Posts filed under 'Technology'
Back in 1986, during my last year of high school, there was a radio trivia contest to win tickets to a concert. I didn’t have much money, but I really wanted to go see this particular group, so I sat myself beside the radio one Monday morning, phone in hand, and waited. Now, my head has always been overflowing with completely useless information –probably more so at that time in my life– so I knew I stood just as good a chance as anybody else. Finally, they asked the question: “What was David Bowie’s theatrical rock-star persona backed by the Spiders from Mars?” I dialed as quickly as I could, but (hampered by my old rotary phone, no doubt) I was not the first, and so didn’t win the tickets. For three more mornings, I did the same, each time knowing the answer, but failing to be the first to call. On that Friday, however, the question was much harder: “Whose band did Canadian singer Gowan borrow for the recording of his Strange Animal LP?” This time I won the tickets. (The answer, by the way, is Peter Gabriel, who was recording in the same studio around the same time.)
I was proud of my accomplishment, elated by that vindication of the sheer width and breadth of the mostly impractical data stogged tight into my brain. It seems a little foolish in retrospect, but the accumulation of knowledge was –for me– the most distinguishing facet of my self-identity.
Back then, information was far less transitory. I remember reading and studying endlessly, trying to retain every nugget of information I could, whether it was useful or not. Now, I have become lazy. When a question is asked and I don’t know the response, a quick search on the Net will generally take me directly to the right information. The question answered, the details then drop away from my mind, and I usually forget it completely. I suspect most people do this nowadays, relying upon the Net far more than memory. When someone dials a friend from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, are they really choosing their most knowledgeable friend, or simply the fastest with Google? Who would you phone?
I have a very large library, encompassing thousands of books and covering hundreds of topics (many quite obscure), and I’m very proud of it. The problem is, sometimes I neglect to use it. The other night, I spent the better part of an hour Googling for information about tree identification. I found lots of bits and pieces, but little of any coherent and wide-ranging coverage. Then I realised… there were several books on the bookshelf behind me concerning that very topic. Yes, I can be oblivious at time, but in this case I think it was more a matter of how technology is changing the way I seek and retain knowledge. My need for a “quick fix” led me to a search engine, and not the shelves.
All of this makes me a little concerned for students today. True, the Internet is probably the best resource possible for scholars and teachers: the world’s largest conceivable library, with mostly free access to almost any snippet of information mere moments away. But with so much data, so free-flowing, has information become a mere tool, like pencils and erasers, fit for the moment and then quickly discarded once beyond its utility?
One might make the point that there was no guarantee that students would remember information culled from a paper encyclopedia, or that they might retain information of no pertinent and practical usage. But information was harder to come by, and –I believe– dissected slower. They say that in 1900, we encountered 1000 pieces of significant information per six months. In 1960, it was within one week. Today, it’s within one hour. How much knowledge can we actually retain when our “seven plus or minus two” short-term memories have to constantly filter, direct and trash most of that data?
It also begs a question: which is better, the instant access to vast quantities of lower-quality (on average, that is) information, or the more difficult access to rarer quantities of high-quality information? A Google search, or the hefty Encyclopaedia Britannica up on the library shelves? The accumulated and often erroneous perspective of thousands of writers, or the careful crafting and fact-checking by a skilled few? (This, of course, is one of the main reasons given by the Britannica company for continuing to use their rather costly work instead of the Net at large, and especially the Wikipedia.)
I wonder how long will it be before each student carries PDAs that display answers to any common question at the click of a button? (The time is almost here, I know.) Where, then, will that lead the education system, and how can it adjust to the notion of near-instantaneous research replacing memory?
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently wondering about this, how our educational tools might better compensate for new ways of learning, filtering information and retaining useful knowledge. Many minds far greater than mine are occupied by these same thoughts, I would guess.
Hmm… perhaps I can Google for them….
October 7th, 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
Not long ago, I had to teach a workshop on “how to make a website.” The class was to take place in a computer lab with older, unstable machines, and the 15 or so participants ranged from teenagers with a good grasp of web development basics to retirees who barely knew how to handle a mouse. I was given three hours to deliver the workshop, not including a 20 minute intermission. Needless to say, this was going to be a challenge.
Thankfully, it turned out to be far easier than I thought, thanks to the excellent WYSIWYG web development application called Nvu (then still at version 0.8). After using the HTML view to learn a few of the basic codes, we switched to WYSIWYG view and they began to use it like a word processor. We shifted back and forth so they could see how authoring in one view affected the other. By time the three hours were up, almost everybody in the workshop had published their own website, and the attendees were rather psyched up about the fact that they managed to create their own little homesteads in cyberspace.
