We have finally released version 1.0 of OutWit Hub, with all the features originally planned plus many others, imagined by our users.

Your help testing the program, reporting bugs and suggesting features was invaluable. We thank our tens of thousands of users for their interest and support and we are especially grateful to the hundreds of beta testers of the Pro features who so actively contributed (some with rather creative test cases). What we particularly appreciated is the diversity of usage we read about in our users feedback: from human resources to SEO, from e-commerce to personal collection, from education to research… And some of you are pushing the application to unexplored limits, which, in turn pushes us to optimize our code as much as we can. We hope you will enjoy the Hub Pro and that it will help you save time and clicks, leave the repetitive, tedious tasks to OutWit and focus on the interesting parts of your job.

Of course, version 1.0 is only the beginning and there are so many items in our to do list that we don’t dare to look at the whole thing anymore. We split it in milestones and, version by version, we will go from a rather powerful extraction tool to an autonomous web explorer, collecting, organizing and sharing data and media for you.

The next step is an internal tutorial/wizard system, which will allow us and anybody to produce walkthroughs for the most common extraction tasks. OutWit Hub’s Help system is pretty good. It covers all the programs’ features in a rather detailed way but, to be honest, users don’t read it. What is needed is a series of step-by-step tutorials to replace the few and outdated ones that can be found on this blog. They will reside in the application itself. Then, this wizard system will by extended into a scripting engine and finally a mashup generation system… No release calendar yet, but these are clearly our focus for the coming months.

Thanks again to all those who helped and I hope you will enjoy the program.

JC

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

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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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.

IMPORTANT! – BEFORE READING ON: 

The latest version of OutWit Hub is on the download page of outwit.com and the version history is here. For Email Sourcer, the links are respectively download and history.

Compatible Versions

• Which versions of Firefox is OutWit compatible with?

General Questions

• What is OutWit Hub?
• What is OutWit Images?
• What is OutWit Docs?
• What is the OutWit kernel?
• What exactly is an outfit?
• How much does it cost?
• Do OutWit Hub, Docs or Images require any external software to function properly?
• What version of Firefox do I need to run OutWit Hub, Docs or Images?
• Are tutorials available?
• What languages do OutWit Hub and Images come in?
• Is OutWit Hub, Docs or Images compatible with Internet Explorer or Safari?
• From which sites can I download images or data?

Technical Questions

• How do I install OutWit Hub, Docs or Images?
• I have installed OutWit Hub, Docs or Images then restarted Firefox but I don’t see the OutWit icon on my toolbar. What should I do?
• How can I revert to the previous version of OutWit Hub?
• What’s the Catch?
• I don’t see the catch panel. Where did it go?
• The ‘Next in Series’ and/or ‘Browse’ buttons are disables. How come?
• Can I export an HTML table to an Excel spreadsheet with OutWit Hub?
• What is the ‘Save Incoming Files checkbox?
• Can I save the Catch for later use?
• How do I save the files I “caught”?
• I loaded a page but I don’t see anything when opening the views. How can I load them?
• Can I perform searches from the address bar?
• When I open the spreadsheet I exported into Excel, I receive an error warning saying, “the document you are trying to open is different from the one specified by the file extension.” What should I do?
• How many pictures can I download in one click?
• How can I change the location where the downloaded files are stored when using the ‘Save Incoming Files’ checkbox?
• How do I uninstall OutWit Hub, Docs or Images?
• I’m using Iceweasel and I get an error message on startup, is OutWit compatible with Iceweasel ?

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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.

The Hub finally came out of the Experimental section of Mozilla Addons, after the review was kindly done by Brian King.

The summer is going to be busy: FF3 version, OutWit Images, API documentation, online help, and many tutorials! In the meantime, some of our users are very efficient, already producing their own tutorials (if you read French, see Ezratty’s review and tutorials for image collection and data collection).