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[ Go to "Turbo Charge Your Browser" ]
Cover Story
-- by Lenny Bailes
NetAttaché Pro is a dynamite jack-of-all-trades program that organizes bookmarks, downloads Web sites and schedules smart page updates. It's also a query tool that can search an unlimited number of Web engines simultaneously (the program includes 11, and a search engine tool to add others is available at Tympani's Web site) and download the results. NetAttaché Pro's Bookmark/URL Manager is organized into category groups called "brief organizers." It provides five brief organizers (Demo, Government, Leisure, News and Sports), each containing 10 preset URL bookmarks. The program doesn't rely on your browser, but rather works through a threaded client/server architecture that downloads multiple URL information and serves it to the browser. (NetAttaché can be configured to use up to 20 Winsock sockets in the background.) Retrieval options let you include or exclude images, frames, plug-in/ActiveX data, Java applets or other files. You can follow up to 99 on-site and external spider levels. NetAttaché Pro can monitor subscribed sites and update the content that you defined to your hard disk. You can replace the entire site, download only changed portions, or download a copy that shows both the old and new content. The Smart Search option lets you query a page during the update process, and will only retrieve the new version of a page if changes match criteria that you set based on text strings grouped by AND, NOT and OR Boolean operators. You could use this option to focus on specific information, such as the change in the price of a specific stock. NetAttaché Pro's online search capability is also quite sophisticated. A set of Yahoo-specific features let you choose which Yahoo subcategories to include or exclude in a search, and you can use a full range of Boolean operators in conjunction with text strings. As with a general page download, you can specify the number of internal and external links to follow, and whether to retrieve graphics, file links and so forth. The program also supports advanced searches on AltaVista, Excite and the San Jose Mercury News site, plus simple searches on DejaNews, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan, Open Text and WebCrawler. NetAttaché Pro successfully downloaded and displayed both embedded QuickTime objects and Shockwave multimedia. Our experience downloading Java applets was less consistent.
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