Ask HN: Review our app, Boomtango | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our app, Boomtango

boomtango.com

57 pointswillwagner34 comments

Hi,

For a long time, I've griped that the browser history system is old and neglected, but given some love, could potentially be a powerful tool. A lot of my web searches are for content that I have seen in the past, and while browser history is great for the back button (and the awesome bar), the ability to re-find old content has been sub par.

My friend, Alan and I, prompted by the Mozilla Firefox Extend Contest, decided to write a firefox extension that took a fresh look at the browser history system, trying to get past some of the current deficiencies like the lack of integration of multiple tabs being open, the inability to monitor ajaxy sites, etc, and being able to do more than search by hostname and date.

Boomtango is our rough attempt to put together a system that allows you to search by the content of your page or see your history automatically categorized by it's content. It's all stored locally in a sqlite db, so your web browsing never hits our server.

Let us know what you think. We're not awesome ui designers or expert marketers, so any feedback you have, regardless how harsh, would be very enlightening and helpful.

Thanks!

hi Will,

Super idea, this has been a major annoyance to me in the recent past, the inability to find stuff that I know I've read for sure.

First comment, please make it so that it will import all the history from the browser that it is installed on (if someone should want that).

thanks !

It's not mentioned anywhere on the site, but it does do that. Unfortunately, the browser history doesn't contain as much data as boomtango tracks (the full content of the page, any information we grab off the dom, thumbnail previews) etc. It's still handy, but not quite as full featured as the history you generate after it is installed.

Hm, weird, all the previous dates other than today are blank (and today only shows what I loaded after installing).

Also, I noticed that when I switch to the boomtango tab it shows 'phantom' entries, as soon as I click on them the day shows as empty.

You mentioned "Data is stored on your local computer so your history remains private" what about giving the possibility to upload to the web, then I can get my browser history whenever I am. Maybe a possibility to merge browser histories would be cool also ;)

But even with this, it stills very COOL!.

Congrats

That's something we're definitely considering. One idea that we've been noodling on is to add a downloadable app that managed all your storage and had a simple http rest api. Then in the extension, you could optionally point to that instead of the internal storage mechanism.

That would provide some internal benefits of being able to use a beefier storage backend decoupled from the browser. Users then could run the app locally on their computer, or on their own server somewhere, or potentially as part of a cloud storage service.

A simple workaround might be using dropbox to sync the sqlite db file. It would be nice to have an integrated solution though.

A side note: this product, like many others, hosts its video walkthrough on Vimeo. But, Vimeo clearly says on their upload page: "You may not upload commercials, infomercials, or demos that actively sell or promote a product or service."

So, does Vimeo just not enforce this rule, or what?

In haste, I guess we didn't read the fine print. Lesson learned.

I'll remove it from the site tonight and figure out a better way of displaying that content directly.

I installed this. I have two comments:

The first time I launch Firefox after installing, the interfaces asks if I want to import my history or "cancel." I'd like to recommend changing the wording to "Do not import" or something. Did I just cancel out of a larger startup process? I assume not, but I don't think "cancel" is the logical opposite of "import history."

For the screencast, this is my recommendation: 1) write your script 2) record the video portion 3) narrate the video as a separate stage

I've made a few videos this way, and this is the best way I've found to make it fast and error-free. It's hard to multitask, and performing a task while vocalizing it at the same time is really hard.

Anyway, I'm really interested in this project...

Thanks for the comments; both spot on.

I have to say that I've put screencasts in the category of "easier said than done". What I thought would be a simple exercise turned into a grueling marathon one night trying to get 2 minutes worth of video recorded.

Opening the boomtango page takes a long time on my machine, mostly because it's trying to download an image from PayPal.

I hope you guys can make all the images local, so it loads instantly.

Thanks, we'll do that.

Sweet work, and congrats! I wrote and maintain archivd.com and before that dowser.sf.net. Anyone who helps users archive and search is good people.

I suggest working on the visualization design, ie find better ways to compactly represent the important information inside arbitrary webpages. Also think about inferring structure, for example, if a user searches Google for "foo bar" and clicks on a result, that result should automatically get a "foo bar" tag.

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback. We definitely need some work on the visual design; also, I love the idea about an inferred structure.

Np. The way I think about it, an "icon" for a piece of information has to be three things:

    An accurate portrayal of the contents

    More compact than the original

    Sufficiently different from other icons of the same "type"

With web pages that means more than the title + favicon. If a page has a video embedded in it, that's a BIG clue. Also there is tons of structured information that sites put inside pages to make them more tasty to search engines, like microformats. Facebook recently created a de-facto standard for video_src nd image_src link tags.

Excellent, I think I will use this nearly every day. Found a small bug - Tools->Boomtango->Open Settings->Categories->Click the Visit Boomtango for plugins link

Get a 404 trying to reach page: http://www.boomtango.com/trackers/

Thanks, we'll get it in the next update. FWIW, the url it is supposed to go to is:

http://www.boomtango.com/plugins.shtml

Sounds like what I was looking for. Looks good.

The interface is too bright IMO (just checked the screenshots).

I remember there was a similar add-on for firefox. It stored the entire content of pages you visited on your local hard drive and you could search through it. It's called breadcrumbs. How is boomtango different from breadcrumbs???

I haven't installed it, but from looking at the docs, I think there are couple major differences.

One is that we provide a UI with several views that let's you slice and dice your way into finding the content you are looking for. For instance, you can view your history visually in thumbnail view, by a variety of calendar views, or by the category of your content.

Second, we look at the content (and possibly your actions) to determine what the content of the page is and what you've done, and put it into categories. All the videos you've seen or searches you've done, etc, will be categorized so you can quickly find by the type of content for which you are looking.

Third, we include an open greasemonkey style api so that this can be extended (the only one we have right now is a "Hacker News" plugin that records every article you click on from hacker news). For instance, we plan on adding plugins that don't fit for the general public. Conceivably, you could add a blogging plugin that might record all the comments you add to a blog, or a developer plugin that records all the api calls you look up on various sites whitelisted sites so that you can quickly get back to that content.

Woah that third point got me totally swayed.

Edit: Just noticed that dragging the Boomtango icon into the customize box puts an entire iconset in the box rather than the boomtango icon.

Also, does Boomtango change the default throbber???

uggh. That's a bug. We'll fix it in the next update. We don't change the default throbber; not sure what might be going on with that but I'll take a look.

Er... I meant the throbber which appears in the place of the favicon on the tab header, rather than the throbber which appears on the menubar.

Apparently it's a change in the latest nightly and not due to Boomtango.

Thanks for the report. Customize bug fixed in trunk. Will make it to the next update.

Hey Will, this is very well done. It's clear you put a lot of hard work and thought into every aspect of Boomtango and it shows in the quality of your product. Kudos.

Looks cool - consider me a new user! Two suggestions for the FAQ: 1. How much space will this use up on my machine? 2. Will this slow my browsing experience?

Thank. We'll add that to FAQ.

Wasn't there an YC company some time ago doing something similar? What was their name, and what happened to them?

I think it was webmynd

Friggin genius.

Great idea for a plugin.

One feature I'd really like to see, is the ability to selectively delete history entries, both in Firefox's regular history database and Boomtango's enhanced database.

I put it on our todo list. should be pretty easy to implement at this point.

Thanks!

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