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Making A Better Browser History
jbtule writes "Students at the University of Illinois have released TrailBlazer, a new user interface to represent your web browsing history. It lays out the pages you visit in a simple 2D map with thumbnails and summaries. The project took 2nd place at the university's annual Engineering Open House and a three minute video is available that demonstrates TrailBlazer for those who don't have Mac OS X Panther. TrailBlazer is implemented with Apple's WebKit on a bare bones browser, but this interface would probably be more useful if it were added to a real browser. This is a much better history than chronological lists of web page titles or crazy cubes floating around a 3D space. Hopefully Safari or /insert favorite web browser/ will do something similar in the future."
I don't have a problem with Opera's current implementation. Their quick and easy one button (F4) sidebar let's me quickly search by string for title, and arranges it by reverse chronological order. This allows me to quickly type in something like "google" in the filter, and show me every google search I've done in the past let's say 2 months. From this I can usually pick up any trail that I've lost and find a page that I've visited before with ease.
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
OpenSource, scriptable, customizable ad infinitum integradete IRC for spatial use and finally a good reason besides games to have a fast graphics board
Videos and images available
spidergraph (it plugs into Mozilla)
Safari uses webkit which uses konqueror base
That is a brilliant idea... BRILLIANT!!!
So if you wanted to search for an article on how to weave baskets (I know, weird example) that you had seen in the past, you could tell Google that you're interested in crafts and such but not shopping or historical research. Google would then filter out sites about the history of basket weaving and sites selling woven baskets. That doesn't leave a whole lot of room for anything but articles on how to weave baskets yourself.
I'm sure that'd get you there [almost] as fast as a Google search on your history. You'd probably come across even more relevant information than if you only searched your history. It's just another technique for Google to deliver the most relevant results in the search engine industry.
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.
which is a Gecko base
The underlying HTML technology beneath Safari is KHTML, not Gecko.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
EOH@UIUC covers all engineering fields, not just computers. TrailBlaizer came in second to an impressive physical demo exhibit titled "Stopping Waves with Bubbles: The bubble plume breakwater".
FWIW, the only original part of this idea is the thumbnails. IBM's WebExplorer for OS/2 in 1994 created a Webmap as you browsed. The killer part of this is being able to easily access pages you can't reach with the back button, because you already backtracked and then branched out in a different direction. However, they still win points for me by being the only ones to actually resurrect and improve this old idea.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Whats next, a "2-wheel mouse"? Hey haven't I seen that before???
IBM came out with a mosue with one of those controls that looks like a pencil eraser where a scroll wheel would be. Then another company came out with a mouse with two wheels: one vertical, one horizontal. Now Microsoft has their tilt-wheel tech, where you can press on the wheel to scroll side to side.
I think I like the Microsoft implementation best. The IBM concept made it difficult not to get some sideways scrolling when you scroll vertically, and the two-wheel design requires more doohickeys.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You're thinking of ProjectX, which was renamed HotSauce. If I remember correctly, it was a "fly through" of spheres in fake 2D, each sphere representing a site (and surrounded by smaller spheres representing linked sites). As you approached a satellite sphere, you would begin to see its links come into view....and so on, ad infinitum.
Here's one link I found in Google "apple hotsauce browser."
It has been done before. IBM Web Explorer for OS/2 and Mosaic 3.0 both had tree browser histories.
This sounds very much like the "web map" feature of IBM's "Web Explorer" browser for OS/2 back in the early 90's. Web Map created an html page comprised of the links you had visited in that session, arranged in a heirarchical manner. I've not seen anything quite like it in other browsers.
I'd agree, if this weren't built using OS X Panther. This browser history map uses thumbnails (and if those thumbnails aren't resizable, they should be in the next version) and simple arrows,
.nib files from TB into Safari? I know that iCAR adds a prefpane to iChat that adds functionality - maybe by copying some files from TrailBlazer into Safari's History window file we could already implement this? it's a long shot, but hey... I'll play with it and report back if it actually works.
From the few minutes I tested TrailBlazer with, it seems that they resize automatically when you visit more pages. There is also a "minimum" and "maximum" thumbnail size in preferences, but they don't go lower than 150. At the size I have it right now (about 10 pages), the display fits about 5x3 pages in a relatively small area. As long as the old History is also accessible, IMO this is ready to implement in a browser such as Safari.
I wonder if it would be as simple as copying some
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
So bloody obvious! Amazing nobody has figured this out before.
FYI - this feature (more or less) was on IBM's initial web browser for OS/2, before they ported Netscape. I remember using it almost a decade ago. I think they called it a "Web Map" and it was just a tree representation of the pages you had opened. Very simple, intuitive and useful.
Been there done that
i've used something like this called mantadb under windows:
MantaDB v02.03 - MantaDB is a very useful
set of utilities for Microsoft Internet
Explorer. Included with MantaDB is a Web
Page Database that indexes the words that
on view in your browser, a utility to
check for dead links on web pages and
smaller utilities to numerous to mention.
From: Net 2000 Ltd. (Win95, 98 2000, NT4)
a similar windows product still under development is called hindsite
it is a bummer these are both windows only products. does anything like this exist for linux? i checked the mozilla extentions page and didn't see any such creature there.
ciao
until viewable screen realestate increases, to me, it is just useless!
23" Apple Cinema Display
dave