While reviewing Inspiration 4.0 for TidBITS #180, I meant to compare it as an outliner with Acta, but the winner kept turning out to be MORE, which I had never meant to consider seriously, and of which I had only an outmoded version (2.0) to examineShow full article

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While reviewing Inspiration 4.0 for TidBITS #180, I meant to compare it as an outliner with Acta, but the winner kept turning out to be MORE, which I had never meant to consider seriously, and of which I had only an outmoded version (2.0) to examine. So I took a closer look, and for two months now, I have used the latest version, MORE 3.1, on a daily basis.

I liken MORE to a dinosaur in the best and worst senses. MORE started life as ThinkTank, the magnificent brainchild of Dave Winer, back in the Apple II days. As the Mac came to life, Winer evolved ThinkTank into MORE 1.0. Like dinosaurs, ThinkTank and MORE were vastly successful because they were the best at what they did. If you want to use an outliner as a serious writing tool, MORE remains the only way to go.

But after a Cretaceous heyday, dinosaurs had to adapt or die. Symantec bought out Winer (leaving him free to play God in the brave new world of scripting, with Frontier), and was a good deity stand-in for a couple of eras; but lately its attention has strayed, and MORE is showing signs of being too big and clunky and failing to keep up with the environment. If Symantec doesn't take it seriously again, or sell it to someone who will, it could easily go extinct. This would be a terrible loss.

The Milieu -- An outliner, you recall, works with text (and, in MORE and some other outliners, imported graphics) as topics. Every topic is subordinate to (is a subtopic of) some other topic, up to the main topic (or title) of the whole outline; an immediate subtopic of a topic is said to be one level deeper than that topic. The advantage of this organization lies in how you can view and rearrange topics. Any topic can have its subtopics either collapsed, so that they are invisible, or expanded, so that they appear below and indented relative to the topic. If you cut a topic, its subtopics (and their subtopics, and so on), whether visible or not, are cut as well; likewise, if you move a topic (by cut & paste or by dragging), its subtopics travel with it. This hierarchical structure for storing, viewing, and rearranging clumps of material is indispensable to me for creative work (preparing articles and lectures) and for reference (notes on books).

MORE (like most outliners) also lets you fold a topic, meaning simply that when the topic is visible, only its first line actually shows. This helps with viewing and navigation if topics become lengthy.

Some outliners, MORE included, provide a second entity, usually called paragraphs or notes. Only one note can attach to a given topic, and it can be shown or hidden independent of whether the topic's subtopics are collapsed or expanded. A frequent use of this feature is to make topics be subject headings only, with the actual discussion confined to notes. You aren't compelled to do this - in the old Apple II ThinkTank, you were, since topics were confined to 80 characters, whereas now a MORE topic (or note) can be as long as you like - but maintaining the distinction often helps clarity and flexibility.

[By the way, I'm not using the MORE documentation terminology. They call topics "headlines" and notes "comments."]

So much for the basic features that make an outliner an outliner. The devil, however, is in the details. MOREphistopheles comes into its own in the details.

Navigation -- A major MORE advantage is that it implements text navigation like a true word processor. Most outliners use or emulate Apple's built-in TextEdit routines (as exemplified by TeachText), which are primitive, to put it nicely. But MORE gives you text-navigation power nearer the level of Word or Nisus. Double-click to a select a word, triple-click to select a sentence. Up- and down-arrow keys move by line; right- and left-arrow keys move by letter, adding Command moves by word, adding Option moves to the start or end of the topic (or note); and Shift can be added to any of these to select text.

Remarkably, such text navigation melds into topic navigation. Other outliners treat topics as isolated units. In Acta, for example, repeating the left-arrow key in a topic moves through the topic but stops at the first letter; but in MORE, when the start of the current topic is reached, the insertion point just moves on up to the end of the previous visible topic. (Of course you can't do this while selecting; a selection cannot consist of text split between topics, as this would make hash of the notion of a topic.)

Similarly, other outliners make much of the distinction of whether you are in a topic (you have selected its text) or about a topic (you have selected the topic as an entity). Of course this distinction exists, but MORE lets it break down where convenient. In Inspiration, if the insertion point is within the text of a topic, you can delete text, but not the topic itself; you need to use the mouse, so that the topic itself is selected, before you can delete it. In MORE, with the insertion point in a topic, if any text is selected, hitting Clear deletes the text, but otherwise it deletes the topic; hitting Delete deletes the selected text or previous letter, but if you're at the start of a topic, it deletes the topic barrier itself, merging the topic into the previous one.

Keyboard navigation between topics is similarly easy and powerful. Command-up- or down-arrow moves into the previous or next currently visible topic; option-left-arrow moves to the topic governing the present topic; option-right-arrow moves to the present topic's last subtopic. Similarly, keyboard shortcuts let you show or hide notes, fold or unfold topics, expand or collapse subtopics. I hate leaving the keyboard to use the mouse, so I appreciate MORE's full set of keyboard shortcuts, which is matched by no other outliner.

And if you do choose to use the mouse, the way you use it is great. In most other outliners, you must use the mouse very precisely, to put the selection point right into a topic, or click right on the topic's "marker" to select the whole topic; with MORE, clicking anywhere to the right or left of a topic lets you select the topic, expand or collapse it (by double-clicking), fold or unfold it (by option-double-clicking). Almost the only time you have to aim precisely is if you elect to use the mouse rather than keys to show or hide a topic's note.

The way MORE implements notes deserves commendation. A note appears, when made visible, as a scrolling window within the main window, below its topic; subsequent topics move down to accommodate it. Moreover, this window can be resized. If you click outside a note window, it remains, but its scrollbars turn inactive. The result is smooth, clean, and convenient, and not at all buggy, unlike other implementations of notes within outlines.

Another nice feature is hoisting. To hoist something is to focus in on it, removing other material from view. If you hoist a topic, it shows as the first topic (top-left) in the window (in this view you can work with the topic's subtopics and create new ones, but you can't make a new topic at the same level). If you hoist a note, it fills the main window.

Reorganisation -- When you want to reorganise your outline, MORE provides just about every imaginable tool for doing so. To move a topic, you can cut & paste, or drag, or use keyboard shortcuts to move it a single increment up or down, or deeper or shallower. Keyboard commands also can promote all of a topic's immediate subtopics to its level, or demote a topic's co-topics to become its subtopics. You can split a topic into two at the insertion point within it; and you can even merge two topics into one (unlike any other outliner I know).

Especially interesting is MORE's capability to clone a topic. This is like an internal, mutual publish & subscribe: if two or more topics are clones of each other, any change made to the text of any of them, or to the text or organization of their subtopics, is instantly reflected in all of them. (Don't worry, if you delete a clone topic, its clones are not deleted!) Also, if a clone is selected there is a command to take you to its next clone. I find this valuable for creating multiple "views" of data within the same document. For example, I summarise a book from start to finish; beneath that I create subject topics and bring together, as their subtopics, clones of the relevant topics from the summary. Now I've got two views of the same material; if I make a wording change in one view, it's reflected in the other; and it's easy to flip from material in the summary view to the same material in the subject view.

