Browseback 1.5 —

Graphically browse & search your visited web pages

SmileOnMyMac, LLC

For a demo of this product

$30 USD (List), Calculated $38.17 CND, £18.80 UK, €23.81

Released: October 25, 2008

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4. or later; Universal binary Broadband Internet connection recommended.

Users: All Skill Levels.

Strengths: It works exact as advertised.

Weaknesses: It is a memory hog, a controllable one, but not for those whose hard drive is almost fully filled.

Copyright Notice:Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Reviews were carried out on my iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM running Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.5. I use both Safari and Firefox as browsers, both in their most recent versions.

Caveat Emptor — For this review, I used more than my usual amount of polisher’s material. But I hate rewriting material when the original is both clear and makes my point.

Introduction and Publishers Description

Doc was curious. Why when all modern web browser have a browse back (history) feature, would a company as astute as SmileOnMyMac, LLC publish such a product; not even as shareware but as a commercial software product?

The Publishers Claims — With browseback, you'll never lose a web page again!

Want to find a web page you know you saw but didn't bookmark? — Browseback intuitive visual interface lets you scan through thumbnails, they’re more like readable miniatures, of every page you've visited!

Need to find all the web pages you've visited on a specific topic? — With browseback, you can search the content of your web history by keyword! "The software lets you go back at any time and find those things that you lost. It's like Time Machine for browsing." - Victor Cajiao –Typical MacUser Site

Found a web page that you want to share? — Emailing a PDF of a page is quick and easy with browseback!

Looking for an old news story that's been taken off the publisher's site? — browseback stores a PDF of every page you visit, at the time that it was visited. And the contents are searchable too!

When deciding to test this product, I had three major concerns:

How much hard disk space did the product need for its data files?
Although Safari is my default browser, how did the product deal with the fact that I sometimes used Firefox to do searches and wanted to access them?
I periodically purge my history list and other cache files, to retrieve disk space and enhance performance. How would this affect browseback’s routine performance?

Getting Started

Installation was easy, as was registration of the product. The readme file, not a help file, provided me with enough information for installation as well as how to delete the product, should I choose to. It even located the browseback data files. <Harry’s Leopard > Users > Harry > Documents > browseback folder.

When browseback is first launched it creates a database of web pages retrieved from your browser history (histories, if you use more than one web browser). Your normal browser history is often short, possibly only a week. This is where browseback comes into play. Browseback runs as a background application, and stores your history for as long a time as you specify. It not only stores the locations of places you visit, but it stores the actual page content also. Why? You might ask. Well, remember that article you saw on the front of the Times three weeks ago?

The front of the Times changes, the article is no longer there. With browseback it still is.

Activate browseback with the key press command-F12, by choosing browseback from your dock, or by pressing command-tab, and selecting the browseback application icon from among your applications. You can adjust browseback's activation key from the General Preferences.

Check out the rest of preference pane selections, and set them to your liking. I set the memory limit for the database folder for 25 GB of the 383 GB I have currently available. I also, for now, want to keep the data for a mere 180 days. The later is likely too long, but settings can be easily changed.

When is use-active, the translucent application window overlays your whole screen, 24 inches in my case. Generally when working with the software, you find what you want, leave, and return to browseback when you want to search again. How you ask? Just click your cursor on any part of the browseback window that does not contain web page thumbnails.

Using the Software

You can rapidly scan through thumbnails of your web pages by moving the mouse over them. The page immediately under the mouse is considered selected, and appears highlighted around the edge. That page is also automatically summarized by showing its title, URL, text summary, and date information.

You can scroll further back through your history by clicking the single scroll button on the bottom right of the screen. It scrolls back a row of pages at a time. You can scroll back as far as is contained in browseback's database by clicking the double-right arrow, just above. Scroll forward to present day by clicking the arrow on the top left of the screen. The double-left arrow, just beneath it, will scroll to the start of your history.

Double-click the selected thumbnail to open that web page in your browser. Note that the browser will show the current version of that web page as it is live on the web, not the version stored within browseback's database.

Features:

Surf thumbnails of your browser history

Search your history with keywords and Spotlight

Export web pages as PDFs to save or to share via email

Quickly retrieve what you found weeks ago

Export pages to PDF and E-mail for sharing with others

intuitive visual interface

Supports major Mac web browsers (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.)

