Columns
Idealog:
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, 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 1.0. I liked Opera so much that Firefox had never tempted me, until version 9.5 when something broke so badly 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 prompted 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 as well. 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. Then PC Pro issue 167 came out with our editors' "Top 15 Firefox Extensions<
" which introduced me to Scrapbook, an extension developed at the 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 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 JPEG files. For several years I used a proxy server, whose name I've forgotten, 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 a text had often 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 par, remove ads and other junk at a click, and add stick-on annotations.