You can select multiple topics: it's easy to select contiguous or non-contiguous topics one by one; or, with modifier-clicks, all a topic's subtopics, co-topics, or topics on the same level whether they are subordinate to the same topic or not; or, from the menu, all topics at a given level or range of levels. Once you've done this, you can print or export just the selected topics, or even format the selected topics. You can also clone, copy, or cut & paste all the selected topics so that they come together under one topic.

Rulers and Formatting -- MORE's formatting capabilities set it apart from all other outliners. Formatting rules are contained in rulers, rather like those of Nisus: initially there is one ruler, attached to the title topic, but you can add a ruler to any topic; a ruler governs the formatting for its topic and all subtopics, infinitely deep or until another ruler is encountered. Rulers can be copied, cut, and pasted; they can be transferred between documents, and even named and stored in a library. A menu command opens a window in which you can set or modify the formatting rules for the ruler attached to the current topic. These formatting rules govern just about every imaginable aspect of the document's appearance: not just character formatting such as default font, size, style, and color, but also paragraph formatting such as justification (left, right, centered, or full), margins and paragraph indent, tabs, and line spacing, and even outline formatting such as topic labels and spacing between topics. Paragraph margins can be set relative to the page margins or to those of the governing topic. So every topic is a kind of paragraph (or collection of paragraphs), making MORE not a mere outliner, but a word processor which "does" outlines (superbly).

That's not all. Every formatting rule has a scope: it applies to topics or notes or both, at a set range of levels of subordination starting with the topic to which the ruler is attached. This means you can have multiple formatting rules within a ruler, dealing with the same subject: for example, this topic should be bold, its subtopics should be italic, and their subtopics down to infinity should be plain.

You aren't confined to using the ruler rules for formatting either. Character formatting can be set from the menus; paragraph formatting can be set from a Word-style ruler at the top of the window. Combine all this with MORE's powerful printing options - set page margins, create headers and footers, print all or all visible or all selected topics, set range of levels of topics and notes to print - and what you have is the ability to prepare a polished presentable printed document from entirely within the outliner. I know no other outliner that lets you do this.

A Case of the Clunkies -- There are many things I would change to improve the interface to give MORE a stronger market position. I have no idea whether these or any changes will ever take place. The creation date for MORE 3.1 is December 1991; the Mac world has changed radically since then, but all one hears about MORE are rumours (unconfirmed) that Symantec is ready to abandon the program. Here, then, is a wish list that may be utterly in vain.

First, some of the editing and interface details could use improvement:

When you create a new topic MORE automatically places it just below the present topic. If this isn't where you wanted it, you have to move it. This is silly. Even Acta lets you make a new topic be a co-topic, subtopic, or co-topic of the governing topic at the instant of creation.

When moving a topic by dragging, it isn't clear where it's going to be put when you release the mouse. Acta shows an outline of the topic as you drag, so you know just where it will go.

There is no facility to select by paragraph, and no formatting rule to dictate the spacing between paragraphs. There is no keyboard command letting you move the insertion point sentence by sentence. There is no way to keyboard-navigate out of a note; you must either hide the note or use the mouse. There is no quick way to turn a note into a topic or vice-versa.

Most distressing, MORE forgets certain crucial viewing information. You can resize a notes window, but if you hide the note and then show it again, MORE assigns its window a new size. Even worse, if you collapse a topic and then expand it, you can only expand either to just its immediate subtopics or else to infinity; MORE has forgotten the expansion state of the individual subtopics. Acta distinguishes between collapsing so that the current state of all subtopics is remembered, and full collapsing so that all subtopics are also collapsed.

So much for editing and interface. Now, more general comments. MORE is System 7-compatible, but no more. At the very least it wants Publish & Subscribe, so that a topic from one outline can show up in another. (Of the outliners I know, only Acta 7 has decent Publish & Subscribe.)

MORE has extensive import/export capabilities, and does a remarkably good job of maintaining formatting information. But it uses proprietary translation modules, so you're limited to what it includes. Either it should include more (Acta? Nisus? RTF?) or it should support XTND technology. It also lacks the ability (which ThinkTank had) to export just the notes.

The manual (in six volumes) is huge, daunting, turgid, dull, confusing, uninformative, and inaccurate. It looks and reads like the Think C manual. A simple, stupendously unbelievable example: the "Quick Reference" is arranged by action - for example, it tells you what will happen if you press Enter, or if you option-double-click to the right of a topic. But I can find that out by doing it. I consult the Quick Reference because I want to know how to achieve some desired result; so it should be arranged by result ("To fold a topic..."; "To show a topic's note..."). The Online Help is even worse; I couldn't even find out from it how to create a new topic!

MORE itself is too "big". I'm not saying that spell-checking, GREP-searching, summing, phone dialing, calendars, drawing tools, and a 144K graphing utility aren't nice, but they do make me wonder whether anyone in charge has a vision of what this program is supposed to do that doesn't involve the words "kitchen sink." I have not even mentioned MORE's Bullet chart and a Tree chart view of the outline, intended so you (the business type) can make diagrams and slide presentations. Because of all this, MORE costs too much. IN CONTROL is moving high volume with a street price of $85 and a variety of give-away packages; MORE's size, its battery of features, and its street price of about $260 add up to Pure Stodge.

Here's my strategy in a nutshell. Now that System 7 is here with IAC and the rest of it, bust up MORE into several small components (outliner, bullet-charter, tree-charter, grapher, calendar), independent but completely capable of sharing data. Improve each component so it's the best at what it does, and eliminate all tools (such as drawing) that some other program will always do better. Then sell each component independently and cheaply. If someone buys all the components, you make more money than you do now; if not, you still win on volume. And move quickly, Symantec. The Cretaceous period is coming to an end.

Symantec -- 800/441-7234 -- 408/253-9600
70414.1331@compuserve.com

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Bare Bones Software's BBEdit 8.7 -- Latest version offers a
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Veteran readers of my contributions to TidBITS know that I am unabashedly obsessed with computer tools for the storage and retrieval of information. They also know that an almost unqualified rave review from me is a rare thingShow full article

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Veteran readers of my contributions to TidBITS know that I am unabashedly obsessed with computer tools for the storage and retrieval of information. They also know that an almost unqualified rave review from me is a rare thing. Hold on to your hats, here it comes.

Take a simple, yet elegant, powerful, and above all useful fundamental idea as your program's basic metaphor. Then implement it with meticulous attention to the details of the interface, taking full advantage of the Mac's features to give lots of flexibility and convenience. That's the recipe for a great Macintosh application - such as the one I'm using right now.

The object of my new affections is IN CONTROL (about $85 discounted), from Attain Corporation. It's an outliner with a big difference. Outlines, you recall, are clumps of text structured as topics and (indented) subtopics, and since you can "expand" or "collapse" a topic's subtopics (to make them visible or invisible), or move a topic and its subtopics to another place in the outline, they are great for arranging, rearranging, and navigating information of all sorts.

Here's the IN CONTROL (IC) difference. To the right of the outline you can create any number of "columns;" and into each column you can enter information corresponding to each topic of the outline: a date, a number, a keyword, a comment, that sort of thing, each column representing some concept you want to associate with the outline's topics.