Nvu occupies the gap left by applications like Dreamweaver, GoLive and FrontPage becoming much more complicated for professional usage: there is a genuine need for a simple but potentially powerful program to create web pages without dealing with difficult learning curves, shelling out hundreds of dollars, or moving too fast and too far beyond the paradigms of a word processor. That isn’t to say that professionals won’t find it handy: I’ve used it a number of times myself for “quick-and-dirty” webpages. It’s also great for keeping a commonplace book that can be accessed from multiple locations via a web server. Although the beta versions were stable enough to use for my purposes, the fact that it’s officially released as a version 1.0 means I can start recommending it to others without fear of beta quirks.
The software is yet another powerful application in the Mozilla family, along with Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird (still in early development) and the Mozilla Suite (in fact, it’s the successor to the Mozilla Composer still included in the Suite). It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and it’s free to download from Nvu. If you’re a beginner with an itch to start producing your own web pages, or even a professional looking for a cross-platform way to create pages and modify existing sites with a minimum of fuss (or expense), then Nvu could prove invaluable. It costs nothing to give it a whirl, and you may even save a fair amount of money and time in the long run.
(By the way, as with any new tool, make sure you back up your existing files before you start experimenting.)
July 2nd, 2005
Back in the bronze age –my high school and university years, to be more specific– I spent a lot of time writing fiction. Just like every other struggling writer (and perhaps those with far more experience), the development of plot and subplot elements within story lines proved to be one of the most intimidating and frustrating parts of the writing process. And, like so many others during that epoch, I turned to index cards. I’d jot down a title like “Man peers down into sewage drain” and then use the rest of the card for details. Afterwards I’d lay out the cards on a large table and shuffle them about till I was satisfied with the progression. Nowadays, I often use outliners for that purpose, but they never felt, well… authentic to me, at least as a writer.
Enter the Writer’s Café, a woefully under-publicised application from a UK husband-and-wife team that seeks to deliver an authentic writing experience in ways other software falls flat. The duo is an interesting couple: Dr. Julian Smart is a fairly well-known software developer, the man behind the cross-platform wxWidgets project, and Harriet Smart is a novelist with several books to her credit. For this product, they combined their respective disciplines to create an application that might prove invaluable –if not essential– to many writers.
Writer’s Café is essentially a suite of writer’s tools. The emphasis is not on word processing –there are too many of those out there already, including the free OpenOffice.org Writer– but rather on the development of ideas and the organisation of material. StoryLines is their equivalent of the index-card-shuffle, and you can create several streams, one for each plot line. You can create detailed content for each card and even add annotations and an image, then export the whole lot to an external file as a report suitable as the basis of a first draft (it even supports OpenOffice.org format). Another application serves as a hub for:
- Keeping a journal
- A “notebook” for writing down your loose ideas and developing them
- Displaying random inspirational quotes the developers have selected (they call them cookies)
- Timing your writing, with optional prompts to kickstart your brain
- Creating simple brainstorming diagrams or collages, with ovals, rectangles, pictures and text interconnected with lines and arrows
- The scrapbook: this is essentially an outliner in which you can organise text, web links, images, collages and shortcuts to files on your hard drive
There are a few other applications, such as WordTiles (like a fridge-magnet poetry tool) and Forty Thieves, a card game to help de-stress. Also included is a 60-page ebook called Fiction: The Facts, which should prove handy to beginning writers, and a catchy theme song by Jay Goldmark called Untie Your Tongue. (Hey, why not?)
So is this for you? Well, it depends. There are a few things I really like about it. First, it’s cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (which is probably a bigger deal for me than it is for you). Second, it does a great job of creating a nice little self-contained system for writers to develop, research and arrange ideas, plots, locations and characters, even if one’s computer skills are fairly basic. Most things work by dragging and dropping or by simple menu commands. An effort has been made to keep it flexible but user-friendly. Third, I like that it caters to writers and the writer’s mindset… everything is ordered and implemented in such a way to make a writer feel at home, using standard time-honoured nomenclature and techniques. Even the title is meant to evoke this. Fourth, the StoryLines program is definitely a best-of-breed, and I can’t say I’ve seen many comparable pieces of software, at least in terms of helping writers to re-arrange and annotate their plots. (I’m not about to mention the oft-hellish Dramatica here.) Last but not least, the program contains functions that are normally only found in higher-end and more technical applications, albeit here they are far more basic and intuitive (read: less intimidating). Programs like DEVONthink Pro and Visio would scare the pants off many creative writers I know, but Writer’s Café should hit the sweet spot in terms of balancing technical know-how with the need to be productive as a writer.
