DeepVacuum - 1.66

It was a long road that I travelled to get to this application. I was originally going to buy Webstractor, but the price was a bit high. They offer educational pricing so as I had a course coming up I decided to wait. It took months to get the course organised and then weeks on top of that to get the student number issued. I finally went off to Webstractors site and the site was down and has been for over a week.

I looked at the reviews on VT of similar apps and none had very impressive feedback, but eventually one piece of feedback pointed to DeepVacuum.

I downloaded DV and installed it. Within 5 minutes I had decided that this was the application for me and went of to register it.

Some people ask why use an application like this. For me it is because there are just so many sites that I can't access at work. This way I can DL the site or parts of a site that I want to look at to my laptop and then take that to work for the research that I want to do in my lunch break. I can also download sites whilst at my girlfriend's house and take the laptop back to mine, a house with no phone line.

Even in the UK, by the time that the tax has been added this app only cost 7.52 GBP. Give it a whirl. You wont go wrong.

Rarely does shareware reach this level of refinement without becoming bloated and overpriced. When I first started using DV, it was the site downloader I tried after my others failed, but now after a year or so of development, DV is the first and usually only downloader I use. DV surpasses other downloading apps costing more than twice as much, and of course one is not even forced to buy DV unless they get sick of waiting a few seconds to use it. After using it free for many moons, I finally paid for it because I wanted to reward the developers; I find the care and attention put into DV inspiring and want to repay its humble developers.

I suppose now I could list the downloaders that DV has put to shame in my downloading trials, and give a few examples of sites only DV could handle, but I'm not going to. I don't doubt that other downloaders might really be able to tackle those sites with enough finessing of the settings. The brilliance of DV is that, like all of the very best Macintosh software, it just works. I can make simple adjustments most of the time, but there's always a pane of advanced features for fine-tuning DV for those tricky sites. It's a great software design paradigm, and I wish more developers used it (yes, even Apple).

I'm about to give DV the ultimate praise in my book: when I'm finished using DV, it leaves me in a better mood than when I began using it.

I used to use PageSucker, but came across some sites that caused it to crash. Also, PageSucker has a lot of set-up options, which make it difficult to configure properly. DeepVacuum has worked great on every site I've downloaded, and I love the fact that it makes use of one of the built-in Unix utilities in Mac OS X. It seems plenty fast to me, and because it fetches (wgets?) one page at a time, I don't worry that I may be overwhelming the target server as with other programs that open multiple streams simultaneously. The pre-sets are also extremely handy. I tried a bunch of other, supposedly similar programs, and chose DeepVacuum.

It has been discussed several times on this forum, but it seems that some people are still confused.

DeepVacuum is based on GNU wget. Wget is widely available under GPL - means it's code is a common wealt that must remain common wealt even if modified. DeepVacuum is an idividual program that knows how to use launch and use wget. It does not contain a single line of code from wget. As such is does not fall under GPL regulations.

A good example here would be Mac OS X that is a separate software that does not share code with Darwin. Darwin is the core of Mac OS X. It really handles everything: disks, memory, devices, program lauchning and more. But Mac OS X source code is not available as it does not share any code with Darwin it is rather a separate program running on top of GPL core.

It is a real nonese to say that DeepVacuum possibly tries to hide malicious code. DV is a regular program that is supposed to make user life easy. No adware, no spyware, no any other strangeware and weirdware.

I stronlgy encourage users to try both programs: DV and SiteSucker. I conclude a few of my observations here:

• SS is *not* free ($5) as someone has mentioned.
• The speed of download is just about the same.
• DV allows users to download using may protocols: http, https, ftp, ftps
• DV let's you setup many downloads with different setup - actually this way you can download faster than SS and from more sites
• DV includes many presets that allow to download exactly the files you want. Site Sucker has only one profile, that might be useful to a very narrow group of users.
• Compare what settings you can use to fine tune your download in both programs. You don't want to download all of the rubbish, but only what interests you, doesn't you?
• By reading "What's new" you can see that SiteSucker is still in development and may not download certain sites due to bugs in the program. In contrast DV (wget) is a very mature program that will do it and won't crash.
• SS interface doesn't follow OS X concepts at all
• DV costs just a few bucks more but offers much, much more than SS

But hey, these are my observations, check it out for yourself. ;-) Most of the statements are true for WebDevil as well. I used to use this program some time ago. I don't like comparing any of these programs here, but I can't just sit and read posts from people that haven't even tried DV. And please do not judge programs by their price, only. It seems to me that some people got disappointed that DV is not free any more. I need some bread and butter too.