Forget to bookmark that great web page and now you can't find it? Do you use Netscape Navigator and wish it kept your browsing history? Use more than one browser and wish there was one place you could go to find any page you visited? iRemember is a revolutionary new application for keeping track of your web browsing history that solves all of these problems! Using Apple's Information Access Toolkit (AIAT is also used by Sherlock), iRemember indexes all of the words in every web page you visit. Later, when you want to revisit any page that you've ever visited in the past, you only need to type in a couple of words that describe that page to quickly return to it. You don't need to bookmark the page or remember when you visited it. iRemember also keeps a history by date of all of the pages that you visited, so that you can also easily look for a web page you visited on a particular day. iRemember also adds a handy menu to your system that adds new features to Sherlock and makes it easy to get to Sherlock anytime with a single click.
Compatibility
MacOS 7.1 and later (including MacOS 9.0)
PowerPC or 68K Macintosh (choose the correct installer for your Macintosh).
MacTCP or OpenTransport (1.1.1 and later).
Web Browsers:
Netscape Navigator (2.02 - 4.73 and later)
Explorer (3.0 - 5.0)
AOL (2.7 - 5.0)
iCab (all versions, including 1.9 and later)
(Essentially, iRemember should work with any browser.)
How to Use iRemember
Run the installer (which will require that you reboot). Now any time that you launch a browser, iRemember will automatically start up. As you surf the web, in the background iRemember will index all of the pages that you visit. When you want to search for a page that you once visited, just switch to the iRemember application using the convenient menu that was added to all applications (you can turn it off in the preferences). Type a few words that you think probably appeared in the web page and click the Search button. A results window will appear with matches listed from most relevant to least relevant. You can select any item in the results list to see which words were matched in that document. You can double-click on any item in the results list to go to it in your browser. If you hold down the option key while double-clicking, the results window will be closed before iRemember switches to the browser and takes you to the selected page. If you want to see a list of all the pages you've visited, select 'History' from the File menu. You can expand any day and select an item to see more details about that page. Double-clicking on a page visit in the list will take you to that page in your browser.
That's all there is to it! Once you've visited a bunch of pages over the course of a few days, the searching and the history will quickly become indispensible. Remember, the longer you use iRemember, the more useful it becomes...
For more information, check out the iRemember User's Manual. The manual is stored in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), so if you don't already have Acrobat Reader (the free PDF viewer) you can download it at:
iRemember is shareware, which means that you can try it before you have to buy it. The version that you've just downloaded will be fully functional for 30 days (iRemember only counts days you actually run it). After 30 days, iRemember will stop indexing newly visited web pages until you've registered. You can register at a secure web site or via email, fax, physical mail or phone for just $25. Just select the "Register iRemember" menu item from the File menu or click on the Register button in the About Box. You can also launch the "Register iRemember" application directly if you want to register by email, fax or mail.
Once you've registered, we'll send you a registration key within a couple of days that you'll need to enter along with your name to reactive iRemember. For more information about registering, see the User's Manual or visit our web site.
What Gets Installed
When you run the iRemember Installer, several files are installed:
In the Extensions folder in your System Folder
_iRemember Extension (all Macs)
_iRemember OT Module (if you have a PowerPC Macintosh)
OT AutoPush Support (if you have a PowerPC Macintosh)
After you run iRemember, two files will be created in your preferences folder:
iRemember Index
iRemember Preferences
You can uninstall iRemember at any time by simply throwing all of these files into the trash. (OTAutoPush Support is an extension from Apple Computer, and it's possible that some other application might have also installed it, so you should check the installation log to be sure that iRemember installed it before deleting it.)
The installer for iRemember was created using StuffIt InstallerMaker from Aladdin Systems, Inc.. For more information on StuffIt InstallerMaker contact:
Aladdin Systems
165 Westridge Dr.
Watsonville, CA 95076
Voice:831.761-6200
Fax: 831.761-6209
E-mail: dev.sales@aladdinsys.com
http://www.aladdinsys.com
How iRemember Indexes Pages
This is covered in detail in the User's Manual, but having some idea how/what iRemember indexes can help you to understand the results returned by searches. iRemember watches all of the HTTP communications between applications (typically browsers) and the network. Every time it sees you visit a web page, it quickly copies all of the words in that page and later indexes them in the background. Indexing is extremely fast in iRemember so you should never notice any delays in your browsing.
