SCRAP MERCHANT

Dick Pountain/19 September 2008 11:29/Idealog 170

I've always believed in surfing one wave behind the leaders when it comes to computer software, which is why just as Google releases Chrome, the future of browsing, I've only just moved over to Firefox. I must hasten to explain that the move wasn't from Internet Explorer which I abandoned a decade ago for Opera v1. I liked Opera so much that Firefox had never tempted me, until version 9.5 when they broke something so badly that I could no longer log into Dennis Publishing's Webmail interface (which is basically my place of work). This mishap more or less coincided with the release of Firefox 3 and decided me to take the plunge, and oh boy was it a good move.

I didn't think so at first because Firefox's default handling of tabs is horridly different from Opera's, and its bookmarking is pretty crap too. If I was going to live with Firefox I needed to fix its tabs, and that forced me to investigate the world of FF extensions. Once I saw what was there, there was no going back. The Firefox add-on scene is a little microcosm of what an enlightened software market ought to look like, a prototype for Apple's App Store except almost all free. After browsing for what you need, one click downloads and installs it, and thereafter each widget keeps you informed whenever an upgrade is available.

The first thing was to fix the tab problem and Tab Mix Plus solved that neatly, enabling me to exactly duplicate Opera's tabbing style (I like each link clicked to open in a new tab without quibbling). Then PC Pro issue 167 came out with our editors' "Top 15 Firefox Extensions"  which introduced me to Scrapbook, an extension developed at the Department of Human System Science at Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology. That same feature also turned me on to the spectacular image viewer PicLens and the handy Internet Explorer emulator IE Tab, but it's Scrapbook that has changed my life.

I spend many of my days reading and researching, and nowadays that almost always means researching on the Web. For 25 years I've been discovering and outgrowing various means of keeping a sensible database of my notes and clippings. First it was a biro and A5 reporters' notepads, and I still have a filing cabinet full of those that will remain forever unread unless I win the Nobel Prize and they're sold posthumously to a Chinese university library. The advent of PCs brought a variety of full-text retrieval systems, the longest lived of which was Blackwell's excellent Idealist (I wrote two books from that). AskSam was a brief replacement, and then the Web was upon us and saving stuff from websites proved to be a nightmare, with each page made up of countless silly little GIF and JPG files. I used a proxy server whose name I've forgotten for several years to read stored offline web pages, each page occupying a whole folder of crap. Bookmarks were almost useless since I was on dial-up for most of this period and when I was online, as often as not a text had moved or disappeared by the time I needed it. Then I started just cutting and pasting the text from web pages and storing these in a whole tree of folders under My Documents, named  Science, Politics, Philosophy and so on. As of today My Documents contains 16,027 files in 719 folders...

The Scrapbook extension has changed all of that: it lets me save a web page to my local disk with a single click. It doesn't ask where I want to put it but supports its own customisable folder structure so I can just point. And it lets me edit pages before or after saving, use a highlighter to pick out passages, cut and save just the odd para, remove ads and other junk at a click and add stick on annotations. Everything I read that may be of future interest now goes straight into Scrapbook, and the only irritation is that I didn't discover it years ago because I can't think of any sensible way to import my years of backlog into its folder system. Nowadays I'll quite often Scrapbook several newspaper stories, read them offline and delete the ones that aren't useful. I even use it to capture pages of thumbnails from Flickr that I want to return to but don't like enough to Favourite. I still dislike Firefox's bookmarking compared to Opera's (something nasty about the layout of the dialog) so I just capture stuff instead. One day I may grudge the local disk space used, but not yet a whiles.

I  also recently upgraded Natara's Bonsai outliner application - which syncs with my Palm Treo smartphone - to the Vista version which is better than ever. I've mastered its simple project management features and can slide a little progress bar attached to each item to show how far I have left to go (it neatly sums them all in the parent headings). And I can cut and paste stuff straight into Bonsai from Scrapbooked articles, papers, books and Wikipedia entries. Watch this space for a major plagiarism suit coming soon...