Downsides? Well, there are a few. Depending on what applications you already use, the Scrapbook and Collage tools can seem rather primitive and a little clunky. Unless you’ve invested time, money and effort into learning other applications, though, you’ll still do fine by these tools. The text tools are another matter, however. I understand that the emphasis is placed upon developing your ideas, and not to recreate a fully-functional word processor, but the lack of certain functions like search/replace are a little frustrating if –for example– you decide to change a character’s name or a location. That being said, you can do a search within the application and replace text manually, or simply export the “report” to your word processor and just change the words there when you begin work on your first draft. The good news is that (according to a post in the forums) improving the text tools is high on the developer’s to-do list.
My only other qualm, and it’s a fairly minor one, is that of aethetics. The cross-platform widgets set seems a little out of place on Mac OS X, and things lack a little of the Aqua “elegance” that many expect from most native applications. Likewise, the application icons seem rather primitive, not at all lickable or even anti-aliased. That being said, Writer’s Café looks quite natural on Windows, and only slightly awkward under Linux. These issues mean little when contrasted against the value of the software, though.
While I probably won’t be giving up my cherished DEVONthink Pro or other professional tools very soon, I can certainly recommend Writer’s Cafe for those writers stuck in the mire of a story going nowhere, or for those trying to get along with only a regular word processor. Many professional writer’s tools –several of which are of inferior quality or hopelessly complex– cost several hundred dollars, so at $45 USD, Writer’s Café is a great deal. StoryLines itself is worth the cost of admission.
If you’re interested, the UK’s Practical PC site has a review of Writer’s Café with screenshots, and of course the Writer’s Cafe website has plenty of information as well as a downloadable demo.
June 30th, 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
Well, it’s been about a week since the release of the D*I*Y Planner Hipster PDA Edition, and the feedback has been excellent and very constructive. I’ve also had a few dozen people writing me about how they implemented the Hipster PDA in their own systems, and it’s been some interesting reading. However, there seems to be a disconcerting trend among a few users, and there is one person in particular whose email illustrates it well. Let’s call him Ringo (and I thank him for his permission to post about his situation).
Ringo wrote me a message asking for my opinion about how he might tweak his setup. Normally, my standard reply is “whatever works for you, my friend,” since everybody’s situation is so very different, and I advocate a process of discovery. But this email caught my attention, since it epitomised a number of problems I see emerging among some productivity tweakers.
His GTD-based system involved Outlook, Excel spreadsheets, a wiki, a web-based to-do application, a Palm synced with both Outlook and Palm Desktop, some Perl scripts to import and export CSV and tab-delimited data files to and from various applications, a D*I*Y Planner Day-Timer and a rather thick set of Hipster PDA cards using most of my templates. I won’t get into the details: suffice it to say that the system was detailed in 17 steps, was about three pages long, required carrying a large bag filled with his tools, and done daily. I must say, as I read his email, I could certainly admire his technical abilities and –in certain cases– his ingenuity. His Perl scripts used a number of CPAN libraries to retrieve and post information from his private wiki and prep it for his Palm, and his next stages were to involve Plucker in the mix using some Python scripts and then use pilot-link libraries to import to-do’s and memos into his Palm. Ringo is a part-time CGI programmer, and quite the smart cookie.
Too smart, I think. It seems like all the really smart people (and notably the ones with technical abilities) overcomplicate matters, and make the productivity process far too difficult and inefficient.
I’ve noticed some people are sharing their planning mantras. Here’s mine: simplify.
In the body of Arthurian legends, you’ll find various tales of the Sangraal, the Holy Grail, the sacred cup that once contained the blood of Christ and which possessed the abilities to heal the land and its people of infertility, disease, despair and –some would say– ignorance. The earliest legends had for their central character the knight called Perceval. (Other Arthurians, please forgive my mixing of versions in the effort to make a point here.)
