 | |  | Download Blue Crab | | | | Soft32.com  Mac Internet & Network Internet Tools | Blue Crab 4.9.18 Blue Crab - copy the contents of a website.
| | | | | Editor's Review - Blue Crab | | |
Features
Stability
Usability
Interface
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| | BlueCrab is a site crawling application that allows you to browse completely offline a certain Web site by doing a local copy of that site.
BlueCrab is an application that does it's job pretty well, but with the penalty of lower usability. The testing of this application took quite a while. The first test was the crawling test of the producer's Website. The whole thing was quite fast, but then I decided to do a level two crawling of the Soft32 Website. That was heavy work.
The interface of this application shows you the bookmark list where you can place the sites that you would like to download. This bookmark list is rather unusable. It takes some time till you can learn how to properly use it. Luckily, the tooltips are there, so hovering the mouse over a specific button might give you a hint. The sidebar uses only graphical buttons, so without the tooltips, the usage of this application could have been even more tricky.
Every crawling job runs in its own window which provides advanced statistics about the downloading process, and the queued activities. For any crawling job you can use a custom setup by defining a new configuration. The configuration of new setups lacks some functionality as the 'Save as' functionality is not implemented, so you can't define a new configuration by modifying the default one, and save it as a custom one. You need to complete all the steps: add a new configuration, edit it, then save it, and only then you can use it.
Even though the application uses quite much processing power, it provides satisfying results. It has the possibility to remap all the hyperlinks, including the hyperlinks generated by a dynamic Website. Since you can use many advanced options that are provided by the configuration interface, you can fine tune the resulted HTML content.
Pluses: advanced functionality, very configurable and flexible, a great hyperlink remap support, good documentation support.
Drawbacks / flaws: high CPU usage, quite unusable interface.
In conclusion: if you can get over the interface design issues, this application can be a very good tool if you need to download a site.
version reviewed: 4.9.1
Blue Crab Publisher's Description Blue Crab is a versatile program that you use to copy the contents of a website to your computer, in whole or in part.
Conduct fast offline browsing and searching without an internet connection.
Create a snapshot of a website for historical archiving.
Collect specific types of resources such as images or email addresses.
Search current content more thoroughly than a search engine right on your own computer.
Check a site for broken links, or generate an HTML site map
Perform batch downloads of URLs
Create full page images of URLs (JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, PSD, etc.)
With Blue Crab you can download all the content including HTML, PDF, graphics, video, file archives, etc., or use selective filtering to restrict downloads to specific kinds of files. For example, you can choose to save only the JPEG images Blue Crab finds, or just the PDFs.
Blue Crab has a special feature called the "Media Grabber" which you can use to easily download just the images (or movies) on a website. Moreover, you can view a slide show of the images as they are downloaded. You also have the option of "flattening" the images, i.e. putting them all into one folder, or preserving the folder structure on the server (just as when downloading a complete website for offline viewing.)
Starting with a single URL Blue Crab begins traversing the site by following the links on the HTML pages it finds. Blue Crab does not stray off the domain of the starting URL; in other words it won't download the whole web! Moreover, you can restrict Blue Crab to a subset of the given website by specifying strings that must match parts of the URL.
Blue Crab is gentle on the server. It processes only one URL at a time and may be configured to grab resources at preset time intervals. System Requirements Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. | | | |
Download Blue Crab | Screenshots
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