Posts filed under 'Apple'
My Newton MessagePad 2100 remains disconnected from my computer and the world at large while I wait for a) a Newton 2100 Serial Adapter Dongle; or b) Andriano’s Newton-USB dongle. Thus I’m taking this time to play around with my Newton eMate 300 and a few of the available sync programs. To tell the truth, I had heard so many intimidating and frustrating things about synchronising a Newton with a modern Intel-based Mac OS X box that I doubted I’d ever bother with it. Sure, I could always go back to my Pismo and OS 9, but my wife has now claimed that machine, and besides, I want to sync with my OS X address book, calendar, and so forth.
So, my current set-up: a 15″ MacBook Pro, a stock eMate 300, an old-school Mac serial cable, and a Keyspan USA-28X serial-to-USB adapter. One end of the serial cable plugs into the eMate, the other end into the Keyspan, and the Keyspan’s USB connector into my MacBook Pro. Keyspan drivers are downloaded and installed.
First, the most basic sync program: NewTen, by Panic Software’s Steven Frank. This is basically a package installer. I choose my Keyspan connect, set the eMate to dock via serial, and drag a Newton package onto the app. After a little while –remember that a serial connection can be rather slow– the eMate has the package installed. A one-trick pony at the moment, perhaps, but it works well.
Second, Simon Bell’s NCX, also known as Newton Connection. This is an impressive little app that looks to replace Apple’s official Newton Connection Utilities (NCU). While it doesn’t yet do full synchronisation, it currently has the ability to:
- Install packages through a drag and drop;
- Import and export NewtonWorks “paper” (text) files as RTF and Notes files as text, plus Calendars and Names.
- Back up and restore the programs, extensions and data files on the Newton.
- A pass-through keyboard. This is neat. Whatever you type on your computer comes out on the Newton. Drag and drop text on the window to copy it into whatever program is currently open on the Newton, right where you’ve put the cursor.
The latter has proven handy to drop text right into a NewtonWorks or Notes file right from the Mac’s desktop. The export works well too — I’ve written four articles on the eMate thus far (including this one).
The third program I’ve been trying out is NewtSync, also known as nSync. (*cough*) I’ve already used this program to transfer all 200 of my OS X Address Book entries to my eMate, and am now experimenting with its text, outliner, calendar, and newsfeed synchronisation. It’s still an early release, and so I’m attempting each sync with extreme caution, being sure to back up my data often. Thus far, no problems.
I should note that none of these programs were created by Apple, nor are they sponsored by Apple in any way: these are hard-wrought fan projects, pure and simple. There’s something to be said for the dedication needed to program such things, given that the Newton platform was prematurely canceled nearly a decade ago.
More posts later, no doubt, as I learn the ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses, of each of these applications.
June 3rd, 2007
In two articles for DIYPlanner, one about the MessagePad 2100 and another about the eMate, I mentioned how I’ve got the decade-old Apple Newton bug. Given that the site is mostly about paper-based fetishes, there’s only so much I can say there without upsetting the apple cart. (No pun intended.) Here I can say a little more.
It’s a little bizarre: I normally receive a half-dozen email per article, in addition to the 6-12 comments left on the site. These Newton articles not only generated a lot of comments, but some 30 email, and were picked up by The Unofficial Apple Weblog and –giving me a brief and unexpected laugh-out-loud instant in a supermarket check-out line– on the MacBreak Weekly podcast. Most of the email posed the same conundrum: “I’ve always wanted a Newton, too…. Should I buy one on eBay?”
Now, I really hate giving advice like this, and for several reasons. First, the costs of Newtons in the past few weeks on eBay seem to have jumped significantly, no doubt owing to its sudden re-appearance in various media outlets in the weeks leading up to the iPhone. Second, I prefer not to be responsible for someone bidding for a Newton on an impulse and winding up with a $200 device that seems almost antiquated for most modern-day uses. Third, and most importantly, I’ve only had my Newtons for a few weeks. That means I am a base and uninformed Newt Newbie. I’m not fit to give such advice. I tell these people that the Newtons I have work for my purposes, but that they should join the NewtonTalk mailing list, which is overflowing with wise old masters dispensing advice and practical knowledge.
That these machines are working for me is evidenced by my sudden ability to write articles, notes, lists and other text in a focussed environment. While I dearly love my MacBook Pro, it’s filled with distractions, not the least of which is its proclivity to braise the flesh of my lap. By contrast, the eMate 300 (which I’m using to write this post) remains cool to the touch and allows me to actually concentrate on my words without thinking about websites, email, instant messaging, or even fancy graphics. Text, baby, and nothing else. It’s a handier version of an old-fashioned typewriter. This is the same reason why I’ve been debating getting an AlphaSmart Neo or Dana for so long. The difference is that the eMate (besides being quite a sexy looking machine, in my humble opinion) is roughly 1/20 the price. While getting the initial connections set up wouldn’t be as easy as with an AlphaSmart, the screen is bigger, the ruggedness is legendary, the touchscreen works very well, the 20-hour battery life is nothing to complain about, and –well– there’s something very unique about the machine that that makes a guy feel special. I can see why Batgirl likes it.
Perhaps in the next few weeks, I’ll post about how my Newton experiments are going. I’m still learning the ropes and exploring the machines’ strengths and weaknesses, so I might toss my discoveries out onto the Interwebs for those folks meandering down the same path. I’m sure there’s at least one other person out there….
May 27th, 2007
Over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann is rediscovering the wonderful Mac application that is DEVONthink Pro - DEVONthink: An appreciation of “smart groups”
I’ve now had DT Pro v. 1.1.1 in battlefield action for the last few weeks, and have been dutifully feeding it anything I find that seems tangentially interesting or useful; a few custom Quicksilver triggers mean one-click, no-look addition of any data type, from web pages to text selections to photos, full PDFs, and movie files.
DEVONthink Pro is probably my favourite piece of software. Ever. While I use a score of multimedia applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc.) on a regular basis, I am –by nature and trade, in the broadest sense– an information worker. I need a digital commonplace book to collect, track and act upon all those things that Merlin mentions, and much more. While DEVONthink Personal proved an excellent application for doing this, the introduction of DT Pro and its subsequent updates have left me continually astounded. (See my earlier detailed review of DT for more information.)
Merlin goes on to mention the “smart groups” –basically, agents to collect items automatically based upon their content or properties– but I’ve always found that its real power starts to show with things like concordance (estimations of related items — see Berlin’s article), offline archiving of web pages (very useful for changing sites like the NYT), sheets and records (think about a database), Dashboard widgets for quick access, and a teeming horde of AppleScripts. Those starting off with the software might not appreciate all these functions, but I can assure you that they all come in very handy, very soon. And the fact that DT/Pro gets “smarter” as you feed more information into it translates into a more powerful application every day.
Those needing to dig up knowledge on a constant basis can take the application a step further, though: I’m just now exploring DEVONagent, an “intelligent research assistant.” For a long while, I resisted: I’m definitely a Google power-user, and it seemed to do everything I needed it to do. Or so I thought. It turns out that DA has increased my research abilities many-fold. It scours not only the web in general, but also specific online databases to collect and collate information, compiling a useful text-only preview of all those tidbits it thinks I might like to know. With one click I can view the full pages in an integrated (tabbed) browser, or add the information into DTP. The new version also adds an interesting “visualiser” to see how other words and topics relate to your current item. The application takes a little getting used to, but it really pays off after a week or two.
So much information, so little time. At least with the DEVON gear, I can generally make the most of it.
May 23rd, 2006
For a year or so now, I’ve been evaluating quite a number of digital brainstorming tools in order to find one that best serves the way I think, the way I make associations, and the way in which I like to fiddle with vague and ethereal ideas before they become solid. I’ve tried plain text editors, wikis, various mind-mapping tools like NovaMind, FreeMind and Inspiration, outliners like OmniOutliner, and “notebooks” like Mori, AquaMinds NoteTaker and Circus Ponies Notebook, but none of these seemed to possess the right mix of power, visual layout, rapid entry, and emphasis on text.
