The quirkily named Hooeey Webprint is a new freeware software and online service combo which automatically captures your web surfing history as you go. Think of it as a web bookmarking system on steroids.

But wait, I hear you cry, you can already do that with default bookmarking or with tools such as Scrapbook or Evernote. Ah yes, dear reader, but this is an automatic service. No button pushing or logging in needed. Just fire up your browser with the Adobe Air app installed, and bingo, you’re automatically saving thumbnails and details of the pages you visit for future reference.

The interface is slick modern black, if you like that sort of thing, and at first glance this looks like a winner application. You can search your history for any particular word on a page, the data is available offline (it’s saved to your hard disk by default) or online via a Plus account which costs $5.00 a month. Or you can store the data on your own server, such as Amazon S3 or Google Docs. Excellent flexibility.

Despite the nice design and carefully thought out functionality I found two navigation issues which kind of broke the whole concept for me. For one, the screen real estate in the Full Size View of you page history is just a little too small to make for easy reading. You need to scroll far too much where all you really want is to do is browse page content as quickly as possible.

The second problem is the lack of keyboard shortcuts to cycle quickly through Full Size pages. The program desperately needs a right and left arrow navigation to swiftly move through your history or search results. And backspace to return to Thumbnail view perhaps guys? Maybe I’m being churlish but it’s the small things that count with a product like this, although fortunately these are things which should be fixable quite easily methinks.

Those quibbles aside, the program and service look to be really useful for people who need to do research or have heavy browsing needs such as journalists. I love the fact you can see your web surfing habits at a glance, the ability to maintain different libraries for different browsers and things like tagging, favourites and the export to various media are great.

Will I use it? Hmm…yes, at least for a while until it becomes either superfluous or indispensable. As with all these things, installing is the easy part, it’s integrating it with your existing workflow that’s the difficult part. I would prefer it if they allowed for automatic upload to the Plus cloud storage (at the moment you have to do it manually), and I’m not sure I want to clutter up my drive with *all* my trivial trashy surfing, but time will tell. Definitely worth a trial though folks, as it’s a well crafted piece of work. Nice one!