<div id="popup_box_thanks" style="display:none" onClick="close_popup_thanks('popup_box_thanks', 'ts')"><br>Thanks for submitting your tip! All submissions are moderated by an editor before appearing online. We've reset the form so you can enter another tip. Or you can close the tip submission box. <div class="x_close" id="thanks_upper_right"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="close_popup_thanks('popup_box_thanks', 'ts'); return true;">Close</a></div></div>
<div class="tbf_row"><div class="tbf_wide_extra_top not_bold">Please submit only technical tips that will help other TidBITS readers better use their Macs, iPhones, and related software and hardware. All product announcements should be sent to <a href="mailto:releases@tidbits.com">releases@tidbits.com</a>.</div></div>
<div class="tbf_left">URL</div><div class="tbf_right"><input type="text" value="" name="tip_link_url" tabindex="3"><span class="tip_description"><br>Enter the URL to a Web page that supports your tip.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<div class="tbf_row">
<div class="tbf_left">Linked text</div><div class="tbf_right"><input type="text" value="" name="tip_link_label" tabindex="4"><span class="tip_description"><br>Enter the name of the page linked above.</span></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><input type="submit" value="Preview Your Tip" name="preview_tip" onClick="fill_preview('tipbits_enclosure_preview', 'ts', this.form); return false;" tabindex="7"> <input type="submit" value="Send Us Your Tip!" name="submit_this_tip" onClick="handle_tip_submission('ts', '', this.form, 'tip'); return false;" tabindex="8"></div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<div class="tbf_row">
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">When you submit a tip, you give us permission to use it. Read <a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="generic_show_hide('tip_terms')">our terms</a> for more details. All submissions are reviewed before publication.</span></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">Our terms: By submitting a tip, you agree to assign TidBITS Publishing Inc., a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual license to reproduce, publish, and distribute your tip in connection with the TidBITS Web site and associated products in any media. You agree that you created the content you submitted, and that you have the right to assign us this license. You give us permission to use your name, but your email address won't be publicly displayed or shared. We review all submissions before publication, and reserve the right to select which submissions we feel are appropriate for our readers and to edit those we publish.</span></div>
<div id="comment_thanks" style="display:none" onClick="close_popup_thanks('comment_thanks', 'comm')"><br>Thanks for submitting a comment! Please check your email for a link that, when clicked, will verify that you're a real person and cause your comment to appear immediately. <div class="x_close" id="comment_upper_right"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="close_popup_thanks('comment_thanks', 'comm'); return true;">Close</a></div></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">Our terms: We reserve the right to edit or delete any comment, so please post thoughtfully. We use your email address <i>only</i> to send you a one-time verification message confirming that you posted this comment. We also store your address to allow you to verify using other Web browsers in the future. For more info, see our <a href="http://db.tidbits.com/privacy.html">privacy policy</a>.</span></div>
<li><a href="/feeds/tidbits.rss" title="Subscribe via RSS" class="gettb">RSS <img src="/images/feed-icon-12x12.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Subscribe via RSS"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=276986548" title="Subscribe to the podcast" class="gettb">Podcast <img src="/images/feed-icon-12x12_podcast.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Subscribe to the postcast"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.twitter.com/TidBITS" title="Get Article Updates via Twitter" class="gettb">Twitter <img src="/images/feed_icon_12x12_twitter.png" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Get Article Updates via Twitter"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/TidBITS/195314925519" title="Go to the TidBITS Page at Facebook" class="gettb">Facebook <img src="/images/feed_icon_12x12_facebook.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Go to the TidBITS Page at Facebook"></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" title="Sections" class="tabhead" onClick="return showhide('articleslist')">Sections <span id="articleslist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_open.