And why would you want to do that, you ask? Because now you can view your outline in new ways, by sorting or hiding topics according to the criteria of what's in the columns. Picture this:

• Make your outline a list of things to do, arranged into topics by some convenient typology (e.g. Schoolwork, Housework, Phone Calls, etc.): now add a column for the date and time when you want to do each thing, sort on this, and Presto! You're looking at your schedule in chronological order.

• Make your outline a list of your classical record albums, with subtopics listing every piece on each album: add columns for the date, the principal instrument, and the musical form of each piece, and now - want to know what albums contain flute concertos written between 1800 and 1850? Presto! Everything else is hidden, and you're left with a list of only those albums and those specific pieces.

• To write an article (like this one!), build an outline of topics and subtopics, so you can brainstorm and rearrange ideas easily; beneath each subtopic, write sentences of actual text you want to have appear in the article. Add a column categorising each topic as a "heading" or a "paragraph," depending whether it's a topic description or the actual text. Want to rearrange the ideas? Presto! Show only the headings, and alter the outline to your heart's content, with no "paragraphs" visible to mar your view. When you're finished writing, Presto! Show just the "paragraphs" instead - and since what's exported is what's showing in the current view, you can now export just the actual text (and send it to TidBITS!).

• Make your outline a bibliography of books and articles, with main topics by author's last name. Make columns for date, keywords, type ("Book" or "Article"), status ("Not yet read," "On order," or "Read"), and notes. Every entry in a column can hold 32K of styled text; that ought to be plenty for your notes! The notes will occupy vertical room in the window only if they are showing: Presto! Just hide the notes column, or use the menu to show just the first line of all topics, and you can view your bibliographic info conveniently. Use the keywords to show just those articles dealing with "Aeschylus," or do a search-match to show just those books for which the notes contain the word "Laryngeal." When you're finished, export just the bibliographic information, retaining text styles, straight into your word processor.

As these examples show, you can sort on different kinds of criterion. You classify a column as text, numeric, or date-time, and IC knows how to sort and co-sort accordingly. The techniques by which IC decides which topics to hide, called "matching," are even more sophisticated. You can hide or retain only those topics with a column entry identical to, containing, or greater or less than the current entry (or to stuff you type in a dialog box) - and again, comparison is done properly for text, numbers, and dates. Sorting and matching will not expose a topic that has been "collapsed" along with its co-topics into its governing topic, so this provides a further filter (that's important: collapsing and hiding are not the same, though both make a topic invisible). You can also manually select a topic or topics and hide or retain them directly. Furthermore, retained topics can be shown as an outline (in which case the topics that govern them are shown, even if they didn't match the requisite criteria, so as to make the outline levels meaningful) or in a simple one-column arrangement, called a "table." (After sorting, what you are shown is always a "table," since otherwise the governing topics might have to be repeated several times, making nonsense of the outline.)

It's important to understand that when you sort and hide topics this way, no change is made to your outline (although IC can also sort in ways that do rearrange topics); what's altered is your view of the information in the outline. You can toggle back and forth with a button-press between such an altered view, with some topics hidden and/or sorted, and the normal view of the outline. Even cooler, you can preserve an altered view. You can hide and sort, and IC remembers the criteria and actions by which you arrived at the current altered view. You can then name this view, specifying the particular features which you regard as important, and the name appears in a pup up menu. The whole operation can now be performed again at any time just by choosing from this menu. Doing this doesn't mean, "show me just the topics that were showing previously"; it means, "do the same matches, sorts, or other changes that I performed earlier, on this version of the outline." Such preserved views are called "scripts," and are easy to create and modify. (Scripts can be transferred to a new IC file, but not copied between existing files.)

So you might think of IC as an extended outliner. For extra bonus coolness, you can extend your outline right on out of IC itself: any topic in your outline can be "linked" to any document on your Mac (assuming you're running System 7, of course)! Once you've set up a link, you select that topic and hit a command-key, and the document is opened by its application. The possibilities for this feature seem endless: demos, presentations with pictures, catalogues of documents, indexing....

I'm sure that by now you're starting to think of all sorts of uses to which you could put IN CONTROL. The adaptability of IC is certainly inspiring. Its makers also seem to have found it a bit daunting. In our present niche-oriented software market, what is this thing they've created? It's an outliner, a date-book, a database, a writing tool, a table-maker, an indexer - you try to label it, I can't. Attain's own pedestrian label ("To-Do List Manager") does it scant justice; this, and the several pages in the manual devoted to "time management," suggests to me that they're aiming at a business market. I guess that "thinking people who want to organise and navigate information" (like me) isn't considered a worthwhile proportion of the population.

To make IC seem more like a To-Do List, there's a further feature: besides the columns that appear to the right of the outline, there is also a column that can appear to its left, consisting simply of a check-box for each topic. You can hide and sort on the checked-ness of these boxes, and the manual suggests you use them to mark whether you have performed the "to-do" item. This is a column by other means, modified to fit the specialised "to-do list" rubric; to me it seems an artificial appendage.

The check-boxes, though unnecessary, are at least useful and unobjectionable. Not so, I thought, the calendar-reminder facility, even though the manual goes to some lengths to push this as a major feature. The interface between the outline and the calendar is brilliant, to be sure; but I found the component as a whole weak to the point of uselessness, by comparison to the shareware Remember?, which I use. There is no capacity to enter regular events ("every Wednesday at 5"), so if you want to use IC as an appointment book and something in your life recurs regularly you have to enter a separate notation for each occurrence, one by one. Nor can you enter dates descriptively, ("the second Tuesday of November"); you must find November on the calendar and figure out which day is the second Tuesday. And that won't be fun either, since calendar navigation is primitive (no nice pop-up menus with month names or year numbers). If an appointment comes around, you can be reminded (through an extension) even if IC is not running; but the signal consists only of a beep and a flashing icon in the menu bar, and we all know what that's worth (on my first Mac, my Alarm DA flashed for three weeks the first time before I noticed). And if you want to know what you're being reminded of, you have to open the right IC file yourself, manually. Contrast this to Remember?, which brings up an obnoxious palette in front of everything describing what's happening, and lets you bring up the calendar and list of upcoming events instantly from there if necessary. In short, the calendar-reminder feature feels artificially and inadequately imposed upon IC - perhaps (but this is just a guess) in hopes of giving it more appeal to the lucrative business market. However, I don't need IC as a calendar, so I don't care.

Aside from this, IC's implementation is beautiful and thoughtful in its details. The document window has a removable bar with some popup menus and gorgeously drawn buttons across the top; the choices have been well made as to which functions to make accessible here. There is nice use of a changing cursor. You can Undo just about anything. In short, it's clear that serious thought has gone into making IC robust and intuitive, something I can't say of certain other "neat idea" applications I've had occasion to review in these e-pages.

Keyboard navigation between topics is superb, including commands to move up or down to the next topic at the same level, whether adjacent or not, to move to the topic governing the present one, and to move to the present topic's last subtopic. You can select topics contiguously or non-contiguously. You can promote all of a topic's subtopics, or demote all topics subsequent to this one at the same level (to make them subtopics of this one). You can copy a topic with or without its subtopics. A style-sheet can be set for the whole document, dictating the default font, size, style, and color for each outline topic level; activating the style-sheet does not wipe out features not specified (if you change a level's font to Helvetica but don't specify a style, italics are not lost), and multiple alternate style sheets for the document can be maintained using a "script". My one complaint is that there is no keyboard command to move the cursor a word at a time; commands to split and merge topics would have been helpful too, and it might have been nice if graphics could be pasted into the outline.

