This must have happened to you: You’re registering on a Web site or perhaps trying to use a Web form to raise a support request and something goes wrong. Perhaps your browser crashes or you fail to click on the right button and when you return to the form page you’ve lost the text you were entering. Such things can drive you nuts.
This is why you need Lazarus, a free Firefox add-on published by Interclue, that records and saves every form you fill out and does so as you fill it out – in other words it is doing real-time recording.
When (not “if”) you need to recover form data you just right click in the form field to bring up the context menu and select “Recover Form”. Lazarus will find the data and voila! You’re back in business.
What is impressive is that Lazarus doesn’t just understand plain HTML forms, it also understands WYSIWYG editors, rich text boxes, and AJAX-enabled forms. You can search the Lazarus database so you can recover form data even when you aren’t on the original Web page.
Lazarus can be disabled for selected sites (for example, you might not want to record your interactions with your bank) and the form data is stored encrypted with “2048-bit RSA and 256-bit AES hybrid encryption.” You can password protect access to Lazarus data and optionally have Lazarus purge recorded form data older than whatever time period you like.
In fact Lazarus goes to great lengths to protect your form data including not storing the search index in plain text: Lazarus “first applies a salted hash to every word before indexing it. The ‘salt’ is randomly generated, but is stored unencrypted, which means that if an attacker steals that as well, they can use it to mount a dictionary attack against the words in the index, and eventually discover some of the words that you have entered into forms. The locations of the forms will still be secure if you are using a password for Lazarus.”
Interclue also offers the eponymously named Interclue, another free browser plug-in that provides previews of link destinations for Firefox users (it should also work with Flock and support for Internet Explorer, Opera and Safaris is in the works).
This tool is really clever: When you hover your mouse over a link it shows “linkclue” icons next to the link text that indicate “information about the link, such as the related site favicon, what kind of file it is if it’s not a normal Web page, and if it’s going to open in a new window or tab.” If you now hover over the linkclue icons a tool-tip pop up (the “Clueviewer”) appears showing “link summaries, link context information and useful next-action buttons.”
The central idea behind Interclue is that it saves you time by allowing you to check out what a link is all about and where it goes to without you having to follow the actual link.
Interclue also contains a clever bit of marketing: It tracks your interactions with both itself and the browser and figures out how much time it has saved you. You can set a value for your own time and Interclue also tells you how much money has been saved.
This is a terrific piece of engineering and beautifully designed with lots of configuration options and it even looks good. This is inline with Interclue’s Manifesto, which is to my mind delightfully “old school” stating, as it does, that “Every pixel counts”, “User augmentation cannot come at the cost of user irritation”, and “Functionality is useless without usability and discoverability.” I wish more developers followed these maxims.
Both of these products are donationware and have become indispensible to me. Outstanding!
