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[ Go to "Turbo Charge Your Browser" ]
Cover Story
-- by Lenny Bailes
Web Buddy is an easy-to-use page retriever with a well-designed interface. Its unobtrusive toolbar has buttons that let you schedule downloads of single Web pages or of complete sites. Other buttons let you capture the current page from your Web browser, add a bookmark to the bookmark manager and convert a page to another file format. You can save HTML files and embedded graphics as text, RTF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works or WordPerfect files. Web Buddy Central is the program's bookmark and scheduling manager. You can run it separately or open it from the toolbar. DataViz doesn't supply a lot of interesting sites to visit, but its bookmark manager lets you create your own tabbed groups where you can save multiple URL bookmarks. Any bookmarked URL can be used for a scheduled page download. The program can follow up to 99 on-site and external links, and it lets you specify a disk space limit for each site. You can unpack the offline archive into individual components and export them to local or network directories keeping the links intact. In our tests, Web Buddy couldn't download Shockwave multimedia or run Java applets offline, but it did capture and display embedded QuickTime movies. We weren't able to download messages from the conference site, but the program didn't interfere with logging onto and browsing the site with Netscape. Web Buddy doesn't have built-in search engine support, nor does it perform smart monitoring and updating of previously downloaded pages. Its scheduling utility can download and replace any page or site on a daily, weekly, monthly or other basis.
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