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="articleslist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="return showhide('stafflist')" title="Staff" class="tabhead">Staff <span id="stafflist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="stafflist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" title="Issues" class="tabhead" onClick="return showhide('issuelist')">Weekly Issues <span id="issuelist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="issuelist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="return showhide('abouttidbits')" title="About TidBITS" class="tabhead">About TidBITS <span id="abouttidbits_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="abouttidbits_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<div class="center_top">Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling <a href="http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/?pt=TB-TAGLINE" style="color:yellow">Take Control</a> ebooks.</div>
<!-- begin centercolumn -->
<div id="centercolumn">
<!-- begin rightcolumn_container -->
<div id="rightcolumn_container">
<!-- begin rightcolumn -->
<!-- rightcolumn is embedded within centercolumn so featured text wraps around it -->
</div><!-- end tearoffbox_wide_container for watchlist items -->
<!-- begin tearoff box wide -->
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_container">
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_tips">
<div class="tip_display">
<div class="tips_sponsor_logo">
</div>
<h6>Go Back and Forth Fast in Preview</h6>
<p><p>If you're reading a PDF in Apple's Preview software, and you follow a bookmark or an internal link to move around within the PDF, you can quickly return to where you were by pressing the keyboard shortcut Command-[ (that's Command-Left Bracket). Or, you can choose Go > Back.</p><p>The command works iteratively, so you can go back to just the previously viewed page or if you issue the command again, to the page before that, and so on. There's also an equivalent Go > Forward (Command-]).</p></p>
</div>
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_bottom_tips">
<div style="padding-bottom:35px"><div class="tip_display" style="float:left"><p><br><a href="/tipbits/89">Link to this tip</a></p></div><div class="tip_display" style="float:right; width:150px">
<div class="tbf_wide_80" id="hc_rc_2649">To help us avoid automated posts and misuse of our site, please enter the words below.</div><div class="x_close_row" id="hc_upper_right2_2649"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="HidePopupContent('hc_2649', 'hc', '2649'); return true;">Close</a></div>
<div id="article_box_2649"><P>No, it's not a badly dubbed karate flick. Web Ninja is a little utility written by Bill Tudor and distributed as a MacUser Exclusive, which means it's free, but can only be downloaded from MacUser's Web site.</P><P><<A HREF="http://www.hotfiles.com/swbrowse/MC14/4/2/mac-MC14422.html">http://www.hotfiles.com/swbrowse/MC14/4/2/mac- MC14422.html</A>></P><P>I've looked at almost every bookmark manager available on the Web (see the four-part series of reviews beginning in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-323.html">TidBITS-323</A>), and although Web Ninja offers some of the same kind of functionality, it's not precisely a bookmark manager. Instead, it watches where you go on the Web in the background (assuming you use Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Spyglass Mosaic), and records your path. Even this isn't an entirely new feature; several other bookmark managers offer record modes.</P><P>Yet Web Ninja is a bit different. First off, it's a complete no-brainer. You drop a faceless background application in your Extensions folder and forget about it. You don't have to turn anything on or launch any special applications for it to work its magic, nor do you have to decide what you want to record. It captures every Web and FTP URL you visit using a Web browser, and if you have more than one browser window open at a time, it captures the URLs in each. It can't capture URLs from multiple Web browsers at the same time, if you're running several simultaneously, which I do on occasion. If you visit the same URL more than once, Web Ninja merely increments a counter rather than recording the entire URL again.</P><P>That's the data collection part of Web Ninja, and it's performed that task well for me. Then comes the Web Ninja application, which provides access to the collection of URLs. It lists URLs you've visited and enables you to sort the list by URL, by number of visits, by date of last visit, and by the amount of time you've spent at the site. Double-clicking on a URL (or dragging it to the browser window) sends it to your preferred Web browser and resolves it. I enjoy sorting by number of visits, although it's not tremendously useful since it mainly tells me that I go to Alta Vista, my home page, and sites that I'm writing about for some article - as if I didn't know that. Most Web pages I visit once and only once. Similarly, the date of last visit and time spent at the site aren't terribly useful to me, especially since I don't shut my Mac off all that often and I tend to leave my Web browser running, which means that Web Ninja thinks I've spent hours perusing some Web sites when in fact my monitors were off and both me and my Mac were resting quietly.