And, oddly enough, the answer has been right under my nose for a while. I had been trying to force Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox into becoming my digital Commonplace Book, but it was a poor fit for me. I required so much multimedia and OS X services support that I felt like I was trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and eventually I decided upon using DEVONthink Pro. While I have not regretted that decision for a moment, my inner geek still lusted after Tinderbox, having had fleeting glimpses of the power that lay untapped beneath its surface.
In a way, Tinderbox is like the Emacs of information management applications. Beneath each deceptively simple exterior (and, after all, Emacs does seem to be just a text editor), there lies a very powerful system with seemingly endless possibilities. Both require some effort and dedication before you begin to understand the depth of the applications and the myriad uses which slowly make themselves known as you explore their non-obvious capabilities. Like Emacs and its underlying elisp, Tinderbox has some powerful tools beyond the basic ability to write and organise text, and this case, it includes scripting tools, agents, rules, versatile export codes, prototypes and multiple views. And, unfortunately, just like Emacs, both applications are often relegated to niche power-users while mom-and-dad computer users have moved on to more straight-forward, simplistic and user-friendly software.
Let me get back to digital brain-storming for a moment. I’m a strange mix of visual tinkerer and textual thinker, and for me, things like colour, size and proximity of items have to strike a balance with text note names, hierarchy, and the ability to enter large amounts of material. For example, I like the ability to rapidly create notes as little boxes with various colours and short descriptive names, then move them around the various sections of the screen to play with categories and relationships. But once these categorisations are made, I want to be able to see the outline of all my ideas, and to write text and annotations for each item.
People who have used Tinderbox are no doubt grinning right now, as this is a perfect (albeit low-level) match for how this application works. By switching views between Map and Explorer views, one can create and place notes visually, and then structure them within an information-rich hierarchy. The latter, DEVONthink Pro can handle, but not the former.
So I started thinking, do I really need to do all of my outlining and writing in DTPro? Of course, the answer is no. Choosing the best tool for the job means evaluating each application on its own merits for the task at hand. For me, Tinderbox has become my brainstorming tool of choice. I like being able to create separate documents as “silos” for each subject matter. For instance, I just created one that outlined a number of business opportunities, and then I worked on another document with some ideas for the next generation of the D*I*Y Planner. These are things that I really don’t want in my DTPro Commonplace Book, at least not until I have something that I feel is somewhat solid and ready to be called “information”, as opposed to a loose but flexible array of insubstantial ideas.
In short, DTPro has become my collection bin for every conceivable type of multimedia information, but Tinderbox has become my repository for half-baked ideas, snippets of incoherent prose, mind-maps of categorical and causal relationships, and brain-dumps that are eventually (well, possibly) massaged into something I’d risk showing to other carbon-based bipeds. It’s for the act of textual creation, an invaluable tool for a writer.
Of course, like any other application, Tinderbox is not without its warts and unsightly blemishes. The price strikes many potential users as extraordinarily high –an initial regular cost of $192 USD, plus $90 per year of updates– but here I’d have to suggest weighing the value of your usage against its cost. Ted Goranson referred to Tinderbox as “a Photoshop-scale application that is underpriced” (and we all know how much Photoshop will set you back).
Other issues concern the documentation: unfortunately for those who learn best by studying example, the manual is structured more like a quick reference help file than any sort of tutorials on how to get the most out of the application. The Tinderbox wiki helps somewhat to fill the gap, but not much. Then there’s the nature of the beast: owing to the complexity of the application on one hand, people have a hard time understanding exactly what Tinderbox can do for them, and yet owing to its deceptive simplicity, others who try the demo write the software off as an expensive and underpowered waste of money. It has almost no support of modern OS X features like services, AppleScript-ability, tight Finder integration, and WebKit embedding (although this might be partly due to the fact that Tinderbox is being ported over to Windows, which lacks these things). And, while Goranson diplomatically called certain components of the application “austere”, others have commented (not unjustifiably) about its interface, which looks basic and somehow temporary, like software in its early alpha form. Supporters of the application are quick to point out that this lack of clutter allows one to focus on core tasks like writing with a modicum of distraction.
Finally, many people seem to have a problem with the fact that Tinderbox seems to be the product of only one man, Mark Bernstein, and that he’s not receptive to other ideas and feedback. From my (albeit limited) experience thus far, I’d have to disagree. True, the Windows port is taking quite a while, but it doesn’t really matter that much to me, since I use Macs most of the time. (My selfishness is showing here.) But looking at the broader vision of how Tinderbox works and what it can do for me, if I were to choose any one person to create such an application, Bernstein is an excellent choice. I have no doubt that he’s an incredibly intelligent man, and almost all of his decisions regarding the functionality of Tinderbox have been spot-on. In fact, I’ve been reading the manual as I fall asleep at night (highly recommended, although the subplots seem forced and the characters are a little two-dimensional), and I’m constantly struck by little eureka moments when I suddenly realise what brilliant little touches are present in the software, although sometimes hidden just beneath the surface. As for feedback, my few exchanges with Bernstein through email over the past couple of years, most of which transpired when I was experimenting with the demos of various versions, have been rapid, quite responsive and thought-provoking. He’s a man with a lot on his plate, but still takes the time to help confused newbies experiment with the demo, probably knowing full well that most of them will never buy. That earns my respect.
Which reminds me, if you do use a Mac and love to write or play with ideas, I’d highly recommend trying the demo, but only if you have enough time to put into understanding how it works; else, you’ll only scratch the surface of what it can do for you, and you’ll walk away from it either confused or disappointed.
These small gripes and oddities notwithstanding, consider me firmly in the Tinderbox camp. In all the various applications I’ve tried, both commercial and Open Source, I haven’t come across one that’s quite so attuned to the way I play with ideas and write text. I’m not sure if I think like Tinderbox, or Tinderbox thinks like me, but I know it’s an environment which encourages creativity without distraction, and yet feels wholly comfortable to use. A winning combination, indeed.
December 20th, 2005
Recently, my comrade-in-arms at DIYPlanner.com, eric Farris, was completing his port of the various contacts forms for the letter and A4 sizes of the D*I*Y Planner. There was a problem, however. Normally, I take the various templates, designed in Adobe Illustrator, and copy and paste each one into Adobe InDesign so I can produce the PDF booklets. This time, though, my InDesign refused to launch for some reason.
The other option was to produce his templates as individual PDF files (exported from Illustrator), but I have several problems with this: 1) it makes it very difficult to flip through the forms; 2) printing multiple forms in one print run is impossible; and 3) the combined file size of all the individual files is many, many times greater than one master PDF file.
So eric decided to jump into Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s new Automator. For those folks here who aren’t Mac geeks, Automator is a tool whereby you choose applications and a series of actions to automate certain tasks. Although it certainly looked intriguing, I’ve haven’t tripped across anything since getting Tiger that needed this sort of thing. eric suspected that it would be perfect for combining multiple PDFs, and he was right.
It’s basically four clicks: get the Finder Items; sort them in ascending order; combine PDF pages by appending,; and open the Finder Items in Acrobat, where one can “Save As…”. Save the Automator workflow in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder, and when you select some PDFS in the Finder, you can run this Automator script on them. Beautiful. eric points out that a relevant MacOSXHints.com hint is here: 10.4: Use Automator to combine PDFs.
This means, of course, that I won’t have to slog all his AI templates through InDesign, thus saving me a tonne of work.
(In case you’re interested, Adobe InDesign eventually started working again for no known reason about a week later. Hmph.)
November 16th, 2005
I love it when I get a pleasant surprise for the weekend. Now, all things being relative (and keep in mind that I’m a bona fide geek), this is quite a wonderful one for me: I’ve just downloaded and installed a version of the free Open Source office suite OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta for OS X, a version I didn’t even know existed. (Windows/Linux users can skip ahead a few paragraphs.) It’s not easy to find from any official site that I’ve tripped across, but you can find it here:
http://ftp.stardiv.de/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/MacOSX/
The current offering is Milestone 130, which is (according to the OpenOffice.org 2.0 RoadMap) after Beta 2 and before Release Candidate 1. It’s almost a month old, and it needs Apple’s X11 (which is an add-on to Jaguar, but standard in Tiger), but heck, that’s better than nothing. In fact, in the few hours I’ve been using it, I haven’t tripped across any unexpected crashes or glitches, and the whole experience has actually been quite smooth.
