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NetPositive - Download Manager

 

Note
Although most NetPositive preference changes take effect immediately, your best bet, after making a change, is to restart the application anyway.

 

Orb

NetPositive wasn't the first browser available for BeOS. When BeOS was in an early stage of development, Be made an application so developers could read documentation in HTML-format.

Now this is more or less the case also with NetPositive.

For more information about Orb, please visit BeatJapan.

An other browser that once was available for BeOS, was Opera 3.62.

 

 
NetPositive (Net+)

NetPositive was the BeOS-native Web browser, but yellowTAB recommend users to go for Firebird or Mozilla. The NetPositive browser has not been updated for some years, and will therefore fail to present many web sites. It will for instance not show yellowTAB's own web site correctly, but it is on the other hand idle for this manual.

Many BeOS-users will probably continue using this browser, as it is one of the fastest browsers ever made. It launches on most machines in less then a second, pulls previously loaded pages and images out of its cache in a lightning speed, and starts rendering most Web pages almost immediately.

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The text field near the top of the window shows the URL of the current page; type a new URL into this field and press ENTER to go to that site.

In the toolbar you will find the following buttons: Back and forward, stop the page being downloaded, reload the current page, go to your favourite search engine, go to your default home page, and open the file download status window. The icons for search engine and home page are not displayed until their locations are set in the Preferences.

The area at the very bottom of the window displays a keyhole icon when you are entering a secure site, and describes the status of the current page download ("Opening...", Loading Text...", etc.), or the address of the link the cursor is pointing to.

NetPositive Preferences

General Preferences

Home Page
Set this to the URL or domain name that's opened by default when you launch NetPositive.

The default Home Page is built in to the browser it self, and contains links to BeOS resources, both on your own hard drive and on the Web.

Search Page
Specify your favourite search engine. To go to the search engine, click the flashlight button in the browser window. The default search engine is Google.

Download Directory
Set this to the folder where you want your Web downloads to go. We recommend you to keep the default setting: /boot/home/Downloads. For those of you that switch between using Firebird and NetPositive, we recommend you to use the same download folder for both applications.

New windows
This menu lets you specify what should happen when you open a new window. The new window can open the same page that's open in the current window (Clone current window), it can open the Home Page, or open a blank page.

When a new cookie is received
A cookie contains personalized data, such as a shopping cart, or login information, that a server stores on your computer. You can choose to Accept all cookies, Reject them, or Ask to be notified when a cookie is being downloaded.

Automatically launch...
When a file is downloaded, it will be automatically opened if this checkbox is checked.

Number of days...
The Go menu saves recent links so you can return them easily. How long it saves them depends on the settings.

Display Preferences

For the encoding
Associates the font settings (displayed immediately beneath) with the given character encoding. In addition to Western, you can also make font settings for Unicode, Japanese, Greek, Cyrillic and Central European.

You apply an encoding to a page through the browser window's View menu.

The checkboxes in the bottom half of the panel are mostly self-documenting.

Connection Preferences

Check Enable Proxies if you have a proxy server for special caching, or possibly for security reasons if you have a firewall - if you want to run your Web connections through a different server than the one you're actually connecting on.

To set this preference fill in either a host name or IP address for HTTP and / or FTP. The FTP proxy should point to an HTTP proxy, since NetPositive only understands how proxy through http.

Max...connections
Lets you set the maximum number of simultaneous Internet connections to make from one window. If you're using a modem or running on slow hardware, you may want to set this to a low number to improve perceived performance.

Cache Preferences

Cache Location
Lets you set the location of the "cache"; this is where NetPositive stores pages and images (but not files) that it downloads. Whenever you click on a new Web page, NetPositive looks to see if that page (or any of its images) are already in the same cache. If they are, the cached pages are display instead of downloading new ones. The cache's default location is shown here.

Refresh cache
Tells NetPositive how often it should check to see if the pages in the cache have grown "stale". If a page in the cache is out-of-sync with its "real" version (on the server that served the page) the cached version is thrown away.

Leave Cache Size at the 10 MB default, unless you're really squeezed for disk space. Set larger cache if you're a heavy browser.

Clear Now
The button deletes all the files currently in the cache.

The cache can also be cleared with the FilWip application.

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