The outline is always at the left; everything to its right is a column. The width of the outline and of each column can be changed (or zeroed, if desired), and the relative position of columns shifted, by dragging in the bar at the top of the window. Each column's text can be given an independent default font, size, style, and color. A wonderful feature is that if a column is to contain keywords, you can enable fast entry of these: if you type the first letter(s) of a keyword in the column, the computer enters the rest, and if you hold down the mouse in the column, a pop-up menu containing the keywords appears. There is provision for multiple keywords in one column for a single topic; and you can set the sort order of keywords. Another neat thing is that you can set a column so that if you make a new topic, this column will contain the same value as its predecessor, or the next in a sequence of numbers. You can also cause a single value to be entered instantly in a column for all (visible) topics. There is spreadsheet-like keyboard navigation, as if topics and column entries were cells. Thus, IC is a rapid data entry tool.

You may want to use this power to create tables or text that you intend to use in other applications. IC can import or export by copy-and-paste or (to maintain formatting) by using XTND technology. Tab/return-delimited tables are imported as topic (first column) and columns, and vice versa for exporting. When importing, tabs (or option-spaces) at the start of a line are taken as indent information: thus, you can import from any word processor right into outline form. You can export the same way, or (with XTND) export topic indentations as nested paragraphs, using rulers. A clever feature is that hidden columns do not figure in importing, exporting, or printing, and hidden topics are not exported or printed either. This makes it easy to transfer or present data in just the desired format. One of the first things I did with IC was to import a huge table I was constructing in Word; with IC's easy data entry, I'll finish it twice as fast, then export it back to Word. (The only downside to importing is that the IC file can be larger by 30 to 100%, depending on the source.) IC also has good printing capabilities, intelligently managing tables which may spread over multiple pages horizontally and vertically, and providing a basic range of options such as margin size, headers and footers, grid lines, column title style, and alphanumeric topic labels for the outline.

The manual is splendidly written: clear, simple, small, explicit, graphic. I could have used a section gathering technical information; it is possible to err too far on the side of simplicity (not all your customers will be business nerds, Attain!). Also, "later in this chapter" is not much of a cross-reference; page numbers would help. There are twenty graphic online help screens, and balloon help; even the error alert boxes are informative rather than merely punitive. Two complaints about IC. First, I hate to harp on this, but is it really too much to ask that a program shouldn't mess up the "colors" on my 16-gray screen? Not only does IC do this, it sometimes turns its whole window black, and I have to go to some lengths to recover visibility. Second, a single bad interface decision: there is a situation where text jumps from under the mouse as you double-click on it, and you end up clicking in the wrong place. Attain should rethink this one.

IN CONTROL revolves around a powerful basic concept. The interface is clean, lean, reliable, helpful, and sensible. Put these two elements into the hands of just about any user, who surely will find the program so flexible and adaptable as to serve all kinds of needs both present and hitherto undreamt of, and you've got a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. IC is already taking over many tasks on my computer that I had assigned to lesser workers. No doubt it can do the same for you.

Attain Corporation -- 617/776-2711 -- 617/776-1626 (fax)
ATTAIN@applelink.apple.com

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Recently, an amazing program I'd never heard of rescued me from a quicksand of information I couldn't store and retrieve effectively, and from a quagmire of outliners, databases, contact managers, and calendars that couldn't help meShow full article

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Recently, an amazing program I'd never heard of rescued me from a quicksand of information I couldn't store and retrieve effectively, and from a quagmire of outliners, databases, contact managers, and calendars that couldn't help me. What's more, this program - on which I now rely totally - and about which I shall herein proceed to rave intemperately is currently free.

Looking for Trouble -- The problem started when I switched from academia to business, and my needs changed drastically. I no longer wanted to store and retrieve only text (lectures and facts) or simple sets of items. I now edit a magazine, and I need to track prospective articles and their authors.

Suppose John Doe sends me email with an idea for an article on programming the Mac's Widget Manager. [A fictional component of the Mac Toolbox - we hope. -Geoff] Under an outline topic "Proposed Articles" I would put a sub-topic "Doe, John" (to go with other authors who had proposed articles), and under that a sub-sub-topic "Widget Manager" (to go with anything else he might propose). I also wanted further information for each topic, so I used IN Control and added columns for an email address, a miscellaneous memo, and the date we had corresponded, ending up with something like this:

Topic                 Address           Memo         Date
-------------------   ---------------   ----------   --------
 Proposed Articles
   Doe, John          jdoe@netcom.com
     Widget Manager                     good idea!   1/4/96

But there's big inefficiency here: lots of empty space. After the outline (in the first column) I have three additional columns: address, memo, and date. Yet the address column is only used with the author's name, and I'm using the memo and date columns only with the article title, so there are gaps in the outline. This is ugly and error-prone: it's up to me, the user, to remember what each line represents, and to leave the address column blank after an article title.

Why such inefficiency? Because I'm trying to hierarchically arrange two different kinds of entities (three kinds, if you count the "Proposed Articles" header) where each kind has its own set of fields. But IN Control knows nothing of this.

Enter WebArranger -- WebArranger is really Arrange, a program produced by Common Knowledge Inc. during 1991-93 or so. I never heard of it then; but recently, CE Software picked it up, and until 16-Feb-96 is giving it away as a URL hoarder. They adapted it for this purpose using a plug-in module for talking to Netscape, importing its bookmark and history files, and tracking changes to Web sites. Ignoring the Web and URL features, though, WebArranger is at its core a miraculously ingenious program.

http://www.cesoft.com/webarranger/ waregform3.html

One caution: if you're like me, you won't understand WebArranger right away. It took me hours to grasp the basic metaphors and realize what was happening. If you can't find an old Arrange manual, you can download the Help file; it's quirky and outdated, but better than nothing. This article will help too, though the terms I'm using are not the official terminology (as I find the latter opaque and confusing).

ftp://ftp.cesoft.com/pub/Software/WebArranger/ Arrange_Help.sea.hqx

With WebArranger, you define entities you want to store, and each entity has its own set of fields. Then you can build an outline in which any topic or subtopic can be any of those entities. For my example above, I might define a Header entity, an Author entity, and an Article entity. To facilitate display and navigation of the outline, WebArranger uses a summary line where each entity occupies a single line built by WebArranger according to a format you define. When you click a summary line, the entity expands to show each field, labelled and arranged vertically. You can also double-click to expand the entity into a window of its own (to avoid shoving lines off screen). So, my outline now works like this (everything but the three summary lines - which I've marked with an asterisk - would usually be hidden):

 * Header [summary line, "Proposed articles"]
   Header name: Proposed Articles
    * Author [summary line, "John Doe"]
      First Name: John
      Last Name: Doe
      Email: jdoe@netcom.com
       * Article [summary line, "Widget Manager... 1/4/96"]
         Title: Widget Manager
         Comments: good idea!
         Date: 1/4/96

WebArranger builds on this metaphor of fields in entities in outlines, in ways so useful that my co-workers complain about my screaming "Yes!" and jumping from my chair with delight. To avoid repetitiveness, please imagine me saying "But wait! There's still more!" before each of the next several paragraphs.

