WebEx 2.0 Ponders To Online Or To Offline?
By Ahmad Abualsamid
Would you like to browse the Web while on a plane? Or maybe in your hotel room where, if your experience is anything like mine, accessing the Internet is more like a nightmare than a sweet dream. Providing a more pleasant experience, WebEx 2.0 from Traveling Software lets you download entire Web sites while you are connected to
the Internet for viewing offline at your leisure. The experience, when it works, duplicates your online surfing experience.
Task Bar and Site Manager Do the Trick
WebEx is a neat application, made up of a task bar (just like your start bar in Windo
ws95) and a site manager. The task bar can be docked on the top or the bottom of your desktop. You can set it to autohide, taking it out of your way when not in use. WebEx works with Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer and knows all about dial-up connections, as well as direct Internet connections. Installation is easy and smooth.
Once installed, you can arrange for WebEx to start your browser automatically. From there, you can ask WebEx to store any Web page you like. It can store a single home page or a page with its URLs and topics. WebEx keeps a record of the links and URLs on the given page. Later, you can deliver the pages, either by explicitly asking for delivery or by setting up a schedule. Delivery means downloading the contents of the page, including your choice of text, images, audio, video and server-side image maps (a unique ability found in WebEx).
WebEx's storing and delivery customizations are very powerful. You can specify the boundary of the page by domain, directory,
query or pattern match. If you would like to stay up to date with the contents of a particular site, you can schedule periodic delivery to your hard drive. The schedules are flexible and include hourly, daily or weekly schedules.
In version 2.0, the site manager
is integrated with the task bar. The site manager lets you organize your favorite sites. It also archives downloaded Web information into folders of your choice, which simplifies finding information. Users of Windows Explorer (Windows95 file manager) will feel at home with this site manager. The ContentExplorer, another addition to version 2.0, provides a table of contents for the downloaded Web sites, so you can discover changes to favorite sites since the last download.
Another superb ability in WebEx is its integration with popular search engines. It knows about sites like Digital's AltaVista and Magellan. WebEx lets you create searches both online and offline. Once a connection to the Internet is available, searches are performed and th
e results are downloaded to your hard drive. You can view the results of the search at your leisure.
After downloading your sites, you can take your notebook on the bus, or disconnect your home PC's modem and surf the Web offline. WebEx will complain if you start up your browser before WebEx. It will offer to restart your browser so that you can view the predelivered sites. All images and downloads will resemble a true online experience, meaning you can jump from one page to another, download files and click on image maps just like you would on the Web. WebEx knows about HTML forms, too, so if your intranet or Internet site has forms that need filling out, you can do that offline. Next time you connect live to the Internet, WebEx will submit the forms for you.
To Deliver or Not to Deliver?
If everything works as it should, WebEx could be one of the best programs to have on your computer. But does it? I installed WebEx on my notebook, decided to work with Microsoft Internet Explorer, and chos
e a dial-up connection to work from home. At the office, I changed the connection to a direct Internet connection and at a later stage, changed my Internet Explorer browser to Netscape's. So far, so good.
Starting with basic functionality, I visited www.windows95.com an
d asked WebEx to store and deliver the page. It did. Later, I visited the site offline and everything on the page was there, including JavaScript applets. From there, I moved to push WebEx to its limits.
Going to my most-favorite site on the Internet, techweb.cmp.com, I started toying around with WebEx's comprehensive options. I asked it to store and deliver the site with the following options: no boundaries, a 10-MB disk space limit, nine levels of digging and download everything on all pages. The software lets you choose how deep to go into each site, how much space to use up on your disk space and what kind of HTML objects to store (text, images, audio, video, etc.). It also lets you specify whether or not to step off a site, go ou
tside a directory, or use pattern matches against the pages. In effect, you can do wonders with the offered flexibility in terms of choosing how much of a site to download.
While WebEx was working in the background, I decided to visit another site. The switch worked, but the Techweb downloading stopped! The software offered no indication of what was actually going on, leaving me in the dark again. I tried to go offline and visit the downloaded site off my hard disk, but none of the links worked. I restarted the download, but I couldn't figure out how to edit the previous delivery settings of the same site. Sure enough, the site was delivered. I unplugged my computer and took it home (no modem connection, just offline surfing). The page was there, images and everything, but random links failed with various "not found" error messages.
WebEx 2.0 has great potential. It does what it is supposed to do gracefully and, for the most part, successfully. However, I tried many usage patterns and was disappoint
ed with some. Trying to navigate the Web during the store and delivery session stopped the delivery. Neither was trying to use Java tickers like the one available on ESPN's SportsZone. We worked with Traveling Software, and the company acknowledged the bugs and is updating its s
oftware. By the time the final 2.0 version is released, most problems should be ironed out and your offline experience should be as seamless as your online one.
Ahmad Abualsamid is the director of the Model Advanced Facility at University of Wisconsin at Madison. He can be reached at sami@maf.wisc.edu.
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