Coming Soon

Lately I've been working on some updates to Web Helper Browser. This is a great project to work on, because I use it all day everyday (dogfooding, as it's known in the trade!). Many of the new features are just little things I find myself wanting while I work, it's great to just add them to our list and then see them in the next version.

Often though, the bigger ideas or suggestions come from other users who may use the product in a different way to me. For example, the current version saves web content, but it doesn't save an independent copy of images. It takes advantage of the temporary internet files or uses a link to the original web server, so 99% of the time the images are still available, on or offline. When I use the software to save a web fragment, it's usually just a quick drag and drop, and I'm usually just researching a new purchase, or taking note of an address, and the text is the most important thing to me.

The way I use it, it works perfectly, and that was always the goal for me with the product. It's basically there to save me from having a copy of Word, or Notepad open, copying and pasting bits of information into documents. Other users tend to use the software more as an offline browser, saving entire pages to read when there's no internet connection, or to collect a history or compare things they see online. Occasionally, the linked images haven't been available, usually if the temporary internet files have been cleared and an internet connection isn't available, or the file on the original server has been moved or deleted.

This has never really bothered me as a user of the software, but obviously as a developer, the fact that the software doesn't deal with it does bother me. In the next version we'll be trying out an option which will save a permanent copy of images in any of the pages or fragments that you save.

I'll post a full list of new or updated features when the next version is available. I was also planning to talk about the upcoming improvements to our employee scheduling software, Oriador Rota, and a planned major overhaul of all our websites, but I think I'll save those for another day.