Obviously, there are a few bugs and oddities to be found, not least of which is the whole font thing, where one has to manually install fonts before they appear in OOo. A tip: if you haven’t done this sort of thing before (I only know this from using Linux), go to File -> Wizards -> Install fonts from the web… and you can install a bunch of nice typefaces, although the Microsoft ones probably won’t show up. Then, to get the rest of your system’s fonts, call up X11 and in the xterm, type:
cd /Applications/OpenOffice.org\ 2.0.app/
cd Contents/openoffice.org/program
sudo ./spadmin &
After you enter your password, an administration program will pop up (give it a few seconds) and let you add fonts by selecting font directories and then those fonts which you want to install. Not exactly user-friendly, but hopefully this will be rectified by the time of the final release.
The first thing I called up was my D*I*Y Planner Widget Kit. Whew… it works perfectly, and I can now breathe a sigh of relief that I’ve chosen OOo to produce it. (I wasn’t sure what wrenches OOo2 might throw into the cogs.) All told, the whole experience with OOo2 is far slicker and more responsive than OOo1–especially when compared to NeoOffice/J– and there are plenty of handy layout aids, floating/docked toolbars, and drawing tools. While I did find the tools in OOo1 to be fairly clunky, designing forms with the WK seems to be much easier and more intuitive. While it won’t be completely replacing Adobe Illustrator for me any time soon, I can see where I’ll have the opportunity to use this a lot more in my day-to-day work.
As for the other programs in the suite –the word processor, the spreadsheet, the presentation program, the XML forms editor, the database and the HTML editor– I can’t say that I’ve looked at these in any detail yet. I’ve always been fond of the word processor, which actually encourages structure-based writing (unlike, say, Word), and the spreadsheet has always done exactly what I’ve expected it to do. The presentation creator, Impress, has a lot more PowerPoint-style features, has good Flash output, and also blends in the powerful tools from Draw. The HTML editor is as capable as any other non-professional WYSIWYG program (don’t expect Dreamweaver or GoLive), and while the database and XML tools seem quite impressive on first glance, I’ll have to spend more time with them before I can come up with a valid opinion. The native PDF export of the whole suite does seem to be noticably improved, now including hyperlinks and better compression, although it was certainly no slouch to begin with.
Windows and Linux users can take advantage of the more recent OOo2 Release Candidate, or can grab StarOffice 8, the commercial offering from Sun that’s built atop OOo2, but with added goodies like more fonts, a clip art gallery, plenty of templates, a better dictionary/thesaurus, and so forth. (Psst! If you sign up for an account on the Sun website and select your area as “Education/Training”, you can download the full unlimited StarOffice 8 suite free of charge, saving yourself $70. Don’t lie, now. And you didn’t hear this from me.) Those interested in this product can also find a decent (albeit Linux-centred) review of SO8 at NewsForge.
October 9th, 2005
DEVONtechnologies has released the second DEVONthink Pro Public Beta. I’ve kept abreast of this one for a while now, and am pleasantly surprised by its capabilities with each new version. If you’re running a Mac, and need a heavy-duty but user-friendly application for managing your writing, research, freeform information, and files (including HTML, PDFs and graphics), then there’s no way to go wrong with this program. It’s probably the best software of its kind that I’ve ever used.
The final version is due around August 17th, but this download seems to allow unlimited usage till then. There is also a revised manual and a very handy tutorial to get you started. See the previous post An Attic Called DEVONthink for my review of the application, although this new version puts much of the older (and non-Pro version) version to shame.
(Sorry, Windows users… you’re out of luck on this one. However, I have had quite a number of emails suggesting Zoot as a good alternative. From their website docs, it doesn’t look quite as powerful, but I haven’t tested it myself.)
July 28th, 2005
After five years of development, NeoOffice/J is finally released. From the announcement (found in a NeoWiki cache):
The goal of NeoOffice/J is to provide an entirely free and complete Mac OS X office suite based on the international OpenOffice.org project — only with the look-and-feel you’d expect from any Macintosh application.
The OpenOffice.org project is a large open-source effort to create the ultimate office “suite” including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing software, and much more. With OpenOffice.org, you can easily import, edit, and exchange files with users of other office programs, such as Microsoft Office or WordPerfect.
I’ve been using OpenOffice(.org) for years on Linux and Windows, and have found it to be perfect for my needs — in fact, it’s my preferred office suite. It’s great to finally have a Mac-native version with full support for all the OS X trimmings. Only downside? This is based on the older –but stable– OOo 1.1.4, while OpenOffice.org is nearing its 2.0 release (due this summer). I hear that the NeoOffice/J team has donated code back to the project to enhance the Mac compatibility, so hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. I do have a feeling that the Mac native version will still lag behind the Linux and Windows versions after 2.0 is released, though.
(BTW, don’t let the Java-based interface scare you. After start-up, it runs at a decent clip even on my G3 400MHz Powerbook.)
June 22nd, 2005
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
- Sherlock Holmes to Watson during their first case, A Study in Scarlet
From hints in the Canon, I’m positive that Holmes nurtured a own home-grown content management system (CMS) of notes, newspaper clippings, pages torn from journals, snippets from medical textbooks, monographs on fingerprints and head measurements, observations on mud types and tobacco ashes, criminal trial transcriptions, and so on. Some of this was no doubt kept in his “attic” for casework, but there was much that didn’t fit (such as the fact that the Earth revolved about the sun, he claimed) and –should a pertinent nugget need to be recalled to solicit a possible solution for a case– that would require safekeeping for ready reference and analysis later.
I’ll leave the theorising as to whether Holmes would even bother with computers in this day and age to those Baker Street professionals who take great joy in debating such topics. However, I can’t help but wonder what sort of system he, as a knowledge worker, would utilise today.
I guess one might refer to me as a “knowledge worker” in the purer sense of the term (if you can indeed filter out the buzzword poisoning). Most of my time is spent instructing, consulting, preparing coursework, developing (mainly educational) multimedia, researching, writing, and coming up with solutions to uncommon problems. To do this requires a tremendous body of knowledge and information, very little of which I can actually retain in the little attic of my mind. Over the past few years, I’ve tried quite a number of ways to store and retrieve information, and they all have their pros and cons. In particular, I am very impressed with Tinderbox and the way in which it leverages agents, queries which act upon its freeform database and associated metadata to produce groups of links to items that match (and that can be further utilised in other scripts, like exporting to HTML for a website). However, I’ve never been able to find a content management system that also does an excellent job of handling non-textual media and concordance –finding items that are similar, based upon word relationships drawn out by context. That is, until now. Its name is DEVONthink.
Because of the necessity for heavy-duty content management in a recent contract, I’ve spent quite a bit of quality time recently with DEVONtechnologies’ DEVONthink. I had tried the 1.7 series a while back, and found it rather lacking for my purposes. However, the most recent versions have seen quantum leaps forward, especially with a number of features that are helped along by Apple’s new Safari/WebKit and OS X 10.4.x. While the basic DEVONthink 1.9.3 is quite suitable for most purposes (especially since it has received a number of features hitherto reserved for the behind-schedule Pro version), the professional version certainly piques my interest. I spent a week exploring the demo of the standard version, and the past few month using the DEVONthink Pro beta. While the latter is definitely not quite ready for prime time –there are quite a number of minor glitches, and some features that are not implemented or honed yet– I think I can say with a great degree of certainty that this is the type of application for which I have been searching several years.
Obviously, my needs may not be the same as yours. Here is a list of the most important criteria upon which I must determine an application’s suitability for knowledge management, at least for my purposes, and how DEVONthink (or DTPro) fills those needs.
- Full textual support: This goes without saying, since most of my material will be text in some way. The system should make allowances for plain text, RTF and HTML, and be able to somehow import Word .DOC and PDF files without too many extra steps. Reading this material should be easy on the eyes, with decent aliased fonts, multiple zoom levels and various ways of viewing information (for example, outline views vs 3-pane views).