Because the speed of your internet connection is almost always what limits how fast web pages load, most browsers store ("cache") some of the pages they see on your local hard disk so that they can just retrieve them from there (which is much faster) if you revisit the same page later. So, when you ask to see a web page in your browser, it first checks to see if it was cached. If it was, the browser can quickly load the page without having to retrieve it over the network. This is both good and bad. It means that the page loads quickly, but also means that iRemember never knows that you revisited that page because it can only watch network traffic. Therefore, while searches will always correctly find any page that you visited, the chronological history of pages visited can miss a few page visits and sometimes the count of the number of times you've visited a page can be low. If it's important to you that iRemember accurately count the number of visits to each page, you can change the caching settings in your browser to reload pages on every visit.
In order to avoid impacting the speed of your other applications, iRemember tries to gradually index web pages in the background. Typically this means that a new page you visit might not show up in searches for up to 10 minutes after you visited it.
When iRemember indexes pages, it ignores common words like "and", "to", etc. Depending on your preferences settings, it also ignores short words and small numbers. When searching later, you'll get the best results if you use less common words and if you give iRemember several words to search for.
Reporting Bugs
At Serac Software we take software quality very seriously. If you encounter any problems while using iRemember, we want to hear about them! Just send email to bugreport@seracsoftware.com. Include as much information as possible about your system configuration and what you were doing when the problem occurred. If you happen to be running Macsbug, then a stdlog would also be helpful.
Feature Suggestions
We're already hard at work on the next version of iRemember, but we always welcome your suggestions for features that you'd like to see. Just send them to suggestions@seracsoftware.com.
New Features in Version 2.0:
- Command to scan pages to see if any are no longer visible on the web and a command to delete
missing pages. See the User's Manual for a description of how this feature works.
- Command to check the current index file to see if it has any corruption. This command can
still miss some kinds of corruption (the actual file format is defined by Apple's AIAT and we
can only look at it indirectly), but will find most problems. If you find that you
have corruption, just create a new index and then import from the damaged one to get
back to a stable state (see the manual for details).
- Command to import other iRemember indices into your current index (great for people who
use more than one Macintosh and want to merge their browsing histories). This is also how
you can recover browsing history from a corrupted index: quit iRemember, move the damaged
index file out of the preferences folder, run iRemember again (creates a new, empty index),
and then import the damaged index into the new one. iRemember will only import unique pages
and accesses, so importing the same index twice will have no effect the second time.
- iRemember menu now has commands to search for the current selection and
pages similar to the current page (if you're in a browser).
- iRemember now parses the html in web pages and no longer indexes
any of the html tags, javascript code, etc.
- iRemember should now be much better about handling single byte languages
other than English. (iRemember doesn't do anything special to handle
double byte languages like Kanji, but may still work reasonably well.)
- iRemember now remembers whether the Search window was open or closed
when iRemember was quit and restores it to the same setting when next launched.
- New view of the index organized by web site. This window is where you can do
maintainance on the index (like deleting/updating pages).
- When viewing pages by web site, you can select individual pages or whole
web sites to delete pages from the index.
- When you select an item in the History or Search Results windows, a new command
was added to let you find similar NEW pages using Sherlock.
- More detailed information is now provided for the currently selected item in all
of the windows, including the time that the page was first/last accessed.
- New preference to tell iRemember whether to open a new window when going to a
page in your web browser.
- iRemember now supports several AppleEvents, making it at least minimally
scriptable. Check out the AppleEvent dictionary from the Script Editor if you're
interested.
- Multiple selections are supported in the search results window, letting you
conveniently open several found pages in your browser with one command.
Thanks again for giving iRemember a try! Don't forget, the longer you use iRemember, the more history it can collect and the more useful it becomes...
iRemember® is a registered trademark of Blake Ward.
