Metaproducts "Inquiry"

A Webpage Manager
Reviewed by Mike Dinn



"Inquiry" is a utility which facilitates management of your Interenet webpages information. Here is a typical screen

Its main feature is user-friendly, instant storage of the current webpage in a readily accessible format. It provides many aids to assist in searching and displaying.

The most important use I have found for it is storage of pages with transient information such as banking, bills and receipts. Electronic storage and retreival of this sort of information is finally practical. One other major use I have found is during Internet shopping, where you want to quickly save pages of similar products for later detailed comparison. For example I was recently looking for a 17 inch LCD monitor, and I readily saved all relevant pages for instant comparison.




Here are two examples:

 Bills

Saved pages are stored in a propietary compressed format, but can be exported in several ways, such as HTML, HTML Help (.chm), and .exe viewer.

Auto-saving can be turned on. This means that all subsequent pages are saved and can be browsed off-line. But with broadband I personally don't need such a feature.

Another example of something which can be invaluable or irrelevant, depending on your interests, is generating citations in various official formats, for use in papers, books etc.

Shopping

There are many aids to browsing and searching the stored pages. For example, "mouse hover" displays a thumbnail of the page, its Title and URL, and date and time downloaded. A click on a folder of pages produces a display of such information for all the pages within the folder.

Yet another vital or unimportant feature (depending on your uses) is an ability to extract and store all the graphic images contained within, or more accurately linked to, a webpage.

So ... a very good and useful program, in my opinion. The handling of transient pages is by far its best feature, I think.

"Standard" version is $30 US. I think this is just on the margin of value for money. "Professional" version is $60 US, but the additional features available seem to be very minor,

Review edition was provided by Metaproducts. URL is www.metaproducts.com

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