DT has no problem with the cut-and-paste, import and writing of plain text, RTF and HTML. For example, I can copy a body of text from a web page (in Safari) or a word processor, and paste it straight into an RTF page in DT. It retains most formatting, links, colours, and even graphics. The Word import uses OS X’s native text conversion abilities to translate .DOC files into RTF, and PDF files are likewise no problem. Since DT is a native Cocoa application, you have full font anti-aliasing, and can use styles for paragraph spacing and so forth. Multiple font sizes and zooms are available, and there are several views for laying out the various panes to show information in different ways (with extra views available in DTPro).
- Web integration: A goodly portion of my digital information comes to me via webpages, either as snippets of data that I trip across in online journals, wikis, blogs, news articles or static pages, or via email, most of which I read in a browser using Gmail. All of this needs to collected and categorised with due attribution (URL, date, author, etc.).
There are a number of mechanisms for important web-based data into DT, depending on what you want and how you want it. For example, I can drop an URL straight from Safari into a DT group (that is, a topic folder). Clicking on that item will then call up a webpage live for browsing. I can then right-click and “Capture Page”, which saves a local copy of the page as an archive, complete with graphics. Or, I can select some text and –via an provided AppleScript– send the text/graphics to a new text or RTF entry, or even append to an existing one. I can also use scripts to send the page straight from Safari to a selected or predefined group within DT. Any type of URL import or capture will also save a copy of the exact URL as metadata, so you know exactly where it came from, and can refresh to a new copy if you wish. (Note: because Firefox is not a 100% Cocoa application, it doesn’t support a number of OS X services and abilities that Safari does. This means that I’ve actually been spending far more time in the latter lately; it hasn’t been too unpleasurable.)
I should mention that DEVONtechnologies sells a product called DEVONagent, a web search agent which is supposed to integrate quite well with DT in ways beyond a standard browser. While I did download the demo for it, I must admit that I haven’t spent more than an hour with the application: I’m so familiar with the strengths and foibles of Google that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around why I’d user another application to search. However, given how strong the company’s other offerings are, I have no doubt that I’ll devote some time to it in the future. (The two are available as a bundle from DEVONtechnologies’ shop.)
- Non-textual file support: I also create or use a number of other files, including various graphic formats, PDF files, OPML, video, audio, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, and so on. These need to be stored, categorised and annotated.
This is one of the areas where DT really shines over many of its competitors. You can drag any of these files straight into DT and –depending on your settings– either link to the originals, have them copied into the DT file storage, or insert them directly into the database itself. Scripts allow items to be added from the Finder as well. PDF files can be converted into regular text for indexing, and you can view the PDF files right inside of DT. Graphics are displayed as thumbnails, and you can view full size or zoomed versions. Any QuickTime-supported video or audio file can be viewed inside the system as well. DT seems to have support for more file types than any other application I’ve tried so far; file formats that are unknown are simply linked into DT for viewing in external programs, but you can add annotations, comments, etc., for searching, and then classify and categorise them appropriately.
- Writing tools This system should ideally hold my writings, as I consider them as another part of the work I must collate and reference. In peak form, I write over 20 original pages a day, and need an application that does not impede my flow, but yet has enough capability that I’m not aggravated by a lack of basics. As such, I need a simple word processor that can accept the occasional graphic or chart, and the system should certainly allow me to view multiple files at the same time (a major fault with a couple of other applications that I’ve tried). Also, I don’t want tools distracting me or getting in my way: I need to concentrate on content, not fonts or ligatures.
DT has a good balance of writing tools, in my opinion. If I’m writing in RTF, I can choose to show the “Ruler”, which has controls for styles, spacing, lists and justification. I can turn on the “spell-check as I write”, do a find/replace, insert graphics easily, choose fonts, do highlighting and so forth. However, there aren’t a half-dozen panels splattered all over my screen to distract me from the task at hand: writing. DTPro also has a full-screen mode, all the rage amongst writers nowdays seeking to avoid distraction.
One handy writing feature I have to mention is DT’s wiki abilities. You can create wiki links to items within the database quite easily, and even give a document multiple aliases that allow you to reference it under different names (which Pascal Vernier notes is handy for uses like bibliographies).
- Rapid data entry and management: All the above needs to be stored, categorised and catalogued extremely quickly, within seconds. I cannot spend all my time cutting and pasting, adding keywords, creating meta-tags, and massaging information to fit.
In addition to the cut-and-paste and import tools mentioned above, DT has many ways to create items, as well as a fairly easy classification system to push items into the right topic. (It has an auto-classify feature that I don’t dare turn on yet, but later I’ll get up my courage.) Once an item is imported or entered, you can Cmd-Shift-I to see its info box, and add comments, aliases, an URL and so forth. This is mainly only needed if the content is not text (and therefore difficult to index).
- Nested topics: There should be multiple tiers of topics, subtopics, subsubtopics, and so on, so I can group information how I see fit, and drill down to an appropriate snippet in the hierachy. For example: “Technology -> Education -> Learning Management Systems -> Open Source LMS -> Moodle”. My “sweet spot” seems to be four or five tiers deep.
This was one of the major problems I had with AquaMinds’ Notetaker. I wanted to be able to create nested topics, but wasn’t able to go any deeper than sections, subsections and pages. Sure, I could put different topics into different “notebooks” and select each one from the library, but that didn’t seem to be too wholistic to me, nor condusive to the ways in which I manage information. DT allows me to nest topics quite deep, and so I can categorise and group topics in a neatly-maintained taxonomic hierarchy.
- System integration: There should not only be an easy way of storing information from the file system, but also retrieving information (i.e., copying data) into the file system. For example, a graphic could be dragged from the application straight into a folder for synchronising with a webserver. Synchronisation with an external file folder would be an added bonus.
To store information from the file system, either use an import script or drag and drop the item from the Finder into the appropriate place in DT. To move items out, simply drag the item from DT into the Finder. I tried this with a mounted FTP server, and was easily able to upload a graphic right from DT to my webserver. DTPro also has a file synchronisation feature forthcoming, whereby it can “watch” a folder and sync files to and from DTPro to the folder.
- Data surety: The system should allow for peace of mind via: a) intermittent (preferably user-defined) back-ups; and b) easy export to non-proprietary forms, like RTF, HTML, JPG and so on.
DT standard allows you to back up and optimise the database whenever you want. (You can set the preferences to say how many back-ups you wish to keep.) Also, the folks at DEVON Technologies believe that your data shouldn’t be held captive, and that’s a refreshing change from the multitude of commercial applications that hold your work hostage within a locked-in proprietary system (forcing upgrades, enforcing loyalty, and so forth). With this in mind, they allow you to easily export folders and files. Personally, I’ve only tried this once, but it seemed to work well. You can also concatenate entries; for example, you can write chapters of a novel in several different documents, select them all, and then export them as one RTF file.
- Semantic “searching” of material: The search should be smart enough to find items by meaning, not just exact words or regular expressions. For example, a search for “primate” should also find texts that contain ape, monkey, chimpanzee and so forth, but not necessarily contain the word “primate” itself. This semantic connection can be made either through concordance derived from context, or from dictionary lists. In either case, it should be very fast.
This seems to be a particular strength of DEVONthink on OS X (and Nota Bene on Windows, someone mentioned to me). Concordance in DT seems to be generated based upon words in a similar context. For example, it’s quite natural that articles about primates would also use the words “ape”, “monkey” and so on, and the proximity of these words within articles would indicate a relationship. Or so the theory goes: it sounds perfectly sound to me. The only problem with this is that the concordance must be built over time: the more text and articles you create or import, the better the system becomes as recognising these relationships. At first, it’s a little hit-or-miss. That being said, the thousand or so articles I have within my system have already led to a drastic improvement in DT’s ability to find similar pieces.
Speaking of seaches, this is one area in which I find fault in DT’s current version: non-semantic searching. The base search function allows you to find exact words via ALL or ANY, a phrase (words in an exact order), or wild cards. However, it lacks decent boolean and more advanced search techniques. For example, I’d like to search for primate AND (monkey* OR chimpanzee*) NOT ‘a million monkeys typing’. Mind you, I’m sure that this would require quite a bit of CPU as your database swells in size, but it’s very hard to refine word searches otherwise. I hear that DT is getting the boolean search capabilities of its counterpart DEVONagent, so this is definitely a step in the right direction.
