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Jim Regan - Site Reviews |
Quickbrowse.comThe Gallery Of Obscure Patents...) but for anyone out there that visits a specific collection of Web sites on a regular basis, Quickbrowse.com might be right up there with the light bulb.Quickbrowse is a combination Web site and application that owes its existence to its creator's 'real job.' A German journalist working in Florida as a foreign correspondent, Mark Fest grew a bit tired of scanning the pages of 20-odd online news sites every day, so he wrote a program which would do the scanning for him, and present the results in a single, albeit rather long, Web page. Then, in the best traditions of the Internet, he made the application available at no charge to anyone interested in using it. Of course, not all of us need -- or wish -- to read the contents of 20 news sites every day, so Quickbrowse is designed to be the very model of flexibility. After logging into the site, visitors can choose from a short catalog of 'pre-selected' sites, or create their own list of any pages they regularly visit -- a collection of international Finance pages, perhaps, or sports, weather, RAM prices, shoelace futures, or all -- or none -- of the above. Once the list is set, you simply send Quickbrowse off on its retrieval mission, and...go make some toast. (Depending on the length of your list, it will take some time to collect all the pages - the advantage here is that all the waiting is done at the 'front end', and you don't have to be present for any of it.) When ready, the site presents a single 'masterpage', linking all the requested pages together. (In fact, you can actually start browsing the masterpage while content is still being added.) All links on the consolidated page are still functional, and if a chosen site presents its information as brief summaries, with further links to the full story -- as with the Monitor -- you can scroll through the summaries, click on the articles that interest you, and while you finish perusing the first masterpage, Quickbrowse quietly collects and saves the chosen in-depth articles for a second masterpage. By the time you've finished scanning the first, the second is ready and waiting with the requested details. (Or if you prefer, you can have each of the requested links open into their own new windows.) Not convenient enough? Well, you can also set Quickbrowse to disable images to speed up the download, and make your personal catalog into a bookmark, so that you can download your list directly, rather than having to re-enter the QB site every day. Still not convenient enough?! Then you also have the option of having the QB engine search your list and send your masterpage via e-mail, so that it can be ready and waiting when you fire up the computer in the morning. While the sites on my particular list are fairly basic, the Quickbrowse engine can also deal with such complications as passwords, multi-Frame sites, and URL's that change daily. (Features that can confuse the engine are listed on the FAQ page.) The QB site also provides a preset Demo, Help pages that step newcomers through the program's features, and Q-Search and Q-People - the same 'long page' philosophy applied to search engines and Internet White Pages. Criticisms? The site is not rock solid, (although I've only suffered two crashes to date) you won't get far without JavaScript, (not a major problem, except that the site doesn't mention its necessity until deep into the FAQ list) and things are a bit cramped on a small browser. (This last complaint is probably less important with this site than most - since Bookmarking means you'll rarely actually be at the QB site, and even if QB pages did fit well on 640x480 pixels, chances are that many, or most, of the pages on your list won't.) Still, for browsers of habit, Quickbrowse could easily become one of those tools that will quickly have you wondering how you got along without it. Quickbrowse can be found at http://www.quickbrowse.com/. Jim Regan provides 'Today's Links' to the e-Monitor. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. |
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