The Most Overlooked
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Wednesday, November 23, 2005 at 2:15 PM
The single most overlooked feature in Web Helper Browser is probably the browser automation options. This is probably largely due to me calling it browser automation, and tucking it away in the tools menu... I'm not really sure how I expected anyone to find it there and figure out what it does. What it actually does, is let you tell the browser which links you want it to follow and what you want it to do on each page, then leave it to get on with it.
In the latest update, to make it very slightly easier, I added some right mouse menu options that take you straight to it. Let's say that for some crazy reason, you wanted to save all of my recent posts to a Web Helper project. If you select the links and right click the mouse, you now see a Follow Links option.
When you click it, the automation form will open, pre-populated with the selected links, so you just have to choose what you want the browser to do (in this case it would be Save Page to Web Helper, but you could choose Save to Files or Print). When you click Start the browser will start working it's way through the links, saving each one as it goes. I've found it to be pretty useful from time to time, maybe you will too.
You can also Save a screenshot of each page, but that would probably only be useful if you had to produce some documentation for a web system. In those cases, you can supply the list of links for the browser to follow in an XML file, you don't have to be able to select them on a single page.
Web Helper Browser Download - (free copies?)
2 Comments:
G'Day Gavin,
I'm not sure if you are aware of this but there is a limit to the number of items you can add to the IE Context menu. Once you exceed the limit, items at the bottom of the menu (like Surfulater :)) won't be displayed.
I'm not even sure if the menu in this article is the IE Context menu, but just wanted to make sure you knew about this.
You are right about this being a difficult market to have a conversation with. I think we are ahead of the curve.
In case you didn't see it this may be of interest: Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road I hope I haven't give to many secrets away. :)
All the best with WHB.
Neville Franks
Hi Neville,
Thanks for the heads-up, but one of the benefits of having the browser integrated into the product was that I could work around the many hair pulling problems and frustrations that working with the IE Context menu caused. I'm not saying it was a lot easier or quicker, but eventually everything worked :)!
I did read your post about your plans for Surfulater, it sounds like you know where you're going and it looks like you've done a great job with the product. You were probably on your travels when I wrote a series of posts about some of the mistakes I made with this product over on Codesnipers, Mistakes So Far. One of the areas where you're clearly ahead of the game is in trying to keep the product simple... I went the other way there for a while and it's difficult to find the way back.
At the moment I'm effectively treating WHB as a beta product, I've handed the coding over to my business partner and I'm hoping that a fresh perspective will eventually result in a better product. I found that spreading myself between two completely distinct developing products was counter-productive, so I had to make a difficult call and decide to focus on one. In these blog posts I'm just trying to draw some attention to the minor WHB features I find useful, with the shared goals that someone out there also finds it useful, and that Neil gets a little more feedback for future versions.
Thanks, and best of luck to you too.
Gavin
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