- Smart folders: I need to be able to find, group and save items gathered from the system, essentially query result lists that refer to items stored elsewhere. For instance, I might have a smart folder called Primates that contains all the articles found in the search mentioned above. Whenever I click on this folder, I should see all the relevant items from all throughout the system on this topic in one place.
This is a feature in DEVONthink Pro. It consists of groups (folders) which automatically “trigger” AppleScripts whenever they are opened. This script can be a regular query, a request to download feeds, a gathering of to-do items with checkboxes (theoretically, as I haven’t tried this) and so on. However, because the current beta of DTPro is currently lacking meaningful metadata capabilities and therefore the ability to search using it, it can only find items by querying regular content and comments. From perusing the forums and the README file, it would appear that keywords, tags, categories and (hopefully) the ability to search using this information is forthcoming. In an email to Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann, President of DEVONtechnologies, I asked about this. He responded:
The final version of DEVONthink Professional shall feature categories, that could be used for what you’re suggesting, and a future version is supposed to also have the possibility to add custom metadata fields.
- Alternate data forms: Although I definitely require a freeform database, it is sometimes helpful to have a more structured form for storing and manipulating data, like that you might use for a bibliographic entry, a contact, or an application form.
The DTPro betas have just started to incorporate something like this. It certainly shows promise, but I’m going to hold off expressing any opinions until it’s more complete.
- Dependable developers: The system should be developed by a team whom I can trust, and they should respond well to user feedback, incorporate improvements on a frequent basis, and be dedicated to the product for the long term.
The owner, chief developer and an “evangelist” hang out on the DEVONtechnologies Forum, and take time, effort and care to respond to users. Ideas for future additions to the application are often acknowledged with gratitude, problems tend to be quickly solved, and (although there aren’t a lot of members) there appears to be a sense of community at work. Regarding frequent improvements to the software, I can personally vouch for the vast number of changes since the 1.7 version not so long ago, and few point versions I’ve seen and used lately have demonstrated a continual commitment to adding functionality and addressing user concerns. True, the Pro version is quite a bit behind schedule, but many of the Pro-only features have actually been added to the standard version in the meantime, so users certainly shouldn’t feel neglected.
In passing, I just wanted to mention a particular topic in the forum: it was announced that DEVONtechnologies had a new partial owner, a U.S. firm who does work as a contractor to the Pentagon. Now, you can imagine the feelings of many international (and more liberal American) users: the thought of doing business with a company that has anything to do with the Iraq war, the prison scandals, bullying (”You’re either with us or against us”) and an irrefutable record of power-mongering and curtailing of personal freedoms, well… it’s not unforseen that strong opinions and resentment should occur. The president of the firm posted his feelings on the matter and how his company was handling the situation, and his posts were passionate and devoid of the PR spin that I had half-expected. I must say that not only did I overcome any feelings of apprehension, but I actually formed a much stronger sense of respect and trust in them.
- A dedicated tool: I want a tool for managing information, not planning my schedule, laying out newsletters, retouching red-eye, or finding studs in my wall. I simply want a quick and powerful system to store, annotate, categorise, organise and retrieve multiple types of data.
Although I’m sure that some AppleScript or Automator wizards will no doubt be able to twist DEVONthink to do many things (a little AppleScript that’s provided to translate languages is a nice example), its central focus is on managing and organising information, not creating blogs, setting up GTD, or any other peripheral task. Although some people will no doubt push the application in innovative ways, the DEVONtechnologies folks know where their primary focus lies.
Please note that the above is not a slight against an application like Tinderbox, which is extremely powerful and adaptable (and –with the proper encouragement, scripts and attachments– could act, no doubt, as a stud-finder). The point is, I want a freeform database that’s easy to use with many types of data without extra clicks, writing import/export scripts, many hours of (albeit pleasurable) experimentation, or being distracted by all kinds of alluring but complicated geek tools, all stock-in-trade of Tinderbox. In effect, Tinderbox is much like the Emacs of personal content management systems. But, like Emacs, its power and peculiar ways of doing things are often far too complex for simple tasks. DEVONthink, on the other hand, lets me concentrate on gathering, creating and organising content with intuitive and almost reflexive methods.
- OS X friendly: While I would generally prefer for the system to be cross-platform and server-enabled for multiple users, my main “hunting and gathering” machine is a Mac, and so this application should at least take advantage of Mac OS X services, scriptability, integration, and other enhancements.
This is one of the major reasons why I ultimately chose DEVONthink instead of Tinderbox. True, the latter can be controlled via powerful internal scripting variables, agents and other mechanisms (witness how people can actually produce quite functional blogs with the tool), but it is not aware of the Cocoa services and AppleScripting that make working with DEVONthink such a joy. For example, I can drag an “import droplet” into my dock, and whenever I drag a file from my Finder onto it, DEVONthink will copy it into the DT database directories, index the contents, and even create RTF/text from certain types of binary files like PDF and Word docs. The application has an embedded (Safari) web browser, and can view pages right in the main window, as well as capture full web pages –complete with graphics– for offline or archival use. It works with Tiger’s PDFKit to view and manipulate PDF files. It uses OS X’s WebKit to allow you to create HTML files right in the application, with access to source coding. You can cut-and-paste material from a Cocoa browser like Safari, and all formatting and graphics can be preserved. With the new Pro betas, there are quite a lot of AppleScripts included to use and learn from; the AppleScript dictionary for it is quite impressive. In other words, it is very OS X friendly, and a good citizen.
So there you have it. Aside from a few issues surrounding searching and metadata, which are currently in development, DEVONthink fits my criteria almost perfectly.
Dealing with a CMS should be a long-term commitment. Once you have begun to insert entries, categorise data, and feed it daily, the last thing you want to do is export the whole mess and start again with something else. It is a sign of my high opinion of DEVONthink Pro that –for the first time– I feel perfectly comfortable in entering all my more important data into it without any apprehension of a time when I’d switch to something else. (Although, since the application is still in beta, I’m not foolish enough not to back up the my daily.)
So there you have it. A great personal content management system that is able to handle almost any type of data and find those relevant associations that aid and enrich almost any project. It is an infinite and well-organised attic. Holmes, I think, would appreciate DEVONthink Pro.
May 22nd, 2005
Just working around the clock….
On the plus side, I think I finally found my Holy Grail of personal content management, the new version of DEVONthink (Mac OS X only, I’m afraid). It hasn’t impressed me as an ideal solution in the past, but the last few iterations are amazing. It’s been quite an enabling little beast for my job at hand, allowing me to sift through thousands of pages of text (plain, RTF, HTML and PDF), find related entries, track my sources, manage all related media, and write various documents without bother or fuss. Its capabilities are constantly surprising me. Stay tuned for a write-up….
April 29th, 2005
Like most other gadget freaks, I always want the latest and greatest. I can’t go near a Future Shop without venturing inside with a drool cup duct-taped to my chin. I dream of all the things I could get –one day– when I have far too much money and have those business needs which somehow validate purchasing plasma screens wider than my apartment’s living room, wireless speaker systems capable of generating more noise than the eruption of Krakatoa, pens that do everything but write, and strange hunks of plastic that serve as an all-in-one cell phone, barometer, airplane landing signal, holographic chess projector, egg timer, and remote control for next-generation iPods yet-undreamt-of. Like other forms of lust, this too can lead to blindness.
Lately, my dear old faithful Linux SGI box is staggering on its last legs, and so my thoughts turn to how I might replace it. Since portability is key to a lifestyle like mine, a laptop makes perfect sense. But ah, which one?
