

Ask HN: Review our app, Boomtango - willwagner
http://www.boomtango.com

======
willwagner
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!

~~~
jacquesm
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 !

~~~
willwagner
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

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Banzai10
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

~~~
willwagner
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.

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

------
fuzzmeister
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?

~~~
willwagner
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.

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idm
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...

~~~
willwagner
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.

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akamaka
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.

~~~
willwagner
Thanks, we'll do that.

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aristus
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!

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

~~~
aristus
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.

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kogus
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/>

~~~
willwagner
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>

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chanux
Sounds like what I was looking for. Looks good.

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

------
chaosprophet
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???

~~~
willwagner
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.

~~~
chaosprophet
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???

~~~
willwagner
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.

~~~
chaosprophet
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.

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

------
matt1
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.

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taki
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?

~~~
willwagner
Thank. We'll add that to FAQ.

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

~~~
paraschopra
I think it was webmynd

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GotToStartup
Friggin genius.

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bhseo
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.

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

Thanks!

