only articles whose title includes “energy”. I have been using this constantly while developing and refining it, for well over a month now and I have to say I am finding it very, very useful indeed.
Let me start by showing you the new Knowledge Tree Filter user interface panel which lives at the top of the Knowledge Tree bar.
As you can see it is quite simple and hopefully self-explanatory. You pick whether you want to filter by Folder Titles, Article Titles or both and then type the text to filter on. Filtering occurs as you type with the results displayed in the Knowledge Tree.
This is a screen shot of the enhanced Knowledge Tree for the sample MyKnowledge database without any filtering applied.
Now the same tree filtered by Folder or Article Titles which contain the text “energy”.
Notice that the tree items that match the filter term “energy” have the matching text highlighted, in the same way search matches are highlighted in articles in the content window.
Only articles that include “energy” in their title are displayed. The ‘Folder-Article’ counts displayed in gray are the total number of articles in the folder, not the count of filtered matches. So the folder “Solar Power” has 4 articles, but only two match the filter and are thus visible.
Two folders “Solar Power” and “Pending Reading” do not include “energy” in their title and therefore do not match the filter as such. However they do contain articles that match and because ‘Search in: Articles’ is checked, these matching articles and thus their folders are shown. All other folders and articles are excluded or filtered out.
In the screen shot above ‘Search in: Articles’ is not checked and the filter is therefore only applied to Folder Titles. You can see that only two folders match and these are highlighted. Furthermore because the Articles filter is off no checks are performed on article titles and all articles in the matching folders are included in the results.
Knowledge Tree Filters can be used with all of the Tree views, not just the Folder (normal) view. These final two screen shots show the Chronological view filtered by “march” and the Tags view filtered by “power”.
  
Each Knowledge Tree view retains its own independent filter settings and filter status.
The 
button turns the filter on and off and the 
button collapses and expands the Filter panel. See the Surfulater Help topic: Power Features | Knowledge Tree Filters for more information.
As I mentioned at the start I’m finding Knowledge Filtering a most welcome new feature that lets me quickly locate and see a specific set of articles. I hope you find it as useful as I do.
Other updates in this release include support for Windows 7, several Vista specific issues fixed, an update to the Firefox Extension, updates to use new versions of third party libraries, another reduction in the Surfulater.EXE size, some more performance improvements and various bug fixes. Full details are in the Surfulater Help | V3 Release Notes topic.
This sparkling new release can be downloaded from the Surfulater Home page or Download page. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions on this new release.