I love . I really do. But it has an infuriating habit of silently failing to create a web archive when I add an URL via the F8 Quick Entry shortcut.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, Yojimbo lets you press a system-wide hotkey (set to F8 initially, but you can change it) which lets you quickly save snippets of text, passwords, serial numbers, etc. One of the features I use most often is putting in an URL which will tell Yojimbo to go and save it as a web archive.
Which is great.
Except when it doesn’t work.
If Yojimbo can’t download the page for some reason (usually some temporary network issue), it doesn’t do anything to tell you about it. You switch over to Yojimbo and check the downloads (cmd+2), but that totally breaks the whole idea of “I want to do this quick and get it out of my brain ASAP” which is 99% of what I use Yojimbo for.
So how do I know when something didn’t download? Yojimbo creates an empty web archive named “untitled” and usually the URL is stored in the “Inspector” (cmd+shift+i).
Except when it isn’t.
It also seems like the URL gets lost if Yojimbo is quit before you open the Inspector. Like, for example, if you didn’t notice that the web archive failed because Yojimbo didn’t tell you.
This happened to me (again) today. I switched over to Yojimbo and saw the dreaded “untitled” web archive. Fortunately, Yojimbo did record the time.
How does that help?
Well, I could check my browser history, but it doesn’t seem to go back that far. Plus, I use several different browsers (right now I have Opera, Firefox, and Safari running).
All is not lost, however, because I have .
Many Mac users may not have ever heard of Browseback, which is unfortunate. It’s an app that I think is so slick, cool, and useful that Apple ought to buy it and integrate it into the operating system.
It gives you a visual browser history. From all your browsers (it works with IE:Mac, Camino, Firefox, Netscape, OmniWeb, Opera, and oh yeah, Safari).
Browseback captures not just the URL, but what the page looked like. If you’re anything like me, it’s much easier to remember what something looked like than where it was. It will also let you do a search based on date and/or keywords.
It organizes the history by time, so I just went back and looked for what I was looking at around the time that Yojimbo said that I had tried to save the web archive (I went back a few minutes earlier too, assuming that I would have a) loaded the page in my browser, b) read it and whatever I was reading at the time, and c) found something I wanted to save and tried to add it into Yojimbo. Yojimbo told me the time was 10:17pm, and I went back and found something at 10:15pm:
Looking back I realized that I had tried to save from an article at . Voilà!
Now I have it again.
Thanks to Browseback.
Improvements
Yojimbo really, really, really needs to tell me when it fails to download a web archive. I don’t need or want it to tell me every time things go well, but I do need to know when something fails behind the scenes. Hopefully a future update will provide some sort of notification for that. If it doesn’t save properly, the URL should be embedded in the note rather than the Inspector, where it is more likely to be seen.
Browseback isn’t flawless. It needs to be easier to scan the preview of the page that it shows without Browseback thinking that I’m done when I click on it. However the most glaring shortcoming should be pretty simple to fix. See image below:
Do you see what’s missing? When you right click on a web page that Browseback has stored, there are options to browse, email, view, save, or print it, or remove it, or exclude the host where it came from to prevent Browseback from saving it (i.e. your bank’s website would be a good one to exclude!). But what isn’t there? How about “Copy Url to Clipboard”? Now it may be possible for me to get the URL by choosing one of the other options, but why doesn’t it just give me that option right away? Perhaps in the next version.
Browseback isn’t something I use every day, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been glad that I had it around.
BTW: I have been using Browseback for awhile and found that recent updates have made it more stable (it used to show up as “Application Not Responding” quite often). If you tried it before and had problems, it might be time to try it again.