| Web Buddy | Chorus « Mixed Reviews |
| Web Buddy (Win 95): Putting on the Dog |
| Web Buddy is a modest collection
of internet utilities designed to help you retrieve, organize and store any information
you can reach with a browser and a reliable ISP. Want to read that page or surf that site
while you’re offline? Tired of trying to manage both Netscape’s Bookmarks
and Internet Explorer’s Favorites? Looking to easily convert web pages into
word processing files? Will your "browser’s best friend," Web Buddy,
do all this and more? Maybe, maybe not. Putting on the Dog Web Buddy provides two operational centers: a toolbar and Web Buddy Central, a file manager that hopes to operate a bit like Windows 95’s Explorer but is actually a tabbed dialog box—the program’s biggest flaw, as it limits your ability to effectively, efficiently organize your bookmarks and URLs. The 5-button toolbar will dock along the edge of your screen or free-float, and automatically loads when you launch your browser unless you remove the "Auto Web Buddy" shortcut from your StartUp folder. Though adequate, this toolbar would be more useful and unobtrusive if deployed as an additional, integrated browser menu or toolbar. Once you’ve found a web site you can’t live without, there are a multitude of download choices: grab the current page, grab the current page and all links as many levels deep as you’d like, or grab the entire site. The latter can be a dangerous and disk-consuming choice. Do you really want the whole 442 gigabyte Microsoft Corporation web site nestled snugly on your unassuming 1 gig hard drive? Probably not, but that’s what Web Buddy’s going to try to do if you aren’t careful—so use the online help to configure Web Buddy properly before you try to download an entire web site. Whatever your choice, taking the page or site for download is simple: mouse-click either the "Page To Go" or "Site To Go" button on the toolbar, categorize the item (i.e., "Shareware" or "Antiques" or "Cajun Recipes") in the resulting dialog box and click the "Take Now" button. Power users will be pleased by the dandy right-click, context-sensitive menus that streamline this process. If you prefer to whistle—or snooze—while Web Buddy works, you can schedule downloads of pages and/or sites to occur in any combination of days, weeks and months—or so the product claims. Out of ten downloads I scheduled with the program, none was accomplished by Web Buddy, so if you want to download something you’ll have to do it manually until they fix this bug. To view any of the pages you’ve downloaded, launch Web Buddy Central from the toolbar or the Windows 95 Start Menu, scroll to and select the desired category tab and double-click on the page or site you want to browse; Netscape—or any other browser of choice—will open and load the HTML document. Sounds easy, and it is— but Web Buddy’s use of a tabbed dialog interface instead of an Explorer-like tree of folders and sub-folders is its major design flaw. In the Dog House Imagine Windows Explorer without sub-folders and Web Buddy’s organizational limitations become immediately clear. Scrolling from one end of Web Buddy’s category tabs to the other presents the same dilemma, a problem that’s accentuated when dealing with bookmarks. Let’s say you have two hundred bookmarks in one category, shareware, and you want to find the URL for the PC Win Resource Center site (http://www.pcwin.com/index.shtml). You right-click on the Web Buddy toolbar’s Bookmark button. Two choices are displayed: "Add Bookmark" and "Go To Bookmark." You move the mouse pointer over "Go To Bookmark," and another menu drops down, listing all of our categories. Fine. Now you slide the mouse pointer down the row to "Shareware." Faster than you can say "Saint Bernard," column after column of bookmarked URLs will cascade across the entire screen, obliterating everything else—including the browser window and the Windows 95 task bar. The only way to return to your browser (or the Start Menu or anything else) is to hit the "Esc" key or select a bookmark. For a program that touts itself as an organizational tool, this is a sad method for handling bookmarks, and makes Netscape’s clunky bookmarking utility look like a thoroughbred Greyhound next to this charming but slightly dimwitted mutt. If you want a bookmarking utility, turn elsewhere. If you like to browse web sites offline, or if you regularly need to convert HTML documents to spiffy Word documents replete with embedded graphics, you might find it worthwhile to shell out fifty bucks to take this dog for a walk.
James McIllece is a freelance writer and computer consultant living in Los Angeles. |
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