Welcome to our fourth issue of the year!

Surfing the Net can be very discouraging at times. So much to explore and so little time available. Then you find this jewel of a site and start exploring it. Because you don't want to spend your entire seesion time on this one location you save each page with the intent to return later while offline and read them at your leisure. Unfortunately, there are several problems with that method. After saving a number of pages, let us say 50 or so, it is difficult to pick the right page, what with all those cryptic names and worse, it is even more difficult to follow the thread. And then, when we viewed the pages, where were all those nice graphics we took so long to download?

The only solution up until now was to use programs such as Sextant and SmartMarks (featured in the V2N3 issue) but even then we had to work at it, using two or three apps simultaneously. We ended up spending a considerable amount of time just trying to recreate what we had just seen while online.

Just so you appreciate at its full value the advantages of using this issue's featured application, let us see how we normally would handle one typical situation and how the same situation would be handled with that new app I will soon divulge.

Not long ago, I was searching for some nice logos and background graphics I could use in my homepage creations. I did find several superb sites, filled with the desired logos. The only way I could think of capturing those graphics (short of using an app like Sextant) was to right-click on each one and selecting "Save this image as.." then saving it and then, back to the page and selecting another one, then another one... Of course, all this had to be done while online. Even then, when I replayed the same pages while offline, there were no logos! That is what I meant by 'very discouraging' at the beginning of the article.

Yes... I'm getting to it! This issue's pearl of an app is called "Secret Agent" (no relation to the mail program 'Agent'. Here's the spiel on that gem! Once installed, I replayed the same scenario mentioned in the paragraph above. What took me over one hour to perform while online was now done in less than five minutes! I then went offline, fired up Secret Agent and enjoyed several of its features, among them:

Browse your Netscape cache off-line, pages and images

Read pages at your leisure and reduce telephone charges

Extract images and backgrounds for your own use

Display pages from the cache, go on-line and follow 'un-visited links'

Use Secret Agent with a cache from Netscape 1.1, 1.2 or Netscape 2.0

After a heavy session of on-line Web browsing, you can close down your link to your service provider and revisit off-line all the pages you accessed during your session, complete with in-line images and working links between accessed pages. You can extract the graphic files with the help of a special summary index, created by Secret Agent, containing thumbnail size copies of the images, or you can examine the html source of the more interesting web pages.

There is more... you can also display a page from the cache in Netscape, go on-line and pick up where you left off in a previous on-line session! Follow the links or get that image that had been missed before!

If you have enjoyed this newsletter and you know of cyberpals who would also like to receive it, please let them know about it. They might even thank you for the thought!

If you have enjoyed this 'Quality time moment', why not drop me a line. I am always in search of new ideas so, if you have a special topic you would like to see covered at length, let me know.

That's it Folks !!!

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