To help you store massive amounts of information, WebArranger provides a second, higher tier of outlining. Every outline of entities - such as the one we've just constructed - lives in a sub-folder which lives in a folder; i.e., a two-level organizational outline. This organization is shown at the left edge of the window, and clicking a sub-folder displays its contents in the main part of the window. So, I can have a folder called Business with two sub-folders inside it, Articles and Authors.

One benefit of this organization is that one author can be associated with more than one article. To save you from needless multiplication of entities (let's hear it for Occam's Razor), WebArranger lets you clone any entity, which is like making an alias to it elsewhere in the document. All the clones are identical and changes made to one are instantly reflected in all of them. So I can clone my author, John Doe, into the Authors sub-folder, and use that sub-folder as a repository of clones of all authors. Then, if any existing author proposes another article, I can clone him or her from the Authors repository when I make my entry in Articles.

Let's make another change. WebArranger allows entities to have link fields. A link field contains one or more entities (letting you store an entity within an entity), and those entities can be clones. This lets me restructure my entities so that the Author, instead of being a separate line of the outline, appears as a field of the Article, like this:

 * Header [summary line, "Proposed articles"]
   Header name: Proposed Articles
    * Article [summary line, "Widget Manager... 1/4/96"]
      Title: Widget Manager
      Link field: * Author [summary line, "John Doe"]
                    First Name: John
                    Last Name: Doe
                    Email: jdoe@netcom.com
      Comments: good idea!
      Date: 1/4/96

Since a link field can contain any number of clones, this also solves the problem of articles having more than one author. In practice, it's also better to structure my fields in this way because link fields provide automatic look-up. If I create a new Article entity, a box pops up when I tab into its Author link field, where I type the last name of the author. The Author entity with that last name is then cloned automatically into the link field.

Conversely, to make my Authors sub-folder an effective repository of all Author entities, I can set it to auto-clone Author entities, any time an Author entity is created, a clone of it is automatically placed in the Authors sub-folder. Now, when I make a new Article entity and tab its Author link field and type the author's last name, if that Author entity already exists, it is automatically cloned into the Author link field (because the link field is set up to do this), and if not, I create it in the Author link field and it is automatically cloned into the Authors sub-folder (because the sub-folder is set up to do this).

All entities have certain "system fields" which are filled out automatically by WebArranger but are not shown unless you want them - for instance, the date and time this entity was created, and the date and time it was last modified. This feature is a godsend when you're using WebArranger as a contact manager. I've created an entity type called MemoDated, consisting of a text field and the entity's creation date. Each time an exchange about an article occurs, I make a new MemoDated entity and make it a subtopic to the article. This gives me dated records of the history of contacts concerning that article.

Queries and Views -- As you accumulate large amounts of data, you can query it in useful ways. One such way is to examine an outline using sorting and matching criteria. For instance, my auto-cloning Authors sub-folder grows in no particular order, but I generally want to look at it sorted by Last Name and First Name - and, on occasion I might add a matching criterion too, for instance looking at just those Authors who have no email address. A set of criteria for sorting and/or matching is called a View, and the rules for every View are automatically saved with the outline in a handy pop-up menu. A View shows either all the lines of the outline or just those which are of one specified entity type, and can combine this with a "table" structure where rows are entities and columns are fields (like a typical database browse window).

A View can also display as a calendar: you tell WebArranger what date field is relevant, and it puts the summary line for each entity into the right calendrical location. You can show a month at a time, a week at a time, or a day-book, and though there are some limitations the interface is remarkably flexible, in some ways beating even dedicated calendar programs like IN Control 3.5.

I can't possibly describe all of WebArranger's abilities here, so let me hasten through a brief concluding miscellany. There is a good Find feature which is remarkably fast. A Gather feature lets you collect clones of all entities that meet specified criteria. A Goto dialog lets you jump to a different sub-folder by typing the first few letters of its name. You can have multiple windows on a document. An Alarms feature turns any date field into an active reminder; WebArranger does not have to be open for the reminder to work (an extension handles it), and you can turn it off, "snooze" it for a specified time, or go to the corresponding item in your WebArranger document. A "grabber" control panel lets you copy the current selection in any program for later reference; again, WebArranger does not have to be open, and your "grabbed" items are imported into a designated home document the next time you open WebArranger.

Room to Grow -- There are things about WebArranger that could stand improvement. It's not for keeping large texts in (a field can hold a maximum of something like 10K). The outliner has deficient keyboard navigation. Certain actions have the side-effect of deselecting your current selection, which is counter-intuitive and causes you to lose your place. Also, export and printing are not great.

WebArranger is one of those programs that is picky about where you click. Clicking a summary line expands it, clicking its triangle shows or hides its sub-entities, and clicking its icon selects the entity itself. If you're like me, you're sure to miss much of the time.

Perhaps WebArranger's biggest flaw is when you want to examine the deep levels of entity types and field definitions. For instance, you can find out what a given sub-folder is auto-cloning (though not easily), but you can't find out in general what sub-folders are auto-cloning what sorts of entity. Similarly, you can learn all the names of all the fields used by all entities at once, but you can't find out what entity uses any particular field.

CE Software plans to make WebArranger part of a forthcoming DayVision product suite, but I wouldn't count on an interface improvement. Remember, this is CE, makers of QuicKeys (which offers a crummy interface to some pretty great software, although it's badly in need of an upgrade) and of QuickMail (which - in my opinion - is atrocious software with an interface that gets worse with each upgrade).

Nonetheless, the release of WebArranger as a freebie is a wonderful gift. This program saved my bacon when I needed to take notes on discussions I had at Macworld Expo, and is now my primary contact manager. The program makes large amounts and many sorts of data easy to arrange and navigate; in fact, you're tempted to keep your whole life in one gigantic document. If handing this program out for free is a hook to make me pay for a chain of upgrades, I'm a delighted addict.

CE Software -- 800/523-7638 -- 515/221-1801
515/221-2258 (fax) -- <sales@cesoft.com>

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For many years, FileMaker Pro has been one of my standard tools for storing and retrieving structured information: with FileMaker, it's easy to build yourself an address book or a guide to your music collection, and its thorough scriptability makes it splendid for exchanging data with other applicationsShow full article

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For many years, FileMaker Pro has been one of my standard tools for storing and retrieving structured information: with FileMaker, it's easy to build yourself an address book or a guide to your music collection, and its thorough scriptability makes it splendid for exchanging data with other applications. Version 3.0, dating from 1995, introduced relational database capabilities; but subsequent versions offered so little (and cost so much) that I never upgraded further. Then recently version 5, instead of improving core features, introduced some vastly higher pricing, and I wondered whether I hadn't backed the wrong horse.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/05576>

Around this time I learned, with surprise, that Odesta's Helix was still alive. I had used Helix briefly in 1991, but then lost track of it. Helix (soon re-dubbed Double Helix) had been one of the earliest Mac products, dating back to 1984. It was ahead of its time, but was sent down an unproductive development path - basically, much time and effort went into creating a VAX-based server for Helix, whereupon personal computers suddenly got faster and cheaper than a VAX would ever be (can you say Mac IIfx?) - and the company split up in 1992. The product was renamed again, as Helix Express, and more or less languished. Now it has been taken over by The Chip Merchant, which is run by a Helix enthusiast, and is being subjected to the nightmarish process of modernizing ancient legacy code, fixing memory leaks, and squashing bugs. Meanwhile, amazingly, the basic Helix product, now renamed Helix RADE (Rapid Application Development Environment), is free.

