07.30.07
Bookmarking with VoodooPad
Bookmarks in the browser (doesn’t matter which one) does not work for me. I figured this out yesterday after years of webbrowsing. Somehow I can never remember what categories I had or why I bookmarked this particular page. With some browsers you can add a comment to a bookmark, but you have to open the bookmark manager every time. There may be some plugins, but I want to stay flexible in the choice of my browser. Yes, it’s kind of weird. Anyway, I deliberated if I should just copy the links to my favourite app, VoodooPad. That’s soo last century. But wait, there’s this cool method of automation, AppleScript. So I wrote a little script which asks me for a page to append the bookmark. I defined some acronyms, “s” for science for example. And then it asks me for a note, so I can type in a few related words to remenber the content of the website. Still last century? Maybe. I don’t care, it’s much more pleasing to me this way. You could fill in your acronyms and pagenames in the lists at the beginning of the script. It behaves like this: If you use the acronym, it appends the Bookmark to its page. If you type in something else, it appends the bookmark to the page with this name and creates a new one if this page does not exist. Here is it, in case someone is interested. Which is quite unlikely.
on run
tell application "Safari" to set new_bm_url to URL of document 1 of window 1
activate
set acronyms to {"s", "a", "g", "o", "d", "l"}
set pagenames to {"bm Science", "bm Apple", "bm Games", "bm Other", "bm Software Dev", "bm Read Later"}
set d_l to ""
repeat with x from 1 to number of items of acronyms
set d_l to d_l & item x of acronyms & " - " & item x of pagenames & return
end repeat
display dialog d_l as text default answer ""
set text_result to text returned of result
set acronym to first character of text_result
set bookmark_note to characters 3 thru (number of characters of text_result) of text_result as text
tell application "VoodooPad"
repeat with x from 1 to number of items of acronyms
if item x of acronyms is acronym then
set itemnumber to x
end if
end repeat
set pagename to item itemnumber of pagenames
append text bookmark_note & return & new_bm_url & return to page pagename of document 1
end tell
end run
Sogudi
I found an amazing plugin for Safari. I’m not a plugin-freak but this is so useful. It’s called Sogudi. I found it on a MacBreak Video. It lets you define short names for websites, an ovious example is w for Wikipedia. When you want to search something in Wikipedia, you type in your address bar “w ” and then your search term. For example “w voodoopad” to get the entry for “voodoopad”. There are many predefined websites, but you can define your own ones. This way I got rid of some bookmarks and also removed the google searchbox of Safari by editing the Toolbaritems.nib. Great idea.
07.26.07
MindMapper
Since I am a visual learner, it helpes me to have a map of my thoughts or of stuff I’m supposed to learn. One tool I knew from my Windows time was Freemind which is also available for Mac OS. I used it for some important exams and it helped a lot. The capabilities of this application are limited. I appreciate it a lot because it helped me to get into this kind of usage of a computer. It’s just not the solution for me. So I reached out into the unlimitted space of the web and found some other tools. All of them have their limits. I go threw some of them, but this is not a review. Just some random thoughts.
Novamind
Wow! All these colors… how horrible! But ok, it can be changed… I’m not against color, not at all, but just if it makes sense. Not just to be somehow exceptional. The quick creation of topics with the keyboard works to some extent. But what is that, the topics overlap each other in some cases?!? Not the way to go. The set of features is pretty good, but I can’t live with these issues.
OmniGraffle
This is not really a mindmapper, but it has a mindmap mode. So I tried it. For about five minutes. You have to create a sister-topic first and then press tab to make it a child. Can’t tell more because I stoped trying it at this point.
MyMind
Costs as much as Freemind which is good. The view is nice and pretty configurable. Just the handling doesn’t fit for me. I’ll keep it on my harddrive, just in case.
Tinderbox
Tinderbox is not a classical mindmapper. It’s hard to explain. There are notes which can be linked to other notes. The links have attributes themselves. You can make prototypes of notes to create categories of similar notes. Agents can gather notes depending on their attributes. The hierarchival structure is not visible in the map view, it works with layers. Andorments provide an additional possibility to gather notes on the same layer. It looks really interesting, but I didn’t manage to figure out how to use it in a productive way. And it’s expensive. I’ll keep it in my mind.
Graphviz
Not really a mindmap program and not meant to be. But on my research I found this and it helped me for A crappy map for VoodooPad.
Incubator
Nice. The look is very clean. The handling works very well, you can quickly create a map with just the keyboard. This also works with some other tools, but this one act just like I expect it. I didn’t find a way to make links between topics outside the hierarchical structure. I often want to make something like:
a has property b and c also but a and c are on different positions in the tree. Know what I mean? The kind of structure you could easily represent in a table. Sometimes I use color to support this, but it’s not a very well solution. Maybe concept maps would work better for me, but all the tools I looked at were kind of crappy (just kind of!). My favourite feature: Create links to a new page! Just rightclick any subtopic and make a new page with this subtopic as main idea. Then you can click on the arrow next to the subtopic in the main view to get to its own page. Kind of an infinite workspace. Infinite is goood! I really like that. The feature set may not be so huge but it does what I want it to do. It’s the tool of my choice. One downside is, it’s not applescriptable. Sad.
A crappy map for VoodooPad
There’s this Application called VoodooPad. It’s a personal Wiki where I write down just everything.
I am a visual learner and would love to have a map view of the pages. I guess there are too many feature requests and not enought time. So I looked around for an external solution and found Graphviz. This is an open source tool for representing structural information. I tried to write a little AppleScript which exports the information into a .dot file which will be opened by Graphviz.
