Outwit Hub Firefox Web Collection Tool
Outwit Hub is an interesting Firefox add-on. It serves two purposes at the moment: information gathering and organizing.
This is done by separating each website into different parts, like images, links, text and email addresses and providing different tabs for each one of them so that these contents can be accessed separately.
That provides quick access to information by limiting contents to one of the supported content types.
Each item discovered can be put in so called baskets which remembers the website the item was found on and if available the direct link to the item itself.
One interesting feature is the data grabber. If you ever wanted to copy and paste tables or lists you might have encountered formatting problems when you tried to paste the data into another application such as Excel or OpenOffice Calc.
Outwit Hub seems to be pretty solid in keeping the original structure of the data intact.
There's a lot to explore and I only mentioned a few items that seem useful to me. I think that the concept of separating information is an interesting one and could make the add-on useful to some of you.
Update: The Firefox add-on has not been updated since 2012 and while that is a strong indicator of an abandoned project usually it is different in this case.
Outwit released a standalone application for Windows, Linux or Mac that you can download and install instead. An add-on is provided as well that you can download from the developer website directly but since it is offered only there, it has not been analyzed by Mozilla.
To use Outwit in Firefox tap on the Alt-key and select Tools > Outwit > Outwit Hub from the menu that opens up.
This opens a standalone browser that you can use to gather data from websites that you visit. The interface sorts data into various groups automatically that you can access with a click. A switch to images for example displays all images on the page you are on, while contacts all email addresses.
The application is regularly updated and may still be useful. Since it is not limited to Firefox anymore it should have a wider appeal as well.
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anyone use outwit hub extensively?
am a non-dev looking for help w/a multi-step scrape- when emailing outwit help they said it’s hard for them to find time to aid w/individual users questions that aren’t regarding bugs/malfunctions.
really useful to download pictures!
If you want to know how this extension works, I produced some video tutorials at http://www.outwitter.fr
very strange…. after reading your comment i went to the extensions to check if i’d missed something, and no, as before, no options. so, i thought i’d click the button again, just to see what might happen this time, and viola! it worked. and, man is it slick! although, on your site, it doesn’t find your feeds.
You need to start the Outwit Add-on.
it installed in my ff3.1, but does nothing.
No its actually working in Firefox 3
asher responds to archer. that’s poetic.
thanks. i’ll grab it with flock and then install it in ff3 and see if it works.
@archer: If you clicked the link that is where the picture is from. And this is for FF3 they just need to update it for 3.1
does this mean cutting edge techie martin is still using ff2? how could this be possible?
this is a no-go for ff3