<http://www.helixtech.com/>
<http://www.helixtech.com/history.html>

In the Nucleus -- Helix RADE (I'll just call it Helix) is an environment for designing databases and then working with the data (inputting, viewing, querying and sorting, exporting, printing). The design process is unusually visual and object-based, revolving around icons and windows, in ways somewhat reminiscent of Prograph (see "Get Your Hands on Prograph" in TidBITS-312). The terminology is also rather quirky, so bear with me.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/01160>

A database file created by Helix, containing the database structure and the data, is called a "collection." Only one collection can be open at a time. It is represented initially as an empty window, into which you drag icons to represent relations; each relation is a table of data, where all the records (the rows) will consist of the same fields (the columns) - what FileMaker would call a database. Thus, a one-relation collection is a flat-file database; a two-or-more-relation collection can be a relational database, as I'll explain later.

Double-click a relation icon, and another empty window opens, into which you drag more icons. These are of many different types:

• A field is a category of data that each record is to have, such as "last name" or "age".

• An index is an instruction that a sorted order be maintained for one or more fields.

• An abacus is a calculation, such as "first name followed by space followed by last name".

• A template is like a FileMaker layout, where you arrange fields on the page.

• A view is like FileMaker's browse mode; it portrays some particular template, but is where you actually enter and view live data.

• A query is a form, attached to a view, which you can open to change what subset of the data is shown in that view.

• A post is an action to be performed automatically when you do something in a view, such as entering data; chiefly, it's a way of maintaining automatic integrity of data across relations. I'll talk more about this later.

Each icon, once dragged into a relation window, just sits there until you do something with it. First, you name it, just like naming a file in the Finder. Then you double-click it to open its window and edit it. In a field's window, you specify its data type and validation rules. In an index's window, you specify what field(s) to sort. In an abacus's window, you describe the desired calculation: this too is completely icon-based, as you drag icons representing operations and fields into the window and arrange them in a dataflow diagram. For example, to say "first name followed by space followed by last name", you drag in a "followed by" icon, then drag the "first name" field into its first part and set a space character as its second part; then you drag in a second "followed by" icon, feed the output arrow from the first one into the second's first part, and drag the "last name" field into its second part.

A template window starts out as a blank sheet of paper with some rectangle drawing tools. What you draw is crucial, because a view, you recall, is the only place where you enter or examine any actual data, and every view is a representation of some one template; so if you ever want to be able to set directly the value of a record's "last name" field, that field must appear in a template!

Templates come in two forms. A template showing fields for one record at a time is an entry template; in a view that uses an entry template, you navigate records via Next/Previous Record menu items. A template showing fields for all records at once is a list template, and is established by drawing a repeat rectangle around the data to be listed. For example, if you draw a repeat rectangle around the "last name" field in a template, then a view that uses this template will list the last name values for all the records at once. (By "all", I mean "all that this view shows"; you can limit or order the set of data shown, with a query or index attached to a view.)

A list template can appear within another template. For any view that uses the outer template, you specify a field in each template's relation; the inner template will then list only those records of its relation where the data of those two fields match. This is how you make your database relational. The display of the inner template material is extremely flexible, so that Helix's implementation of relationality is extremely powerful: for example, you can specify the sort order of the inner list; you can specify a query further limiting the inner list's records; and you can nest list templates, for additional layers of relationality.

Helix runs in two modes, developer mode and user mode. Developer mode is what I've been talking about all this time. In user mode, you see only certain views and menu items, and have only certain types of access to those views, as predetermined in developer mode. Surprisingly, this can be useful even if you are your only user; when you are done designing, it's nice to switch to user mode, eliminating extraneous windows, and just enter and retrieve your data.

Acid Test -- To test Helix for this review, I reproduced, as a Helix collection, the structure, data, and functionality of a system of related FileMaker databases that we used when I was editing a Mac programming magazine. This system had proven almost too much for FileMaker to handle, and I wanted to see if Helix could do better. I will now provide some gory details, so skip the next couple of paragraphs if you have a weak stomach.

The system tracked articles submitted and published, plus payments to authors. An article could comprise more than one "fragment" (for example, in our Readers Tips column, each tip was a fragment); so there were no authors of articles, only authors of fragments. And a fragment could have more than one author. So far, that's three databases: articles, fragments, authors. For every article, we needed a list of author-fragment-payment triplets. But how, in FileMaker, could a portal in the articles database show authors? Authors had no direct relationship to articles, and portals could not contain portals, or be limited through a query.

Our solution was an extra database, an intermediate "link" pairing fragments with authors (and payments). The articles database could have a portal on this fragment-author database; but how would it know which fragment-author pairs to list? Clearly, the article database's key must match an article key in the fragment-author database. But where would that key's value come from? There were no articles in the fragment-author database; articles were paired with fragments in the fragments database! So we forced each record in the fragment-author database to learn what article it was a part of, through a lookup on the fragments database.

This was just one of many complex portal/lookup tricks we used to hook up the information. The problem here was not the extra fragment-author database (that's standard procedure with many-to-many relationships), but the dreadful fragility of the data's integrity. Lookups in FileMaker were not live, so we had to keep running a script in the articles database that made the link database refresh its lookups. When creating a new article, tasks had to be performed in the right order, to ensure that the fragment-author database was updated correctly behind the scenes; despite precautions, it could easily acquire invalid records, and had to be double-checked often by hand.

The Helix version turned out to be far simpler and far more robust, and took me just two days to create after reading the documentation; it would have been much quicker for an expert. To list fragment-author pairs within a view of an article still requires the fragment-author relation, but in a much more straightforward way: an articles template holds a fragments list template, keying on the article, which in turn holds a fragment-author template, keying on the fragment. Integrity is maintained behind the scenes through a post: when you enter an author for a fragment in the fragments relation, Helix automatically creates a new record pairing them in the fragment-author relation - but only if they are not already paired.

The Helix version is also far more comprehensible to a developer. FileMaker hides crucial information in various modal dialogs: the Define Fields dialog and its Options sub-dialog, the Field Format dialog, the Portal Setup dialog, ScriptMaker and its Script Definition sub-dialog. In Helix, on the other hand, everything is a top-level entity, an icon in a window, and no icon window is modal, so you can open and study many at once - indeed, in an icon window you can double-click another icon's name to open that icon's window! You can view a relation window as a list (like Finder Name view), showing useful information about each icon. Each icon also has a Get Info window, where you can enter a comment and see the names of all icons that use this one. Finally, Helix prevents or warns you if you perform any invalidating action, such as trying to delete an icon used by another.