In my last place of employment, I requisitioned a shiny new Sony Vaio laptop with a Pentium 4 2.66GHz processor. Part of the day was spent in Windows XP Pro, part of it in Debian Linux. Let’s say that the machine was not without its problems. At times, especially in Windows, doing more than one thing at a time seemed to make it incredibly sluggish. (When burning a CD or DVD, you had to be careful not to run another program in the background or touch any keys –even the screen brightness– lest you make a coaster.) Because of the “shared memory” video card, it wasn’t even possible to play a 3D game like Neverwinter Nights while on the road: the OpenGL was software-only. And then there was the failing power brick. When I called Sony tech support, I was pushed to a flustered Indian woman who knew no other English than what was in a flow chart: after nearly an hour’s wait on the line, a 10-minute conversation (me: “Look, I’m a techie… I know that this power supply has a loose connection inside, and I can’t open it!”; her: “Please check that the plug is in the wall socket, and you have pressed the laptop ‘on’ button”), and her request to “Please hold while I look into escalating your issue”… I was promptly dropped. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but this happened a second, third and fourth time as well, albeit with different call centre personnel who had even less of a mastery of English.
Confession: I used to be an Mac bigot. Occasionally working with designers who felt confident and smug about how their pricey machines were far superior to my beloved PCs, I learned to make fun of these hippie freaks who barely knew anything about their machines, who clinged to overly-simple interfaces, and who resisted the urge to join the rest of humanity. I stayed as far away from Macs as possible, which was actually quite easy in this redneck Windows area of the world.
Five years ago, I joined a school in Nova Scotia that would only provide me with a Mac laptop, specifically a Powerbook 2000 Pismo. This oddly-shaped little black laptop came with Mac OS 9.1, and O! did I hate it. I could barely change anything, the interface was far too simple for my liking, there was no right-click button, and there was very little complexity under the hood (I had grown quite used to Linux). When the UNIX-based OS X was released, however, it was an entirely different story: it was powerful enough that I could start to enjoy it. How could you not like something that lets you use Photoshop one minute, and then jump into a terminal to edit bash scripts with vi and tweak its Apache the next?
Five years later, I still have the Pismo.
Now, five years for a laptop is a looooooong time. Usually, an older machine has been dropped, has begun to experience major hardware malfunctions, and is so woefully underpowered that it is practically useless with modern applications. In contrast, this Pismo is still running exceedingly well, to my complete surprise, and each new generation of OS X seems to make it faster. Its specifications: 256 MB RAM (eek!), G3 400MHz processor, 8 MB ATI 3D video card, DVD drive, Firewire, 10 GB hard drive, AirPort wireless, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Strangely enough, it’s quite zippy and responsive. I can have several large applications going at once (including Adobe programs, Firefox and a word processor), and it seems to be able to handle the load very well. In fact, I’d even venture to claim that it’s almost as fast as the P4 2.66 Vaio for regular day-to-day work. True, the poor thing is starting to show its age: the fan comes on and sounds a little whiney, DivX movie files stutter ever now and then, the DVD drive occasionally has to work a little harder to read some CD-ROMs, and the power brick (er… “yo-yo”) is held together with electrical tape and tender care, but all this just gives the little beast more personality. I can see why people adore their Pismos: there are plenty of user comments on sites like LowEndMac that sound off about their wonderful little “workhorses” in such endearing tones that they often verge on love letters. The resale value is also extremely high for such an old machine.
While I will –no doubt– eventually succumb to the technophilia evoked by the beautiful new Powerbooks, I’ve decided that I’m sticking with the Pismo for now. I’ll pump up the RAM, slot in a new hard drive, refresh the electrical tape, and maybe even get a G4 upgrade. The new Powerbook can wait: I already have a good machine, one that feels a little more like a companion than a cold hunk of silicon, metal and plastic.
April 22nd, 2005
If your big thing is outlining and task management, you’re Mac-centric, and you haven’t been following the About This Particular Outliner series, shame on you! The latest column is now up, and includes a nod at GTD: ATPM 11.02 - ATPO: Task Management and Outlining. While some of the software is also available for Windows and/or Linux, the emphasis is on Macs because …well… the site is called About This Particular Macintosh. Personal task management and outlining software is the one area where I feel the Windows world is very lacking, at least until the Windows version of Tinderbox comes out. There are so many imaginative and impressive applications that run on my Macs that I’m spoiled for choice, and I cannot find comparable apps that run under the “other OS.” This series, documenting all the most popular (and not so popular) outliners, is one of the most consistantly thoughtful and well-written tech series I’ve seen, filled with screenshots, explanations, and pros and cons. Definitely intended for information management junkies, it’s one of the only columns I actually look forward to reading.
You can see a list of all ATPO articles so far on the About This Particular Outliner archive page.
If any Mac/Windows users out there want to mention any Windows applications you think are comparable to ones like Tinderbox, NoteTaker or OmniOutliner, I’m all ears. Please leave ‘em in the comments. I’d love to try them.
February 23rd, 2005
As part of my day-job, I provide support and training to a number of non-profit organisations. Because almost all of them face great challenges in their budgets, I’ve taken to delivering Open Source Software seminars and giving out copies of TheOpenCD (which is only for Windows), along with a little report on OSS I wrote detailing the philosophy behind the movement and mini-reviews of the most popular applications.
The latest issue of MacAddict has a small section on OSS, but it occurred to me that I’ve not seen anything like TheOpenCD but for Mac OS X. It really is a shame, seeing there’s so much quality software out there that runs perfectly well on the platform (owing much, no doubt, to the Unix roots of most OSS allowing easy porting to OS X). So I started wondering, if I were compiling the Ultimate OS X Open Source CD, what would I put on it?
Because of the availability of so many applications, it’s hard to make a “one size fits all” CD-ROM, so like TheOpenCD, it must be a sampler, the best or most popular of certain common categories. Since most people wouldn’t have the need or expertise to use server-side applications, I’d concentrate only on client-side programs. Plus, since the object is to place this gear on a stand-alone CD-ROM for easy installation, I wouldn’t include excellent Fink-based applications like GnuCash or Scribus, which need a network connection and a nerd’s touch. 
With those caveats, here’s the CD-ROM that I would create.
Internet Applications
- Mozilla Suite: This Internet mega-suite includes a great browser, a full-features mail and news application, an HTML composer, an address book, an IRC chat client, and more. Even though it’s a bit of a beast, it still runs at a nice clip on my 5-year-old G3 Powerbook Pismo. Secure, powerful, extensible. Stay away from the Netscape Suite: they essentially take an older (and buggier) version of Mozilla, slap AOL logos and unneccessary gear on it, and release it to the populace as a familiar brand.
- Mozilla Firefox: Unless you’ve been walled up inside an Appalachian shanty with no access to technology news for the past few months, this app should need no introduction. Broken off from the main branch of the Mozilla suite, this is a slimmed-down, flexible, highly-secure, kick-ass web browser that has hundreds of extensions available and that offers tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, NO Active X controls (that’s a good thing), live RSS feeds, and excellent bookmark management features. That’s not even mentioning all the high-end power user goodies.
- Camino: A super-Aquafied browser that provides some healthy competition to Firefox. Ironically, it also uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine, and is found at the Mozilla site. Some differences: a streamlined bookmark editor; a more simplistic interface and preferences; more Aqua “widgets” for a consistent look and feel; and integration with the OS X Address Book, Rendezvous and Keychain. Downsides include the inability to use Firefox extensions (or, at least, the last time I looked).
- Mozilla Thunderbird: Ah, I see a trend here… Again, this is broken off the the Mozilla suite trunk as a stand-alone mail client. Fast, user-friendly, and loaded with great gear like spam filters, virtual folders (including saved searches), excellent IMAP support (more rare than one might think), and some quality security features to save your ass when you’re too distracted –or inebriated by holiday grog– to be completely aware of the task at hand.
- Cyberduck: Not exactly Transmit, but a quality (S)FTP client that takes advantage of OS X technologies like Keychain and Rendezvous. I’ve had a number of problems with the dozens of FTP clients I’ve used over the years, and thankfully this is one of the better ones. If you don’t know what an FTP client is, you probably don’t need one; but if you do, then this small and capable (and free) program is certainly worth a try.
- nvu: While not yet ready for prime-time as of this writing, many of this website development program’s kinks will be worked out in the near future. This isn’t Dreamweaver or FrontPage, and it will assume some knowledge of web development methodologies on the part of the user, but when you need to construct a website fast, or update one already on a server somewhere, this is a very viable solution easy at hand. I’ve already used it for a few projects, and am impressed with its capabilities. Spun off from the Mozilla (HTML) Composer project, and funded (at least in part) by Linspire.
