Nice idea, but WAY too slow! – Web Offline Review

Although it might be useful occasionally, I'm not really interested in manually browsing and saving pages ... Way too time consuming. What really interested me was the idea of crawling news sites like CNN and New York Times, saving the results, and being able to view them offline, on a flight for example. I decided to start with the two aforementioned sites, partly because they were "featured" in the developers screen shots in the app store. Problem is, as the warning in the app tells you when you start the process, this is VERY VERY slow. So slow in fact that in my opinion it makes the app unusable for that purpose. The point is, if you are cacheing a news site for offline access, you probably want to be able to do so at regular intervals. I left it running against New York Times for almost half an hour, then gave up with only perhaps 10% of the process complete and 5% of my battery drained. By the way, this was after reducing the crawl depth to only a single level (the default is 2 levels), and I was using a pretty fast high-speed WiFi connection, so that wasn't the issue. I realize that part of the possible problem is how fast the site at the other end responds, but I was getting nowhere fast! I tried the same thing against a couple of other similar sites with similar results. Unfortunately the app also crashed a couple of times. This whole thing is a great shame because it's a neat concept, and the app seems to be well implemented, looks good, etc. But for me, not usable.
Review by Steve Ives on Web Offline.