Helix derives great fluidity and power from the object-based independence of its entities. Consider calculations. In FileMaker, a calculation is basically a kind of field. In Helix, an abacus is just an abacus, and so you can use it however you like: it can provide data or validation for a field, a sort order for an index, a limiting query for a view or for a field entry pop-up menu. On the other hand, things that don't need to be entities, are not. In FileMaker, relationality between databases is one more setting to be reached through a series of dialogs; but Helix knows that this is just a way of looking at data, so it's merely an aspect of a particular view. The general feeling in FileMaker is that you start with a database and drill into it from various places to access its parts; in Helix, you start with the parts, and tie them together to form a database.

Under the Electron Microscope -- Helix is not for the faint of heart. The manual (fortunately due to be rewritten) is a massive series of PDFs, more a specification than an explanation: it has some typos, and the pictures are mostly indecipherable, a serious flaw for a visual language. It fails utterly to teach you the Helix way of thinking, the peculiar culture and tricks handed down by past masters. The learning curve is hyperbolically steep; either you'll suddenly have an "Aha" moment and pop past it, like bursting through a wall, or you'll fall off the mountain.

Helix still has some bugs - I crashed several times - and many faults. Revision continues, so some of these may soon vanish; but at present, the new user is likely to find Helix quirky and fossilized. Over the years, Helix has grown like Frankenstein's Monster; new bits were sewn on without touching old bits, many of which date back all the way to 1984 - and they feel like it, especially the interface, which incorporates no modern elements such as balloon help or tabbed panels.

Navigation is a big problem. There is no Window menu (a dreadful omission), no hierarchical outline view of your collection, and no way to navigate upwards (from an Index window to its containing Relation window, for example). So you spend most of your time lost; even if you can see an icon's name and open its window, you may not know what relation it is part of, so you have to drill down into every relation looking for it.

Certain crucial windows are incomprehensible unless you're very experienced or looking at the manual, and often present their information in a clumsy piecemeal fashion. The View Setup window, where you create the relationality between an outer and an inner template, is atrocious: the space is too narrow for the names you're trying to read, and if you add another inner template the dialog forgets all its previous settings.

You cannot edit data in a list view - though you can double-click a listed record (or multiple selected records) to open it in an entry view where you can edit. Inner lists don't scroll, or support multiple selection. On the other hand, list views support user-selectable sort orders, while entry views don't - a curious asymmetry.

Here's a final miscellany. You can only have eight colors. A multiple-choice field can't be represented as radio buttons. There aren't enough menu shortcuts, because the Command key is the only modifier. There is no way to learn which record of the current found set you're looking at. An abacus has no find-and-replace functionality, so sometimes you have to export your data, munge it, and re-import it.

Replication & Evolution -- Helix is internally scriptable, via menu items or buttons in views; but the only scriptable actions, besides opening views, are those normally available as menu items. That's very weak compared with FileMaker, but posts often make a script unnecessary, and buttons can implement a form of branching and looping, which scripts themselves lack.

Helix can't run AppleScript scripts, so any inter-application communication must originate externally. It responds, not to AppleScript, but to some rather oddly structured Apple events; you'll need a program like Frontier to send them. The repertoire is very limited - fetch a record, load a record, delete a record - but you could probably manage by arranging your database cleverly beforehand, perhaps with an occasional boost from QuicKeys or OneClick. So if the question is, "Can Helix act as a CGI application behind my Web server?" the answer is: Maybe, but not alone, and not easily.

I have not seen the commercial Helix products; there are two. Helix Converter ($500) turns your database into a stand-alone application (in permanent user mode). Helix Client/Server lets multiple users access a database via AppleTalk. It might be preferable for serious CGI work, and without it you can't run two copies of Helix on the same local network. It starts at $300 for two clients and goes up from there.

My exploration of Helix has certainly made me an addict, if not a convert. Once bug-squashing ends, the next big step will be a feature release. It isn't clear what this might include - a truly modern Helix might benefit from an overhauled interface, fuller scriptability, and TCP/IP and ODBC awareness - or what the future pricing model will be. But the present pricing model is unbeatable: a powerfully relational database program at no cost. You have nothing to lose but your dependence on FileMaker.

Helix requires a PowerPC-based Macintosh running System 7.5.5 or later.

<http://www.helixtech.com/download.html>

[Note: This article owes much to the generous personal attention and informative guidance of Matt Strange of Helix Technical Support.]

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Computers are marvelous at storage and retrieval of information, so why are some things so hard to keep track of? You probably know where you put the draft of your novel, or that letter to your congressmanShow full article

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Computers are marvelous at storage and retrieval of information, so why are some things so hard to keep track of? You probably know where you put the draft of your novel, or that letter to your congressman. I'm talking here about bits of information, like the list of things to do before your kid's birthday party, the patentable idea you thought of last week, or the questions you plan to ask your boss at tomorrow's meeting. You may have hundreds, even thousands of miscellaneous "snippets" or "nuggets" like this; what you need is a virtual shoe box into which to toss them as they arise, and somehow retrieve them later in an orderly fashion.

As a fan of computer-based organizational devices, I'm often asked to recommend a "snippet keeper" of this sort. When the question arose recently on TidBITS Talk, a clamor of recommendations resulted, showing how great the need is. Apart from the obvious outliners and databases such as I've discussed here in the past, people use a vast range of solutions: text-based low-tech utilities, dedicated snippet organizers, and even programs intended for something else, such as email. My own current favorite is Idea Keeper, by Glenn Berntson of Plum Island Software.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=872>
<http://www.plumisland.com/ideakeeper/>

What It Is -- Idea Keeper rests upon a brilliantly simple framework. The basis of organization is a folder on your hard disk; you can have many such folders, and you can easily switch among them, but only one can be open in Idea Keeper at any moment. The current folder's contents are displayed in Idea Keeper's Organizer Window as a two-level list: a column of "topics" and a column showing the "ideas" within the currently selected topic. Double-click an idea listing, and you see a word-processing window corresponding to it. Thus, your granular data (your snippets) consist of individual text windows; the three-level hierarchy of folder, topic, and idea which categorizes them; this organization is sufficient to give every snippet a meaningful place, but shallow enough to ensure convenience.

What You Can Store -- Ideas are text windows. But mere text isn't the only thing these windows can contain. You can style the text, and you can also save common style settings such as "Palatino 12 blue underlined" as templates that you can instantly apply to any text. For each paragraph, you can adjust line spacing, margins, indent, and alignment, and these settings can be saved as templates too. The text can contain inline pictures, and even sounds (indicated by an icon that you click to play the sound).

An idea can contain checkboxes, which you click to toggle their state; and you can have "alarm objects" that cause an alert to appear at a given date and time if Idea Keeper is running. Thus, a text window can become a to-do list, possibly with live reminders.

An idea can contain Web, FTP, and mail URLs; clicking one does the expected thing in the expected helper program (as determined by your Internet Config settings), so Idea Keeper can work as a bookmark program as well.

An idea can contain file references (aliases): click the reference to open the file from the Finder. Thus, Idea Keeper can help organize files on disk, and (more important) it needn't store something internally in order to contain it - a PDF, or a QuickTime movie file, can be a snippet, because an idea can hold a live reference to that file.

