TrailBlazer - The browser history file rethought
Apr 01, '04 08:56:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 10 out of 10]
Yes, it's Thursday and I'm just now getting to the PotW -- It's been a busy week :). And yes, I'm cheating by picking something that was mentioned on slasdhot and other Mac sites earlier in the week. And finally, I'm breaking all my rules by awarding a 10 to an application that clearly needs work.
But in this case, TrailBlazer's 10 is awarded for its ground breaking re-thinking of browser History files. I visit a lot of web sites each day, as I'm sure is true of many of you. I've found that the typical approach to history files is really not very useful in any of the available browsers -- they all take a date- and/or site-specific approach to maintaining History files. If you can remember when you visited a particular site, and/or its name, you'll be able to find it with relative ease in your history file. However, even when I know I went somewhere yesterday, that might narrow the search to 100 or so websites -- still not a quick find. Usually, though, it's more like "Hmm, what was that site I was at earlier this week that discussed 'foobar.' Trying to find a site with this bit of knowledge is basically impossible -- searching History is either very limited (Firefox and OmniWeb 5 beta find words in the page title) or non-existent (Safari).
Enter TrailBlazer. Written in Cocoa and usiing Apple's open-source Web Kit Framework for web page rendering, TrailBlazer represents a completely new take on History. As you browse pages in TrailBlazer's basic browser, you develop a visual history file, with pages organized by date and nice thumbnails, along with arrows showing your progression from site to site. But it also uses the Lucene search engine to index every page, enabling very fast content searching. So now, when I remember that the word 'foobar' was on the site I want to find, I just type 'foobar' into the search box, and the page(s) containing that term are highlighted. Between the visual representation of my browsing history and the powerful search capabilities, finding sites in the History file is a snap with TrailBlazer.
TrailBlazer is not necessarily 'ready for prime time.' I had it crash on me a couple of times, and there are times where it gets very slow and unresponsive. However, as I noted, it's receiving a 10 not for its current application front end, but for the rethinking of the whole concept of a browser History file. Since the project is open source, hopefully some of these ideas will be incorporated over time into browsers that have an open source component (Safari, the Mozilla/Firefox family, OmniWeb). I for one would welcome a greatly improved history function.
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040401085654619