Thank you for your abundant feedback. We have put version 0.8.9.132 online with a few new functions as well as a list of features and fixes recently requested. We didn’t manage to exactly synchronize this update with the release of FF 3.6. but we have now corrected most glitches in the last 48 hours. We may have a to release updates a little more frequently during this month as we will try to go down the beta-test feedback and wish list as rapidly as possible in the coming weeks.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

JC

… We will try to help with our programs and make your life easier.

The new Kernel has been online for a few weeks now and we seem to have fixed all the regressions (not so many, in fact, after such fundamental architectural changes). I believe we can now advise those who haven’t done it yet, to install the updates as the general feedback is pretty positive.

You will, however, find very few features of the upcoming OutWit Hub Pro in the 0.8.9.x versions. These features will only be included progressively in the 0.9.x updates, as the very last beta versions before we release v 1.0. Your feedback will of course be very much appreciated.

We will be glad to propose the Pro version for half the price to all those (officially beta testers or not) who will have helped us identify or fix bugs or who have suggested new features which have been implemented or included in our to do list. So, please, do not hesitate to register on outwit.com and share your comments on the program.

Note about the use of your email address: We have never sent our registered users a single e-mail or newsletter up to now. We really dislike invasive mass e-mailings and the least we can do is respect our own principles. So you can be assured that your privacy is safe with us. A few weeks before the release of the Hub 1.0, we will nevertheless propose the update to our beta testers and users, as well as a feedback form for those who have a little time. We promise that this will be very exceptional.

Cheers to all.

We have been extremely busy in the last weeks with the complete refactoring of the OutWit Kernel, preparing the way for the advanced automation functionalities of OutWit Hub Pro. The coming version 0.8.9 will be the first using our new core library. You will not see very radical changes yet, except for the scraper editor, which should make many of you happy. Here are the changes that you will find:

- The brand new scraper manager and editor

- The big red Stop button that many have been asking for (which, by the way, also allows to abort ‘Apply Scraper to URLs’ processes)

- A few changes in the interface, to prepare the integration of new automators in the following versions.

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I understand it is mean to talk about features that are not implemented in the downloadable versions, but I would like to share my ideas on the purpose behind our experimental semantic features.

The “mechanical” recognition and extraction algorithms used in most views of the Hub are mostly based on a combination of DOM analysis (when dealing with HTML pages) and morphological recognition of objects and strings. These techniques are very efficient for simple scraping of data, but they are not sufficient when we need to discriminately extract data about certain themes or topics. We are currently adding semantic capacities to our extractors (in professional applications only, for now).

At the moment, we are only focusing  on statistical analysis of the words and phrases, without performing any syntactic analysis of the texts. However, the results are very promising and seem to confirm our original ideas.

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At OutWit, we are working on adding intelligence to the Web browser.

The free beta applications that you have been downloading from our site are only parts of what we are developing. They are implementations of some of the recognition and extraction capacities that we are including in the OutWit Kernel. We have been talking about a public API for more than a year now and, although it is definitely still in the pipe, we have been delaying it (as for the complete help and documentation) until we can reach a stable enough version of the kernel and feel confortable with people starting to write code around it.

We are convinced that the future will prove it was a good idea to add semantic intelligence to the browser itself instead of exclusively focusing on the server side.

OutWit’s collection technology is organized around three simple concepts:

1. The programs dissect the Web page into data elements and enable users to see only the type of data they are looking for (images, links, email addresses, RSS news…).
2. They offer a universal collection basket, the « Catch », into which users can manually drag and drop or automatically collect structured or unstructured data, links or media, as they surf the Web.
3. They also know how to automatically browse through series of pages, allowing users to harvest all sorts of information objects in a single click.

With simple intuitive features as well as sophisticated scraping functions and data structure recognition, the OutWit programs target a broad range of user categories.

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In our work for the coming versions of the kernel, one of our main chalenges is OutWit’s ability to explore the hidden Web. We are working on some very exciting features in this area (partly autonomous, partly user-driven explorations). The Deep Web is composed of Web pages and resources that are not indexed by  search engines, simply because there are no links to them. One of the interesting functions we are working on is the generation of URLs and queries to the dark side of the Web.

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We released the first public version of OutWit Docs during the weekend as well as updated versions of OutWit Images and Outwit Hub.

OutWit Docs is a simple WebTop Document Finder, based on our Kernel. It allows you to search through Websites and search engines for documents and it will present the results as an operating system would, either in icon view or as a list of files.

oW Docs looks for text files, spreadsheets, presentations in various formats (including PDF, MS Office, OpenOffice documents, RTF, CSV…).

In this version, the filtering & automatic selection options are somewhat basic (name, file type…), but we are going to improve these along the way. As we cannot download all the result files to explore their contents, we are working on a multi-layered filtering process to refine the query, refine the selection and search the content of the most pertinent files only.

As for all our products, your suggestions will be extremely welcome. In the meantime, we hope that you’ll enjoy this program.

The first beta version of OutWit Images was posted on Firefox Add-ons and came out of the experimental zone this weekend. This new outfit is an online image browser that not only allows you to view Web images as a slideshow or as a wall of thumbnails but also to grab the pictures and save them to your hard disk.

The feedback we are already receiving for this extension is extremely encouraging: with Images like with the Hub, people are actually managing to do things they simply couldn’t do before. And this really makes us happy…

Download OutWit Images

Version 0.8.1.126 was released yesterday. This update adds several features to the Kernel for the forthcoming release of OutWit Images, improving in particular the image extraction process and the slideshow.  The version also includes, among other new features, enhanced bottom panels, with a series of additional criteria to refine your selections and filter the extracted data.