NetMagnet Organize and sort through the hundreds of Web sites you may visit in any given session.
zdnet.com
By Simon Eskow PC MAGAZINE
February 19, 1998 -- Imagine for a moment an assistant who follows you around, quietly notes everything you do, and reports back to you--but leaves you alone whenever you desire. Now, compress this assistant into binary code and you have what roughly equals NetMagnet ($80 street). This Web research and communication tool from PeakSoft Corp. peak.com makes it a cinch to organize and sort through the hundreds of Web sites you may visit in any given session. Additionally, NetMagnet takes advantage of PeakSoft's PeakJet accelerator technology to make surfing that much smoother.
From the outset, NetMagnet is a pleasure to use, and it proves itself an intelligently designed product. When installation is complete, dial into your ISP and click on the NetMagnet icon (from the desktop or system tray) to launch your browser automatically along with the NetMagnet toolbox. The program is optimized for use with either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator (Versions 3.0 or greater). Each time you launch NetMagnet, an agent surfs to the PeakSoft Web site to download any recent revisions of the software. On the program's inaugural launch, this process will take some time, but you will hardly notice it the next time around.
The program has several tools, which you can access from a small window that appears when you open NetMagnet. They include PageTracer, which acts as an interface with NetMagnet's cache, listing each page that you visit. PageTracer is similar to a browser's history list but also helps you remember what all those URLs actually mean. You may add descriptive titles, delete duplicate pages, and save pages into sessions marked by date/time stamps. The idea is to make it easier to review where you've been. For example, URLs are color-coded according to the sessions in which you saved them.
A second tool, PageFolio, improvises on the typical hierarchical bookmark tree. It is here that pages are saved in topical folders with their URLs and user-defined titles and descriptions. With its Freshening Options, you can program PageFolio to update nonarchived pages weekly, daily, or on specific occasions. And if you get a hankering for those bookmarks or favorites that took you so long to acquire using your browser, simply "import browser bookmarks" to give them their own folders.
If organization isn't enough for you, you can use the ubiquitous Presenter options to share your Web research. You can save pages or folders in an executable file or a Java applet and attach them to an e-mail. As you'd expect, you can include a description with the file. When a recipient launches the file, a browser opens to those pages sequentially.
Some users may see NetMagnet as a bit pricey for a Web utility, but if you do any Web research that you want to organize and share with others, you'll find this package well worth the price. And the free automatic upgrades promise that the product on your desktop will only get better.
NetMagnet. Street price: $80. Requires: Microsoft Windows 95 orWindows NT; Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, Versions 3.0 or greater; 6MB hard disk space (20MB recommended); 16MB RAM (32MB recommended). PeakSoft Corp., Bellingham, WA; 888-377-1100. www.peak.com. |