Flexible Printing features

Available in English, Japanese, German, French & Italian

Note: all these actions, except open in web browser, work on the stored version of the web page, as it was when you originally viewed it, not the version of that page currently on the web. This allows you to see web pages that no longer exist on the Internet!

Hold down the control key and click on a thumbnail to display its contextual menu. The contextual menu actions are the same as the web page actions above, but also there are two additional ones:

Kudos — Boolean Search Capability

You can search for web pages that match a word, or more complex search criteria. To do this, enter your query into the search field at the lower right of browseback's web page display. Press return after entering your query, and browseback filters its web page display to show only pages that match your query. The help guide provides enough examples to keep you comfortable with doing complex searches.

Note: AND, OR, and NOT are case sensitive. Therefore purple and iguana contains no Boolean operators, whereas purple AND iguana does, and the results will differ.

Clearing Your Search; Click the symbol, at the end of the search field, to clear your query entirely. All of your web pages will then be shown.

Search Operators
Operator	Meaning
AND	Boolean AND
&	Boolean AND
<space>	Boolean AND by default when no other operator is present
OR	Boolean inclusive OR
\|	Boolean inclusive OR
NOT	Boolean NOT
!	Boolean NOT
*	Wildcard for prefix or suffix; surround term with wildcard characters for substring search. Ignored in phrase searching.
(	Begin logical grouping
)	End logical grouping
"	delimiter for phrase searching e.g., "purple iguana"

Discomforts

Deletion of Blank Thumbnail Pages — I picked an arbitrary date to start keeping a history of the sites/pages I visited. As a result, I ended up with a “Bar mostly filled with blank pages. I fixed this by moving the “stat date fore indexing and all was well. But, delete blank pages would work even better.

If Wishes Were Horses… (Features for next desired major upgrade)

Alas, this tool though excellent is not magic. What I’d love to have is software that tracks material taken off a publisher’s site, so I don’t have to write each publisher about each archive document I need for reference. But that has nothing to do with the product SmileOnMyMac has developed.

Conclusions

General — Browseback is easy to use, stable, and works exactly as described by its developer. In using it in both browse and search modes, I was able to find all of the sites I remember reading, except {naturally} for the ones whose history I had deleted. With a single click you can save a web page as a pdf, print it, attach it to an email, or take you back to the site. The later is a bit dicey, the site, particularly of a newspaper or magazine may have, will likely have, and changed. For my needs this is a perfect application done well although, and fairly priced.

I also like the way the product doesn’t get in my way when I’m working on an article. The browseback interface is hidden until you activate it. It overlays your screen when active. When you click through to a web page or switch to another application, the interface is hidden again.

When deciding to test this product, I had three concerns. Here are my findings;

How much hard disk space did the product need for its data files
—> Lots and lots — a two month supply of search information, I do tens, usually; if not hundreds of searches a day when I’m research articles. I tested the software after cleaning out most the cache files in safari on October 13^th. The present data file folder for browseback is 253 MB, that since Mid October.
Although Safari is my default browser, how did the product deal with the fact that I sometimes used Firefox to do searches.
—> Easily, the preferences pane allows you to pick whatever browser you want to index.
I periodically purge my history list and other cache files. How would this affect browseback?
—> once captured by the software your history remains intact.
A freebee — Miraculously, or great programming, the software works with the now unsupported Eudora 6.2.4 email client.

Recommendation — What I suggest a friend or colleague consider before spending their hard-earned cash. Certainly, but SmileOnMyMac has provided you with insurance. The download is a fully operational trial version of the product. It is identical to the purchased version, except that the SmileOnMyMac logo will appear at the top of your browser window when you visit a web page via browseback.

Once the product is purchased and registered, the logo will not appear. All in all, despite being a hard disk hog, it well worth 4.5 macC’s. That’s the sort of reason why I buy computer with 500 GB drives — space for my goodies, tools and the work I do!

A major irritation or perhaps a pet peeve — folks who post one-line reviews damning a product, without providing at a minimum the specifications of their operating systems for the developer to use are doing our community a disservice.

What’s the relevance to this review? Simple, after I complete a review, I check for reviews Googling the product. This check is a sanity test, to make sure I haven’t gone overboard in favor or against the product. Indeed when I disagree with a posted review, I add that information in a PS to my article.