PocketMac Safari Scrapbook review

One of the nicest features of Google Desktop Search on Windows is the ability to quickly find text in cached Web pages, which makes it much easier to find a visited Web page when you can't quite remember its name or URL.

However, as yet there's no Google Desktop for Mac - which is where PocketMac Safari Scrapbook comes in.

This small, simple application fills exactly this niche, allowing you to search through cached pages that you've looked at in Safari, and search either through titles or full text. Once the initial index is created, searching is almost instantaneous, even with large indexes.

As befits a simple application, there are only a few options. You can set Safari Scrapbook to ignore particular domains, allowing you to ignore your .Mac email account for example. You can also ignore particular types of files, such as PHP scripted pages, which are likely to be dynamically generated pages that you won't want to search.

Other than this, there's nothing much to Safari Scrapbook - but that's not a criticism. You can, however, export any item from your cache to either a text file, sticky note or - perhaps most usefully - to the Notes folder on an iPod.

There are only two real criticisms of Safari Scrapbook. The first is that the product will only index when you either restart your machine or once a day, which means you don't have access to your most recent cached pages - something that limits its usefulness for the heavyweight Web user. The second issue is slightly more prosaic: the product, as its name suggests, only works with Safari, which means that users of Internet Explorer or Firefox will have to look elsewhere. HistoryHound (see Reviews 25 June 2004, p38) doesn't have these limitations but works at a much slower performance level than Safari Scrapbook.

Overall, though, Safari Scrapbook is a decent utility that fills a niche at a price that's hard to beat. As long as you're prepared to live with the limitations, it's worth a look.

Needs: Mac OS X 10.3 + 4MB disk space + Safari