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Review
dumpTRUCK!
Issue: 1.6 (June/July 2003)
Author: Jim Rodovich
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,664
Starting Page Number: 9
RBD Number: 1605
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.trafficstudio.com
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
dumpTRUCK! is a tool that was made with REALbasic and is constantly recommended to developers in order to help automate the process of submitting webpages to various search engines. dumpTRUCK! can take the repetition out of submitting a list of page addresses to a group of search engines.
When it was released three years ago, dumpTRUCK! was probably a fairly good example of a REALbasic application. dumpTRUCK! does one thing and does it well (or did, perhaps). It has a simple, clean, and fairly straightforward interface. Today, however, it is likely to be overlooked as anything but evidence of how quickly technology changes.
dumpTRUCK! is available for both Macintosh and Windows computers, but the Mac version has not been carbonized so it's not a native OS X application. The program's system requirements are otherwise reasonable.
A further sign of dumpTRUCK!'s age is seen in the changes made to popular search engines. Only two of the twelve search engines included in the program's default schedule use the same URLs to add websites to their respective databases. In fact, several of the default portals don't actually use their own engines anymore, instead offering search results through another source, such as Google. (Google, perhaps the single most popular search engine today, is one of the two engines that will still work in dumpTRUCK!)
Fortunately, due to intelligent design, users can correct dumpTRUCK!'s outdated schedule on their own. Instead of using addresses that are hard-coded into the program, dumpTRUCK! reads the information about its search engines from a schedule file. It should only take a few minutes to find the addresses needed to submit new pages to today's popular engines and change the schedule file using a text editor. This also means that if Traffic Studio wished to freshen the program, it could upload the changed schedule file for current users of dumpTRUCK! to download, instead of forcing everyone to download the whole application again just to get the other ten sites working. (Ideally, this process would be simplified even more for the user by having the program periodically check to see if an updated schedule is available and download it in the background if necessary.)
It may be worth noting that dumpTRUCK!'s interface is considerably different between the Mac and Windows versions. It is unclear whether this was done to best accomodate the habits of users of each platform, or for technical reasons or limitations, but it does suggest that the program was built from two different project files instead of one project for two platforms.
At one time, dumpTRUCK! was probably a very useful tool for people who periodically created new webpages and wished to submit them to search engines. Should the developer choose to update the program it could potentially become that way again.
In Brief Product dumpTRUCK! Manufacturer trafficSTUDIO! Price $15 Contact Info http://www.trafficstudio.com Pros Flexibility Cons Outdated Rating (1.0-5.0): 2.0
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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