I was inspired to develop AnnWebLinks by e-mails I receive in connection with job hunting. Each listing in these messages starts with a job title. Following this is the company's name and general location. Finally, there is a Web link for more information. At first I thought I could rely on the list of jobs I applied for and my memory to select which job listings I should investigate further. However, I found that I frequently viewed some job Web pages several times. AnnWebLinks can be used to solve this problem.
One of the job alert e-mails I received included a job at eCybersuite for a Senior Programmer. Based on my skills, that seemed like a possibility. So I highlighted that company's name in the e-mail message and used Ctrl-C (copy) and Ctrl-V (paste) to copy it into the Search field of AnnWebLinks. The following image shows what resulted.
It turns out that I considered this job last December and found it to be unsuitable. (Sometimes job titles change slightly.) As a result, I didn't waste any time going to the Web site and re-reading the description.
Next, I want to consider a job at MITS, Inc. Before copying this company's name into the Search field, I press the Clear button. This has three effects. I don't have to overwrite the previous search term, this search term is added to the Search field's drop-down list and the category is set to the default one. For now, the default category is "Jobs – consider." This is set in the Categories page of the Options screen, as shown below.
On this screen, you could add, edit or delete categories. As stated above, you can set a default category. In addition, when you edit a category, you can tell the program to rename the categories in existing items. You can also add new categories by entering them in the Category field of the main screen. When a new one is detected, it will be added to the list of categories.
For MITS, Inc., there is also a single job that I stored in AnnWebLinks. However, for Technical Connections, Inc. there are several jobs that I considered. In this case, the Next button will be activated and the Previous button will activate after pressing the Next button once. How many of these jobs have I stored in AnnWebLinks? To answer that question, I pressed Ctrl-S to display the Statistics dialog window.
As you can see, I saved seven jobs listings for this company in this program. When you highlight one or more rows in the Statistics window, the total number of items is shown in the lower right above the Close button. You may have noticed that the message is "7 items" instead of "7 item(s)". The reason is that AnnWebLinks will display "1 item" when the total number of items in highlighted categories is one.
Suppose you are not job hunting. How can AnnWebLinks be of use to you? You may also get e-mails about interesting Web pages and want to save some of these in this program along with their associated descriptions, as in the following image.
Now let's go over some of the program's basic operations. When you come across a Web link for which you would like to store a description, copy its information into the various fields and optionally specify a category. If the title is in the first line or the link is in the last line, you could set AnnWebLinks to move either or both of these lines to the appropriate fields when you press the Add or Modify buttons.
The Add/Modify page of the Options screen also provides control over how often data are stored and in which file. The message under the Save Now button tells you how close the program is to the next occasion for saving to the file. It adapts between singular and plural so that is doesn't say "press(es)".
The Launch button on the main screen will open your Web browser, if necessary, and put the current link into its address line. (You can also use this program to launch document files.) The Add button adds a new link to the program and the Modify button allows you to update the current link. AnnWebLinks stores each link's added and last-modified dates and times. You can see these date/times by scrolling the list of links to the right. The Clear button adds the search term to the Search drop-down list, clears the entry fields and sets the category to the default one.
The Delete button lets you delete one or more annotated links. The confirmation window will tell you many links are selected. You can turn off confirmation by removing a check in the Miscellaneous page of the Options screen. When confirmation is off, this button's label changes from "Delete..." to "Delete!". If you change your mind after you deleted some links, you can use the undo command on the system menu. Click on the title-bar icon or press Alt-Spacebar to display this menu. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl-Z to undo a delete or modify command. Note that you can activate previewing of undo and redo effects by pressing Ctrl-P. When this is activated, you can see what was changed, as shown in the following image.
AnnWebLinks supports an unlimited number of undo/redo operations.
Many of the pages of the Option screen have been mentioned above. One that hasn't been described is the Title Case page.
Unlike the corresponding feature that is available in word processors, you can specify a list of words that should not be capitalized unless they occur at the beginning, end or just after a colon. A default list is provided.
I hope you find that AnnWebLinks is helpful. If you have suggestions for improving this program, please send me e-mail.
File Jockey at Compu Serve dot com
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Last updated: 27-May-2005
Page address: http://www.FileJockeySoftware.com/shareware/awl/TestDrive.html