Blue Crab Editor's Review

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