App Shopper: Blue Crab Lite (Utilities)

App Activity

Jan 21 '13	$8.99 -> $9.99
Feb 10 '11	Version 2.0.1
Feb 08 '11	New App: $8.99, v2.0

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Blue Crab Lite

Mac OS

Blue Crab Lite is a an app that you use to copy a web site to your computer. It tries to download all the linked data including HTML, graphics, videos, PDFs, etc. automatically. And then you can search or browse the downloaded site without any internet connection.

Starting with a single URL Blue Crab Lite begins traversing the site by following the links on the textual pages it finds, HTML, CSS, etc. Blue Crab Lite does not stray off the domain of the starting URL, so it won't get lost. It knows how to stop because it never downloads the same URL twice, and it remembers what has already been downloaded.

Once you download a collection of files on a website you can search them with the built in text search window, which displays results in a hierarchical fashion. You can also search the downloaded files in the Finder with Spotlight.

Feature List

• Completeness. Unique URL finding methods yield very complete downloads.

• Browse Offline. Downloaded web sites can be browsed offline, because the links in each page have been relinked to point to the proper files now on disk.

• Easy to use. Tool tips exist on all user interface items for learning the program quickly.

• Protocols. Supports both HTTP and secure HTTPS.

• Offsite links. You can allow the app to download resources it finds on other domains, improving the display of pages offline. Select the option "Grab Offsite URLs" in preferences.

• Stay in folder. You can restrict Blue Crab Lite to a subset of the given website using the convenient "stay in folder" option available in every grabber window. This restricts the crawl to URLs whose path must begin with the same path as the starting URL.

• Subdomains. You can enable Blue Crab Lite to move across "second level" parts of a domain it finds, such as from "www.site.com" to "images.site.com." Select the option "Allow Secondary Domains" in preferences.

• Search. The built-in directory search engine displays found files as a hierarchical list that matches the structure of the site, with double-clickable entries to open and view them in the appropriate application.

• Progress. In addition to displaying detailed progress in a window, Dock badging provides visual feedback of progress when the program is in the background.

What's new

• URL data loading option: "Load URLs From Disk" - this option is available in the Preferences window. It is ON by default.

• If this option is selected: When grabbing a website, URL data will be loaded from disk, if available, rather than loading it from the internet. This feature is intended primarily for resuming a download that was terminated more quickly, and not for updating a website previously downloaded.

• Grabber windows display "Looking for url disk file" in the status message area when the option is selected.

• Speed is also improved since pages loaded from disk will not be relinked or remapped, also, data is not re-saved to disk because it is identical.