</P><P>You can also export your list of URLs as an HTML file or as a tab-delimited data file, should you think of some need to perform either of those tasks. New in the 1.0.4 release of Web Ninja is a command to empty your log file, although I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to do that, since your log file increases in value as it grows.</P><P>More interestingly, you can drag URLs from Web Ninja's list to an Items to Download window, and when you click the Download button in that window, Web Ninja will try up to a user-specified number of times to retrieve those URLs. Web Ninja supports both Web and FTP URLs, so it could be a good way of breaking through a busy site, but since it only retrieves the HTML part of a Web page (not graphics), it doesn't compete with a utility like WebWhacker from the Forefront Group, which can download an entire Web page, complete with graphics and fixed links.</P><P><<A HREF="http://www.ffg.com/whacker.html">http://www.ffg.com/whacker.html</A>></P><P>All this is nice, but the killer feature in Web Ninja is its filter field. Type a couple of characters in that field and Web Ninja quickly narrows the list of URLs to those that contain the characters you typed. Forget the URL to Apple Internet Mail Server? Just type "aims" in the filter field. If that's not good enough, you can just expand the filter term slightly, to say, "apple.com" to find all the Apple Web pages you've visited. You don't have to be accurate - you just have to zero in on a couple of characters in the URL you want and hopefully not too many others. I've been doing some research on directory services recently and visiting a page about Ph servers. When I wanted to find that site again, I typed "ph" into the filter field, and got every URL with a word that started with "ph," like "www.phillynews.com." Still, there weren't so many hits (Web Ninja tells you how many it has found, 26 in my "ph" example above) that I couldn't quickly scan for the URL I wanted.</P><P>I've taken to visiting some Web sites quickly just to get their URLs into my Web Ninja list. Sure, I could search in Alta Vista, but it's faster to do everything on my Mac, especially if I know I've been to a page before and merely need to find it in my log file. Of course, at some point URLs will start disappearing from the end of my log file, but since I've only racked up about 1,100 URLs visited in three weeks of use (Web Ninja holds a total of 4,096 URLs at a time), I suspect this technique of recording potentially interesting URLs will work fairly well.</P><P>One tip - on my 660AV, Web Ninja's response time to typing in the filter field is much slower if you have your list sorted by URL than if it's sorted by any of the other columns, like number of visits. Filter first, then sort by URL if you want.</P><P>I've been thinking quite a bit about what makes for good software recently, and I think Web Ninja hits quite a few of the necessary criteria. First, it's dead simple to use. It comes with documentation, but for the most part, you can figure out everything it does from simply looking at the menus and windows. Second, it solves a specific problem - wanting to go back to a site you've visited once before - and solves it well. And, at least for me, the problem turns out to be a real one. I find it hard to predict when I will need a bookmark to a site, but I know that Web Ninja has saved the last 4,096 URLs I've visited, and whatever I need is probably in that list. Third, Web Ninja does most of the work itself, without requiring any extra attention from me. I have enough to do with my time - I don't need to maintain more utilities.</P><P>MacUser deserves kudos for commissioning useful utilities like Web Ninja and releasing them for free. In the past, the MacUser Exclusives were only available on ZiffNet/Mac via CompuServe, which limited their audience significantly. Now that everyone on the Internet can download these utilities (check back - there are a bunch of great ones) from MacUser's Web site, the Macintosh utility world has been greatly enriched.</P><P><<A HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/macuser/software/">http://www.zdnet.com/macuser/software/</A>></P><!-- Attack of the Web Ninja Adam C. Engst --></div>
<!-- end article text -->
<!-- PayBITS -->
<p> </p><div class="sponsorbox">
<div class="sponsortext"><A HREF="http://www.smilesoftware.com/"><IMG SRC="http://db.tidbits.com/images/badges/SmileLogo2010-50x50.gif" ALT="" HEIGHT="50" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0" ALIGN="left"></A>Get more productive with software from Smile: PDFpen for<br />editing PDFs; TextExpander for saving time and keystrokes while you<br />type; DiscLabel for designing CD/DVD labels and inserts. Free demos,
<br />fast and friendly customer support. <<a href="http://www.smilesoftware.com/">http://www.smilesoftware.com/</a>></div>