- XChat: This Unix IRC chat client is not only available on OS X, but actually looks like a real Aqua client. A little complicated, which belies its power-user roots, but it’s the only client you’ll ever really need.
- Fire: Got friends on MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo!, etc. Then grab this, instead of using a dozen different applications.
- Adium X: The newcomer on the Instant-Messenging block, with the ability to speak to all the aforementioned services as well. Dozens of add-ins, themes, and toys to play with. Plus, the icon is a cute little duck.
- XFactor: *cough* P2P *cough*
- Azureus: *cough* ultimate BitTorrent client *cough*. [Perhaps I should include a legal disclaimer here?]
Office Productivity
- NeoOffice/J: This is essentially the OpenOffice.org suite, but wrapped up in a Java wrapper. “Uh oh,” I hear you say, “that’s gotta be slow.” Actually, it isn’t… this runs at an acceptible speed even on my ancient and memory-deprived Pismo. There’s a slight performance hitch over the standard OpenOffice.org suite, but barely enough to be noticable. The great thing is that you don’t even need Apple’s X11 to run this: the Java seems to provide a windowing interface for it that fits well into OS X. You get full access to all OS X fonts, true Aqua menus, full integration with Finder and Mail, native language capabilities and more. Of course, all the OOo gear is there: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, HTML editor, drawing application, database tools, native PDF export, etc. For more details about what it can do, check out the OpenOffice.org site.
- Abiword: Sometimes you don’t need an 800-pound gorilla like OOo or MS Office to help you write a letter to your mum. If your word processing needs are light, but you need more power and features than what TextEdit provides, check out the Aquafied version of Abiword. While it’s still in active development, it can probably do everything you need.
- GanttProject: Well, this was a very pleasant suprise. I had resigned myself to using an old version of Microsoft Project under Classic mode for my project management needs before I found this compact but speedy Java application. This will pump out pretty Gantt charts in PDF, HTML, JPEG and PNG formats, suitable for almost any PM use.
- FreeMind: Mind-mapping software, also written in Java, that will help you expand and connect your thoughts.
- Mozilla Calendar: This is available in a number of forms. A stand-alone –but alpha– version of it is Sunbird, or you can also download it as an extension for Mozilla, Firefox or Thunderbird. It provides a good calendar with multiple views, a task list, multiple categories, alarms, and more. The ability to synchronise with any old FTP server is great if you use multiple machines. Now, if only there was an easy way to hot-sync with a Palm, I’d be all set.
- Other software: With the switchover of many offices to web-based productivity suites, including groupware and ERP/CRM solutions, the natural haunt of the Open Source geek (that is, the server room) is becoming more and more vibrant with regard to software options. However, since these are generally not client-based applications, except in a browser, I’ve decided not to mention them here. (Well, I lied… take a look at the power of Compiere.)
Graphics
- The GIMP: Once of the first Open Source “killer apps”, this graphics application is comparable to Photoshop in many ways. Although the interface is fairly unique and takes a little getting used to, the learning curve brings quite a lot of benefits: layer-based editing, hundreds of filters, dozens of cool Script-Fu (like Photoshop Actions), powerful scriptability, transform tools, easy animated GIFs, node-based path editing, and most of the tools available in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and others. This is not to mention that you’ll save a bundle over its expensive commercial competition. The new version 2.2 has many improvements over 2.0, including a more streamlined interface, bug fixes, and better previews for tools and filters. The only downside is that it doesn’t allow CMYK editing; this is generally not a problem unless you are heavy into print production.
- Blender: A truly kick-ass 3D editing and rendering program. While this can’t quite compete with the likes of Maya or Houdini, it’s getting there. The downside is that the learning curve is just as difficult as almost any other high-end 3D application; the upside is that you won’t have to fork out a few thousand dollars. Aside from the typical 3D editing tools, Blender also has animation, physics, and a neato 3D gaming engine built into it. If you poke around, you can probably find a bunch of high-quality video demos of work that people have produced, ready to burn to DVD for your viewing pleasure. Don’t forget the copious documentation and the video tutorials.
Multimedia
- VLC: Damn, I’m impressed with this cross-platform application. There’s nothing worse than downloading video files from the Net and not having the right programs or codecs to play it. This has played every file I’ve ever thrown at it, even VCDs and DVDs. Especially handy if it’s a Windows Media file or an obscure format. It even plays full-screen QuickTime files better than Apple QuickTime Pro, in my experience (and without the $40 USD cost). You can also give MPlayerOSX a spin if VLC doesn’t turn your crank.
- Audacity: This audio editor is not only easy to use, but it can also import/export many file formats and use lots of professional plug-ins. Simple but powerful.
Utilities
- jEdit: A Java-based editor that’s actually fast and useful, and not just for programmers. This is comparable to the old and venerable BBEdit in many ways. Great for text files, HTML, coding, LaTeX, and almost anything else you’d need a text editor for. It has a good macro facility, and there are plenty of plugins available for extending it to meet your needs. A little slow to start, but once it’s going, it’s quite speedy (even on the aforementioned Pismo). Integrates well with OS X, including the Dock.
- Eclipse: Big honkin’ Java-based editor/IDE/whatever-you-want. Use it for editing code, HTML, LaTeX, text, etc., etc., etc. Nice tree-based project/file management, and there are plenty of add-ins to make it do almost anything. Not exactly user-friendly, but very powerful.
- Fink: Although you can download many of the more popular OSS applications as standard OS X packages, this poses several problems. First, many apps use multiple libraries, some of which don’t come standard on OS X. Second, many apps are updated very often, and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of them. Third, removing them from your system can be problematic –just like any other app– since OS X doesn’t provide any type of software package management. The solution? Fink, the Open Source package management system. Using FinkCommander, you can pick and choose whichever applications you want, and it will handle the rest for you, including deleting unused programs and libraries. Keep in mind that most applications handled by Fink will either run in the Terminal or use Apple’s X11. Either one is a bit of a deviation from the standard Aqua experience.
- Emacs: While Emacs does come with OS X, it’s only a command-line version. You can also get a pretty good Aqua version of Emacs that allows OS X-style menus and multiple windows (er, “frames”). If you don’t know what Emacs is, and you’re not a true geek, back away… back far, far away. For wannabe-geeks, start down the path to true masochism at the Emacs Wiki. (Regular readers know that I love Emacs, and am only kidding. Well, sort of kidding.)
- NetBeans: If Java programming is your thing (or learning it), you can’t do much better than NetBeans, which is now owned and operated as an Open Source project by the fine folks at Sun. I know people that use it for far more than Java work (including writing HTML and text), but they’re certainly alpha geeks, in the truest sense of the word.
Other
- Celestia: Wow, this is beautiful. If astronomy is your thing, give this application a spin. (The main site is being rebuilt; check out its page on TheOpenCD for some more info and screenshots.)
I’m sure that I’ve forgotten lots of other applications, including some that are OS X-only. (I spend nearly half of my day in Linux, so cross-platform apps are the ones that normally occur to me). Any others you can recommend?
January 2nd, 2005
It seems that every techie blogger is sharing his or her list of essential applications, and is inquiring what everybody else is using. Coincidentally, I’ve received four personal emails this week from people who probably don’t even read blogs, and they’ve asked me my personal opinions about what software I recommend. So who am I to buck the trend? Forthwith, my list of current essential software (at least for today):
- Text editing: My first choice is definitely Emacs. Depending on my mood and what system I’m on, you’ll catch me using GNU Emacs or XEmacs. This “kitchen sink” of text editors goes back decades, and its maturity and range of functionality (as well as complexity) shows it. Besides text editing, it handles file management, FTP, news reading, mail, wiki stuff, planner/calendar items, web browsing, code writing, IRC, instant messenging, shell/OS interfacing, coffee making, etc. Not for the faint of heart, but once you’ve learned how to use it, you’ll never actually need another application.
That being said, sometimes Emacs is overkill. I still use vi or vim for super-quick editing (such as config files), or TextEdit (on Mac OS X) if I need a quick drag-n-drop.
