Installing

There are standalone binaries for Mac OSX and Windows. Running from the source files requires Python 2.3 or higher, sqlite 2.6 or higher and pysqlite. Dowser works with any browser. Text-mode browsers like lynx miss out on some of the nifty features.

When you first use Dowser, it will create a directory in your home directory to store the database. Users are reporting an average of 40KB per page for storage.

Mac OSX
X version 10.3 and higher already includes Python 2.3+. Download and mount the dmg disk image and drag the Dowser app to your Applications folder.

Windows
There is not yet a slick installer for Windows but it is self-contained so you don't need Python or anything else installed. Download and decompress the Zip. Inside the unzipped folder you will see "Dowser.exe". Leave the executable inside the folder! It needs to use the support files there.

Running From Source
Make sure you have built and installed Python and sqlite and the pysqlite bridge. (The source zip comes with a precompiled Mac library for sqlite/pysqlite). cd into the main directory and run python startdowser.py.

Building From Source
To build for Mac, you also need the PyObjC framework. To build for Windows, you will need py2exe, which for some reason needed Microsoft Visual C++ version 6.0 to install. Your mileage may vary.

Mac: run macbuild.sh. It will create a build directory and place Dowser.app in there.

Windows: run winbuild.bat It will create a build and dist directory and place the final application in dist. The entire contents of dist is required for distribution.