It works, but not very well. It just takes a list of all pages and searches in the contents for these strings for pagenames. Then writes it to the .dot file which is located at home:scriptfiles:dot: and tells the Finder to open the file using Graphviz which must be locted in the applications folder.
Some bugs are:
- it shows just small letters
- if there is a for example a page called “funny”, the string “fun” refers to it
- no links to files are recognized
- to be continued…
Other problems are:
- it’s quite mazily if there are too many pages
- it takes some time to process if the document is more than just a few pages
- it’s not interactive, you can’t move the page representations nor navigate
- you would have to run the script every time you change something
- not linked pages are not displayed
- to be continued… this list is probably endless
There are some settings in Graphviz which could make it a bit more acceptable. I use the “Energy Minimized” Layout and tell it to not overlap. These settings can be saved as default.
Even with these deficiencies I use it and hope that the idea has some potential. I really need the map view… it helps me to get an idea of that information I have.
Here is the script for the case, someone is interested. Please forgive me for this crap. I’m obviously not a developer.
Code:
on run
set ignorelist to {"index", "post im forum", "vp to graph", "vp to graph mit ignorelist"}
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
set homepath to path to home folder as text
set dotfile to homepath & "scriptfiles:voodoodot2.dot"
tell application "Finder"
try
make new folder at ((home as text) & "scriptfiles:") with properties {name:"dot"}
end try
end tell
tell application "VoodooPad"
set number_of_pages to the number of pages of document 1
set pagelist to {}
set dotfile_refn to open for access file ¬
dotfile with write permission
write "digraph untitled {" & return to dotfile_refn
repeat with i from number_of_pages to 1 by -1
set the beginning of pagelist to name of page i of document 1 as text
end repeat
repeat with x from number_of_pages to 1 by -1
set pagecontent to (text of page (item x of pagelist as text) of document 1) as string
repeat with y from number_of_pages to 1 by -1
if pagecontent contains item y of pagelist and x is not y and ignorelist does not contain item x of pagelist and ignorelist does not contain item y of pagelist then
write "\"" & item x of pagelist & "\"->\"" & item y of pagelist & "\";" & return to dotfile_refn
end if
end repeat
end repeat
write "}" & return to dotfile_refn
close access dotfile_refn
tell application "Finder"
open document file dotfile using application file "Graphviz.app" of folder "Applications" of startup disk
end tell
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
end tell
end run
Here is a picture.
It’s just a simple example. Most likely it does’t look so nice in a real world scenario. Oh, there’s also an ignore-list. Pages in this list will not be displayed.
Thanks a lot!
Lazra
07.24.07
The six stages of our planning
Ok, this is too funny to not mention it. Found this at my workplace.
The six stages of our planning:
1) wave of enthusiasm
2) sudden confusion
3) total disillusion
4) search for the culprit
5) punishment of an innocent
6) glorificaton of a causal bystander
Hope I translated it correctly.
My way to Macintosh
I am pretty new to Macintosh, so I’ll describe how I came to using it. Half a year ago I used Micrisoft Windows. Just because my computer came with it. I wasn’t so clever to question the most important part of the machine, the operating system (yes, hardware is also important…). But anyway, I didn’t use it a lot. Office, internet, a few games. My first contact with a Mac was some years ago in school. This was my first contact with computers at all. Once or twice in one year we went to the computerroom which was always kind of magical. But not magical enought to catch my attention. So I didn’t really remember it when I bought my first computer. Years later I began wondering if a computer could be more useful than mine in my usage scenario. After a long investigation I choose a Tablet PC. It was nice to write right on the screen and don’t have to care about all the single papers. At this point I began to look for another operating system. The reason for this was that my particular Windows XP ran very slow. I guess it had something to do with the driver configuration, but I don’t really know. First I tried Ubuntu, a Linux distribution. The hardware side of the tablet stuff worked, but I couldn’t find a software for taking my notes in a comfortable way. I also got a bit annoyed because I had to configure a lot. I kept telling myself that this was a good thing because it meant that I was able to configure a lot. But this didn’t really help when I had to be productive. Partially I switched back to Windows and got annoyed again by the slowness of my particular system. The other thing in my mind became more and more realistic. Macintosh. I waited for a few months, read a lot, went to a Mac store, tried to get into it. Which was impossible without actually owning a Mac. I didn’t plan to, but when a friend wanted to sell his Mac mini, I took the chance. It was the best tech related decision I made since I bought a PSION PDA. I’m not sure if it offered more possibilites than my previous computers. But I began to use them. Maybe just because it felt more home than everything before. I missed the tablet stuff, but it didn’t keep me. It didn’t take long to convince me of the fact that this will be the system I want to use. Looking forward to my Life Sciences study I needed something mobile, so I chose a MacBook Pro. That’s what I’m using now and hopefully will be using for a while.
This was a short description of my switch to a Mac. I hope you are not asleep by now. Well, I guess I would be glad to serve you in whatever way.
Starting the Blog
Hello World!
What is this:
I’m starting a blog here about personal technology. Since I use a Macintosh it will be strongly related to this category. But there may also be other things popping into my mind.
Who am I:
I guess I am a technology enthusiast and my profession is / will be in this area. I’m not sure what I will be doing in five years but tech will certainly be involved. Please forgive me for my bad english, I’m from Switzerland and didn’t practice as much as I should have. Anyway, I guess it will work. As long as I have something to talk about… let’s see.
Thanks!
Lazra