Now, Perceval’s mother wanted to shield her baby from the nasty world outside, from its war-mongerers, its tempting damsels and its enticing evils. She retreated to the Welsh wilderness and raised him there in the wood for 15 years in complete isolation without the benefit of books, visitors or tutelage in outside matters. Then one day, Perceval experiences knights for the first time. He was amazed by the sight of the armored warriors, and in his naivété he couldn’t comprehend that their metal casings weren’t skin. Finally, in the face of a barrage of questions that forever broke open his self-contained little world, his mother gave in, and told Perceval of his noble birthright and knights and kings and chivalry. Perceval, the young fool, pitched some food into a sack and left for the cities, forever leaving behind his weeping mother and the tranquil life of the forest.
The Quest for the Holy Grail was the medieval epitome of the search for excellence. Many great knights, including the great Lancelot du Lac, tried to achieve the magical vessel and failed miserably, for they were flawed in their thoughts or deeds. Eventually, it was Perceval –the naive, the unlearned– who attained it. Despite the powers and techniques and worldly experience of the other knights, it was only Perceval that possessed the one thing that could lead to the Grail. The simpleton’s secret? Focus. While all the other knights spent most of their time jousting in tournaments, chasing damsels, conquering evil knights, sleeping with queens, and sundry other glamorous tasks, Perceval was single-minded upon reaching his objective.
I’ve always thought that the moral of the tale is to keep things as simple as possible and to focus entirely on the desired outcome. I used to be like Ringo, and had some pretty …uhm… “interesting” ideas on how to use technology to tie together my information and organisational methods into a coherent system. I was always questing, but taking my eye off the Grail. There were so many interesting and glamorous diversions in implementing the various tools that I rarely stuck with my procedures long enough to be efficient. Each new side-quest was alluring, filled with the promise of fulfilling the end goal while making my life easier.
It was only last fall that I realised I was in a never-ending spiral of productivity tweaking. I sat down with a blank piece of paper and wrote down the types of information that I needed to use to keep myself productive. The solution was actually far simpler than I would have imagined. Within a day, I had figured out what I had to do. Within a month, I got the bugs out of the system. Six months later, I only make small and incremental changes –which the Japanese call Kaizen– but only if they are simple, effective and focused. (I’ll write about my own productivity methods at a later date, for those who are interested.)
My most important lesson learned: unless it’s simple, I won’t do it, or won’t find it efficient. Simplify.
Update : I’ve written a post concerning how I simplified matters, entitled The Beginner’s Mind.
June 18th, 2005
There’s a little light at the end of the tunnel with regard to my workload, so I’m taking this time to mention the status of the D*I*Y Planner.
First, there is still no version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org yet, so my template kit is still pending its “any day now” release. I am quite encouraged by the drawing tools in the beta, but the program still rather buggy at this time.
Second, my focus for the next while will be on “add-on” packages for the D*I*Y Planner which would be targeted towards more specialised users. The first two will be Education and Creativity. I’m still very much in the embryonic stages of what’s to be included, and how they will be structured.
Which brings me to the reason for this post: are there any students and teachers out there who have ideas about what you’d like to see in the D*I*Y Education Package? Currently, I only have the following templates in process:
- Lesson Plan
- Unit Plan
- Course Overview
- Materials
- Bibliography (MLA), including an index card variant
- HowTo: MLA Citations
- Timetable, both five-day and blank versions
- A marking template or two
- Attendance
- Perhaps some new brainstorming charts?
I lean towards the arts, not the sciences, so MLA is my first choice for documenting sources. That being said, I can see no reason why I couldn’t create other styles while I’m at it. I would like a few pros to double-check my work, though.
If you have any suggestions for additional templates, I’d love to hear from you: please leave a comment below or send me an email. (My address is found at the bottom of the menu at right.) Scholars, educators, students and educational methodologies being what they are, I sincerely doubt that these templates will suit everybody’s needs, but I’m trying to ensure that I take into account as many as possible. Your feedback is thus very important to me.
May 26th, 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
A few years ago, I had a really bad bout of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) that made almost any typing or pushing quite painful, despite my careful consideration of ergonomics. Slowly, with a decrease in my typing workload, the problem alleviated itself to the point where I wasn’t worried about it anymore.
In the past couple of months, however, I’ve been creating quite a lot of educational content for an online course, and my wrists are seriously beginning to hurt again. The CTS has made a comeback and becomes more noticeable with each passing day.
I’m aware that are both short-term and long-term semi-solutions to CTS, but it’s far better to address the origin of any problem rather than treat its symptoms. So I took a careful look at what I was doing, and how I might address the issues.