- Web browsing: Firefox, without a doubt. A lean, mean and extensible web machine. With a few extensions added (current favourites: Gmail Notifier, Adblock, Web Developer, BugMeNot, Diggler, and Image Zoom), this browser does everything I need it to do, exactly how I want it.
A web developer does need other browsers to check compatibility, have multiple identity sign-ins, etc., so for these purposes I use Safari (OS X), Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Camino (OS X), Epiphany (Linux), Opera, Lynx/Links (Linux) and whatever else is handy.
- Mail: For web-based mail (which I need for mobility), Gmail is the best service I’ve ever seen, bar none. (For the reasons why, see my previous post.) For email clients, I use Evolution (Linux), Mail.app (OS X), Mozilla Suite and Thunderbird, though I’d have to give my nod to Thunderbird for being my favourite of the bunch. I have also used Outlook, Outlook Express and Entourage, mainly to keep on top of the Microsoft world, but none of these have presented me with any bonafide reason to stick with them (although the Entourage Project Manager does have some nice features… too bad it slows my systems to a crawl). SpyMac does provide a really good webmail account, although not nearly as full-functioned as Gmail, and as an added bonus, you can also use the account in Thunderbird or whatever client you wish. Recommended, if you don’t already have such a mail account.
- Instant Messenging: Gaim on Linux and Windows, and Fire on OS X, because they are Open Source (i.e., free) and let me speak to all my friends, no matter if they are using AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, and who knows what else. (You try running multiple “traditional” clients at the same time, and watch your system resources get eaten away to nothing.) Both are filled with neat bells and whistles that make tracking your buddies and conversations much less of a chore.
- File transfer: Most of the time, in true geek fashion, I use the command-line ncftp client, which seeminly comes pre-packaged with every Linux distro, and is available via Fink on OS X. The rest of the time, I’ll use whatever is handy, whether it’s a stand-alone client like Transmit, Fugu or CuteFTP, or a built-in transfer system like Dreamweaver’s. Special recommendation: Filezilla for Windows.
- Calendar/Planning: I need multiple systems to sync with my Palm Tungsten E –my primary source of planning and scheduling– without messing up entries, duplicating items, or randomly deleting things. The best combination I’ve found so far uses the Apple Mac OS X iSync/iCal on my G4 and Powerbook, and Evolution on my Linux boxes. The Mozilla Calendar project is very cool, and lets me synchronise various machines, but so far it doesn’t sync with my Palm. Once it does, it will certainly be my planning application of choice.
- Contact management: Palm for my hub, Apple iSync/Address Book on Mac, Evolution on Linux, and Palm Desktop on Windows. (Experimenting with Thunderbird for the latter.)
- Graphics: Ah, there are multiple applications I use, depending on the need and the machine I’m sitting at:
- Adobe Photoshop CS, on Mac OS X and Windows boxes, when I need photographic retouching or bitmap graphics work
- The GIMP, on Linux, for same; also available under Windows and OS X as well, although I often fall back on PS there because I also use…
- Adobe Illustrator CS, for my OS X and Windows illustration and page layout needs
- Inkscape and Dia for my Linux illustration and diagram needs
- Adobe inDesign CS and Scribus for my publishing needs on OS X/Windows and Linux, respectively
- ImageWell: This free little image-handling application just blew me away with its cleverness: behind a simple little interface, it handles two-click drag-n-drop resizing and uploading to remote servers… perfectly attuned to blogs and website development, and a heck of a lot faster than toggling between Photoshop and an FTP program
- Apple iPhoto, for organising, importing, printing and viewing my thousands of digital pictures on my Mac
- Office Suite: OpenOffice.org, for almost everything. I fall within the 90% of people for whom OpenOffice is a perfect (and free) replacement for Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office 2003 (Windows) and Office X 2004 (OS X) definitely have their strengths –especially the latter– but the bloat and cost aren’t really justified for what I do. I occasionally try other applications like AbiWord, Mellel, AppleWorks, WordPerfect Suite and Gnumeric, but OpenOffice provides everything I need (with little I don’t), and so I keep coming back to it. It does help to own a great book like the OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit, though.
- Text processing: LaTeX. Rather than using a word processor, I much prefer to use LaTex, Emacs and AUCTeX (an Emacs add-on), for almost all my reports, specifications, dossiers and other (non-collaborative) documents. *cough* *geek!* *cough*
- Note-taking: Ah, my eternal quest. I quite like some hiearchical outliners like Tinderbox, and also some “notebook”-style applications like NoteTaker and Microsoft OneNote, but their lack of cross-platform availability makes it difficult to make and transfer notes wherever I am without the fuss of constant importing and exporting. For ages, I’ve been toying with my ideal of the perfect outliner/notetaker, and I think I might write up some specifications for a Java-based network-aware application when I get a breather. In the meantime, I use my Palm and its wireless keyboard as my “notetaking hub.” Syncing with MacNoteTaker (OS X) and gpilot (Linux) on my main computers, I’m able to have quick access to all my notes in standard text format whenever I want, and can synchronise full directories of them. As my father used to say, “Better than a kick in the teeth.”
- Web design: It depends on the site, and how much of it is dynamic or code-driven. I often do initial designs in Dreamweaver MX+ or GoLive CS, and then do further coding in Emacs. Really large sites, however, I stick mainly with Dreamweaver, since I find it the best with site management.
- Web development: (by this, I’m referring to dynamic development) Zope, Python, Perl, PHP, Apache, MySQL and *nix (Linux/OS X/Solaris/etc.) are my tools of choice. Zope is perfect middleware for large-scale sites and heavy prototyping, and has never let me down when I’ve had to do something big and complicated under a tight deadline. It’s Open Source, extended by hundreds of great add-on “products”, easily extendible using Python, connects to MySQL and other databases flawlessly, and is easy to learn (I even used it to teach web programming and databases to beginners).
- Web-based applications: Way too many. The chief ones I’m using today are WordPress for blogging, Gallery for my photo gallery, and twiki for my wiki. I’m also implementing COREBlog and ZWiki, setting them up for educational purposes. Learning more about Moodle is definitely on my to-do list.
- Audio: iTunes for OS X and Windows, and Rhythmbox and xmms for Linux. I have so many albums ripped that a music management system like iTunes is a virtual necessity.
- Video: vlc is a wonderful cross-platform video player that works on all my systems, and has been able to play every single video file I’ve thrown at it so far, no matter what strange combination of codecs and file formats are involved. Also has to the ability to display subtitles (I like foreign films), play DVDs and VCDs, and play files from over the network. MPlayer OS X 2 (OS X) and mplayer are also recommended, and sometimes seem a little smoother than vlc. For video editing (mainly on the Mac), I prefer iMovie for quick jobs, and Final Cut Pro for more intense editing sessions.
- Programming: NetBeans + Java, Emacs + everything else, especially my favourite language, Python.
- Backup: rsync all the way. For true geeks. (I’d also throw UNIX “dd” into this category, which tends to leave mere mortals quaking, and which has been known to appear in my more surreal nightmares.)
Whew. Punters, take note: whenever possible, I use freely-available Open Source software. Not necessarily because I’m a cheapskate (although my wife might choose to differ on this point ), but rather because I believe in the philosophy behind the movement. I also believe in open standards and open formats, because years from now I don’t want to find that I can no longer read my data: this has happened to me one too many times, either because formats change, I haven’t paid for endless upgrades, or because the software company went out of business.
Most commercial applications have very good Open Source alternatives, and I tend to switch over to these applications as soon as possible (e.g., OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office, the GIMP vs. Photoshop, Gnumeric vs. Excel, Gaim vs. MSN Messenger, Firefox vs. Internet Explorer, Evolution vs. Outlook, etc.). Although these applications are generally programmed initially for the Linux platform, most are making their way to Windows and Mac OS X too. If you haven’t tried them, go ahead: you have only a few hours to lose, and quite a lot to gain –including the cost of expensive software licences.
(Well, I wouldn’t recommend applications like Emacs and rsync unless you’re very technically inclined, but then you would probably know how to use these already.)
September 20th, 2004