UGN news UGN news
DEVONagent is the information finding tool of the next generation. It simulates the behaviour of a human web surfer scanning the Internet for a specific piece of information.
DEVONtechnologies Ltd. has updated its Internet research tool DEVONagent as well as EasyFind, XMenu and ThumbsUp.
DEVONagent 1.3 features a new operator allowing to use partial words and substrings in queries making it even easier to use complex terms for searching the Internet far beyond the capabilities of Google & Co. Two new plug-ins scan all bookmarked pages in Safari or the pages lately visited, and it is now possible to build a new crawler (an intelligent, flexible list of pages to scan) from the Safari history. Also, the multimedia scanner, which filters found pages and only lets them through if they contain multimedia contents, has been splitted into three more precise scanners for audio and video contents linked to and embedded multimedia contents. As with every release, the user interface has been improved and the performance has been enhanced due to optimizations in both, DEVONagent and in the unterlying DEVONfoundation framework.
DEVONagent is the information finding tool of the next generation. It simulates the behaviour of a human web surfer scanning the Internet for a specific piece of information. DEVONagent uses a variety of searching techniques and collects the results from major search engines. Then it visits all the found web sites, downloads, analyses and weights them to find the most relevant pages, eliminating information junk (empty pages, HTTP errors, sites that don't contain the search phrase, similar or duplicate pages, or pages with too little information) automatically on-the-fly.
Especially useful for anyone visiting the same pages over and over again to see if there's something published about a specific topic are crawlers. They scan through lists of interesting pages and report only those dealing with what the user is looking for. Also, "scanner" post-process the result list and filter out all pages that don't match certain formal criteria such as "Contains a webcam" or "Features web galleries".
The final results are presented by DEVONagent in a plain list, sorted by decreasing relevance, together with a first summary of all paragraphs that DEVONagent thinks are the most relevant to the query. A double-click on any link opens the pages directly in an integrated web browser built upon the fast and rock-solid Safari engine (including Java, JavaScript, Plug-Ins and all the rest).
EasyFind, the easiest and most versatile find-file tool for Mac OS X, inherited the new partial words operator from DEVONagent, the directory popup menu displays icons for every item and the user interface has been cleaned up a bit.
XMenu 1.2, a freeware goodie which brings back a menu similar to the good old Apple menu, comes with a new option to move the XMenu menus to the left of the menu extras instead of placing them in the right corner of the menu bar, and displays the menu without icons in the small system font, if desired. Both XMenu 1.2 and ThumbsUp 3.5b have been localized in Polish.
DEVONagent requires Mac OS X 10.2 with Safari installed, or Mac OS X 10.3, EasyFind and ThumbsUp require Mac OS X 10.2 and above, and XMenu only runs on Mac OS X 10.3 and later. All applications are immediately available as a free download from www.devon-technologies.com. DEVONagent must be registered for US$ 35 after the evaluation period.
London (UK, European Union), 7th of May, 2004 --
Return to: the top of this page, or the INDEX for this department
Exit to: The User Group Network front page
Contact: The Editor, Webmaster or Membership Director