Correct ergonomics (the placement of fingers, hands, wrists, back) can only do so much, especially if you already have CTS, but I was doing almost everything right, using various silicon and foam wrist rests, a proper chair, good desk elevation, and correct positioning of my hands. So not much more could be done about that: I was doing things by the book.
Upon careful consideration, I realised that –out of around 16 hours a day of computer work– roughly 80% of this is “hovering” my hands above the keyboard, poised to type, while I thought of the next sentence or paragraph. (When I do type, it’s in bursts ranging from 60 to 80 words per minute.) So why not take away my hands from the keyboard while I think? Well, there is a certain immediacy, even an urgency, of having the hands in such a position; it forces you to write eventually. So what to do?
Well, I mentioned that I often think better while standing or pacing (which is why I’m thinking of following Ed Bliss’ advice about a standing desk). Then I remembered something: about ten years ago, I used to always keep an inexpensive portable cassette recorder –you know, the little microcassette handhelds with a built-in mic– in my car so that I could dictate project notes while driving. I dug it out and started walking around, speaking my lessons into the mic, using the pause button while I thought of the next phrase or paragraph. Afterwards I sat down, plugged in a set of earbuds and played the recording back, typing the words at high speed. Now, it wasn’t perfect, but it gave me the first draft ripe for editing. Not only does this make matters more efficient and easier on my hands, but the extra brain-power generated by walking around seems to help me come up with and expand ideas that may not occur to me while sitting.
So my current “model of efficiency” for producing written content is:
- Create very rough outlines for the lessons on paper, essentially as prompts
- Walk around with the cassette recorder and paper, dictating the content, using the pause button for thinking
- Transcribe the spoken notes at high speed on my laptop
- Edit the material as needed, adding links and images
- Publish
I’ve only been doing this for a few days, but already my wrists are thanking me and my material seems to be better thought out and more imaginative. This is not to mention the potential for actually getting some exercise while I get things done. I’ll be pursuing this workstyle for the duration of my contract (not much longer now), and perhaps beyond.
May 9th, 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
As I’m sure most technogeeks have read in SlashDot, the final version of the new Ubuntu Linux distribution has just been released.
Announcing: Ubuntu 5.04 “The Hoary Hedgehog Release”
The Array (*) is pleased to announce the second release of Ubuntu! If you’ve heard all about Ubuntu and just want to get the Install CD or test the Live CD, you can download it here immediately:
This is one of the first Linux distributions I’ve used (lo, these 11 years and dozen+ distros) that I’m actually completely happy with. It’s just the right mix of usability and power for me, all without getting in the way. It helps to add the new repositories, but after that, every piece of software I want is just minutes away. The few little hitches I’ve had have been easily solved by the Ubuntu Wiki and the Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide.
Released simultaneously with this GNOME-based distro is Kunbuntu, a KDE-based distro for those people who prefer that desktop envirionment.
Note that the Ubuntu servers are quite overwhelmed at the moment, so I’d advise picking up the torrents for a very quick download. They can be found at the regular download sites (direct link: i386 install torrent from US mirror).
By the way, “hoary” means “ancient and venerable”.
April 8th, 2005
Warning: Linux geek territory. Enter at your peril.
Now, I’m both a tweaker and an operating system junkie. I use Mac OS X for multimedia production, Linux for web development, and Windows for… for… hmmm… tech support issues. However, I’ve also tinkered in the guts of Solaris, VMS, *BSD, QNX, BeOS and a half-dozen other OSes, just to see what they had to offer. I switch operating systems like people change their clothes.
I made a mistake about a month ago. I had to burn down and build up one of my chief production machines, a Linux SGI box. It had an ancient version of Red Hat on it and it was unsecure and unstable, not to mention extremely dated (Open Source development moves very fast). On my previous laptop I had been using a Frankenstein variant of Debian Linux, originally installed from a Knoppix live CD-ROM, but I was frustrated by being forced to choose between either very unstable software packages or very old ones. After a brief but unfortunately ill-suited dalliance with Fedora (it didn’t like my hardware), I started looking elsewhere for my new distro.
I had heard a lot of good things about SuSE Linux, so I tracked down SuSE Professional 9.2 and installed it on the SGI box. At first, I was quite happy with it. It came with a recent and very pretty version of the KDE desktop environment, along with Java, Flash and plenty of bells and whistles.
