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help

getting around

About browseback

browseback is an innovative product that makes your browser history useful. With it, you can rapidly browse and search your history via web page thumbnails.

When browseback is first launched it creates a database of web pages retrieved from your browser history (histories, if you use more than one web browser). Your browser history is usually short, possibly only a week. This is where browseback comes into play. browseback runs as a background application, and stores your history for as long a time as you specify. browseback not only stores the locations of places you visit, but it stores the actual page content also. Why? You might ask. Well, remember that article you saw on the front of the Times three weeks ago? The front of the Times changes, the article is no longer there. With browseback it still is.

Activating browseback

Activate browseback with the keypress command-F12, by choosing browseback from your dock, or by pressing command-tab, and selecting the browseback application icon from among your applications. You can adjust browseback's activation key from the General Preferences.

browseback overlays your whole screen while it's active. Generally you find what you want, leave, and return to browseback when you want to search again.

The browseback user interface

Your browseback screen will look like this, but with different web pages:

You can rapidly scan through thumbnails of your web pages by moving the mouse over them. The page immediately under the mouse is considered selected, and appears highlighted around the edge. That page is also automatically summarized by showing its title, url, text summary, and date information.

Scroll further back through your history by clicking the single scroll button on the bottom right of the screen. It scrolls back a row of pages at a time. You can scroll back as far as is contained in browseback's database by clicking the double-right arrow, just above. Scroll forward to present day by clicking the arrow on the top left of the screen. The double-left arrow, just beneath it, will scroll to the start of your history.

Double-click the selected thumbnail to open that web page in your browser. Note that the browser will show the current version of that web page as it is live on the web, not the version stored within browseback's database.

Click once on a thumbnail to display web page actions:

open in web browser
email stored PDF
view stored PDF
save stored PDF
print stored PDF

Note: all these actions, except open in web browser, work on the stored version of the web page, as it was when you originally viewed it, not the version of that page currently on the web. This allows you to see web pages that no longer exist on the internet!

Hold down the control key and click on a thumbnail to display its contextual menu. The contextual menu actions are the same as the web page actions above, but also there are two additional ones:

Remove Web Page Permanently removes the selected web page from browseback's database.
Exclude Host Adds the host portion of the web page URL to the exclusion list in browseback's Advanced Preferences. All web pages from that host are removed from browseback's database.

Preferences

General
Advanced
Display
Update
From here, choose which web browsers you wish to store web pages from.

Change browseback's activation key.

Select launch on login & quit command key options.

You can limit the amount of disk space used by browseback, and/or select for how many days for which you wish to store past web pages.

It's also possible to exclude URLs containing specific strings to be excluded from ever being stored in browseback. Add them here. This is great for any web pages you go to for email, or financial accounts, or any other place you will not want to have stored.

You can set the background color of the browseback display, and also if the display is accelerated. If browseback fails to display correctly, then uncheck this option, and it should display correctly, but will not animate as smoothly. From this panel, control options for browseback to check and see if a new version of the product is available.