But about two weeks ago, the discontent really started. I continually found KDE far too slow and bloated for my day-to-day use. KDE is a pretty heavy-duty system, and it has always struck me as focusing on providing a user interface that matches or outdoes MS Windows feature-by-feature. I didn’t need all that. Heck, I’m happy with just Emacs and a web browser. I tried switching over to GNOME but found out that the SuSE packages were ancient — about a year old. I tried sucking down newer packages from third-party repositories (including apt-get), but many things didn’t work well — for example, anything using the Gstreamer multimedia kit crashed. Garnome was a three-day compile-fest that left me with many other problems, including incompatibilities with existing libraries. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any more. Two days ago, I burnt down SuSE.
Now, I’ve never really been a Debian fan. Most Debian users I’ve met have had all the subtlety of religious zealots trying to convert me at swordpoint. The “live free or die” mentality also tends to get in the way when one is forced to commercial means of making a living. Yes, I do believe in the Braveheartian notion of freedom, but this isn’t very convenient when it conflicts with my “use the best tool for the job” rule: sometimes you need a screwdriver, not a hammer. I don’t like to be told, “Well, you can’t do it that way because the software license isn’t worded correctly, but here’s a simple 48-step way to do it… first, download the new kernel source and modify the Makefile like this….” And don’t even get me started about the user-unfriendliness of the Debian website. All that, plus the very infrequent updates to the base system, led me away from this distribution in the first place.
However, I had been hearing about Ubuntu, the Debian-based distro with “the strange name”, for quite a while now. Convinced that there was something inviting in those waters, I did a little bit of research into it, and arrived at the following conclusions:
- Ubuntu is Debian, but with a very current set of packages, including the recent GNOME 2.10. It can also connect to all third-party repositories for extra and “non-free” packages.
- Because it is Debian, and uses the famed Debian package management system, installing and upgrading software is an absolute breeze.
- Ubuntu is a very philosophical operating system, rather than a religious one. Ubuntu means “humanity to others,” whereas I find Debian Prime to be a “convert or die” sort of experience.
- A very strong effort has been put into usability issues. Not only are most things very intuitive (a lot of credit must go to GNOME Human Interface Guideline adoption), it carefully balances the need for an administrator with the need to be a regular user.
- Ubuntu offers a “live” CD-ROM, where you can boot from the CD and experience how everything works. It detected everything on my system perfectly, and it was extremely nimble when compared to SuSE’s KDE (even though it was running from a CD-ROM!).
- It installs very quickly, and lets one immediately update the system with whatever other packages one wishes.
- The community support is amazing: lots of people helping each other, and plenty of knowledgeable folks creating how-to’s, handbooks, unofficial guides, and wiki pages. And hardly a flame or rude person to be found. Maybe this distro does bring out the humanity in geeks. Heh.
- Get this: Ubuntu will actually send you CD-ROMs by mail, and pay the shipping. I have a stack of 20 x86 and three PPC CD’s on the way to give to friends and volunteer organisations. (Of course, being at least partially funded by a humanitarian billionaire Debian developer — Mark Shuttleworth, also the second space tourist — probably helps in this regard.)
Whereas SuSE took a few days to set up to my liking (and even then, it felt far too sluggish), I installed Ubuntu in less than an hour. It took only a few more hours to download other software packages, choose fonts and themes, slap on Java and Flash, and set up my panels exactly right. In less than four hours, I had a smoothly humming Linux box with everything I wanted, and nothing I didn’t. I’m even getting used to the… uhm… brown-ness of everything: very earthy.
I think I’m going to be happy with this one….
April 2nd, 2005
New beta versions of the Open Source based office suites OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are now available. For those of you unfamiliar with them, OpenOffice.org (a.k.a., OOo) is a free office suite rivalling Microsoft Office and WordPerfect Suite: it’s not quite as good in some ways, but it’s better in others, such as offering some great drawing tools for posters, native PDF and Flash export, and some cool navigational aides. StarOffice is a value-added commercial version with more templates, fonts, clip-art, etc. that’s produced by Sun, who is one of OOo’s major sponsors. I’ve been using OOo/SO for years instead of Microsoft Office, and no one has ever remarked of any incompatibilities with me: these suites read and write most MS Office formats with ease.
While you should treat any beta with caution, these offer a peek at the “next generation,” including a high-power database tool, Office XP-like features to aid migration, better adherance to standards, WordPerfect compatibility, and more wizards to handle complex or repetitive tasks. Links: OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta (summary of new features) and StarOffice 8.0 Beta (“what’s new?” PDF).
March 4th, 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
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