Finally, you can display any idea window as an outline. Idea Keeper's notion of outlining is rather primitive, reminding me of the rhinoceros depicted by Dürer, who has obviously never seen a real one (for example, reorganizing is clumsy and navigation is nonexistent); but it's improving and adds a valuable further level of hierarchical organization for the text, to-do items, URLs, or file references that the idea may contain.

<http://www.princeton.edu/~his291/Durer_ Rhino.html>

How You Can Store It -- Even the most capacious shoe box is useless if you can't find it, or if you can't get the lid off. Fortunately, you can enter information into Idea Keeper easily, and in many different ways.

Obviously, if an idea is open, you can type into it, or copy from another application, switch to Idea Keeper, and paste. Also, working within Idea Keeper, you can import a text file as an idea, or all the text files in a folder (each becomes an idea); you can also copy an entire topic from one folder into another. Idea Keeper can import Palm Database files as ideas, or as topics broken up into ideas according to their bookmarks. Pictures can be imported with automatic format conversion via QuickTime.

But you don't have to switch to Idea Keeper to move information into it; as long as Idea Keeper is running, a key-combination lets you grab the clipboard contents, or you can drag or paste into a tiny floating palette, without leaving the application in which you're working. Idea Keeper captures the material as a new idea. A dialog can appear asking what topic of the current folder to put the idea in, or you can just have the idea go into Idea Keeper's Clippings Window, a sort of global topic belonging to no folder - the point being that you can move the clippings window's ideas into actual topics later.

When text arrives into Idea Keeper, you may want some extra munging performed. You can strip extra spaces, extra return characters, linefeed characters, and email quote characters; Idea Keeper can perform any of these transformations automatically as the text arrives, or you can invoke them later to operate on selected text within an idea. Also, Idea Keeper can convert URLs to URL objects as the text arrives; this simplifies importing a browser bookmark file, or the results of a Sherlock search, as a series of live URLs.

How You Can Retrieve It -- Once material is in your shoe box, you obviously want to be able to get it back out again. If you're fairly conscientious in your organization, the folder/topic/idea hierarchy may well lead you directly to the desired snippet. But Idea Keeper also provides several ways of cutting through this hierarchy.

First, you can maintain a set of keywords, and apply one or more of them to any idea. Unfortunately, the entire keyword mechanism is disappointingly primitive: keywords are global, not specific to each folder; they are applied or inspected through a pop-up menu, which is a dreadful interface; and you can't do a boolean search - you can open those ideas to which some one keyword is applied, and that's all. Still, it's better than nothing.

Second, you can do a text search. You can either do a successive find or a global search; the latter displays a single window listing all ideas and objects (such as URLs) whose text matches your search. Unfortunately, there is no whole-word matching, so the results usually include a lot of undesired matches.

Finally, there's hypertext. This is one of Idea Keeper's best features. Within Idea 1, to make a link to Idea 2, drag Idea 2's listing from the organizer window into Idea 1. Or, to make a link to a specific locus within Idea 2, create an "anchor" at that point, and drag the anchor into Idea 1. Now you have a link in Idea 1 which, when clicked, jumps you to Idea 2. Furthermore, there is a "Back" command, so you can navigate via links and return, as in a Web browser. Thus, Idea Keeper encourages hypertextual organization and navigation. Unfortunately, these links work only within a folder. There is a device for linking between ideas in different folders: you can export an idea to the Finder as an alias file which you later drag into another idea. The result behaves like an idea link, but is actually a file link, and will break if the alias file is lost.

To share your snippets with others, you can export an idea as a text file, or a topic as a folder of text files, or multiple ideas as a single text file. For example, I wrote this review in Idea Keeper, then exported the whole folder as a single text file and opened it with Nisus Writer for final editing. (Unfortunately, some information was needlessly lost in this process; in particular, I had to go back and copy across the URLs individually.) Also, ideas or entire topics can be exported as Doc-formatted Palm files.

You can also export a document as a stand-alone application. What results is a folder of ideas embedded into a sort of read-only version of Idea Keeper; navigation by topic and by idea still works, as do hyperlinks and URLs. Thus, Idea Keeper becomes a tool for creating online documentation, rather like DOCMaker.

<http://www.hsv.tis.net/~greenmtn/docm1.html>

Finally, Idea Keeper is sufficiently scriptable that Apple events can query it and extract the text of ideas. This might be useful, for example, as a way to move Idea Keeper data directly into HyperCard or FileMaker while preserving the topic/idea structure.

Worth Trying -- Idea Keeper is a tremendously original program - so original that its unusual interface and non-standard behavior may create a bad initial impression. My advice: persist! Interface and behavior can be heavily customized to suit your expectations and needs, and after you've used Idea Keeper for a while, and have absorbed its paradigm and its quirks, you may come to see it, as I do, as proof that the Macintosh interface, so far from being exhausted, is capable of something new, refreshing, and powerful.

There are many aspects of this originality that I haven't even touched on in this review. There are brilliant toolbars, ingenious dialogs, extensive use of drag & drop, and immense online help (in the form of two Idea Keeper folders). This is a program that reflects deep concern for the needs of the user, and deep thought as to how best to meet them.

That's not to say that Idea Keeper is perfect. It is clearly the work of an amateur - a gifted, dedicated amateur, but an amateur nonetheless. In the course of preparing this review, I experienced crashes, freezes, and numerous interface misbehaviors. However, Glenn Berntson is extremely responsive and was quick to fix problems as I reported them. Indeed, it is partly for this reason that I suggest you try Idea Keeper: the more users it finds, the more testing it receives, the more suggestions are sent to its author, the better it will become. But of course the main reason I recommend Idea Keeper is that you just might like it enough to make it your snippet keeper. I certainly do.

Idea Keeper is a 2.6 MB download and requires 7 MB for installation; it prefers 12 MB of RAM. The program costs $30 shareware; the download is not disabled in any way.

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Remember the Roach Motel? "Roaches check in, but they don't check out." Now Boswell, from Copernican Technologies, Inc., wants to do the same for your text documentsShow full article

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Remember the Roach Motel? "Roaches check in, but they don't check out." Now Boswell, from Copernican Technologies, Inc., wants to do the same for your text documents. It's a text archiver; you put text snippets into it, and afterwards you access these snippets through lists that combine them in various ways, but you can never delete them, accidentally or otherwise.

<http://www.boswell.com/>

Why is this program called "Boswell?" Copernican says it's because it's easier to spell than "Amanuensis" (one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts). But James Boswell, who wrote the celebrated Life of Samuel Johnson, perhaps one of the greatest biographies of all time, was no one's amanuensis; he was a traveller, man-about-town, essayist, lawyer, laird, and ardent lover of intellectual and artistic achievement in that most intellectual and artistic of times and places, 18th century England. Through his frank and vivid journal, he is also one of the few historical figures one feels one understands intimately. Both the biography and the journal testify to the virtues of keeping good notes; Boswell the program wants to help you do the same.

<http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/ BLJ/>
<http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/ journal-selection.html>

Knowledge of the Second Kind -- "Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." - Samuel Johnson

Boswell creates a storage file on your hard disk, in 1 MB increments; into this file you will be placing snippets of text. A snippet can begin life within Boswell itself; you can type or paste text into the new snippet, and this text can be styled. Alternatively, you can import a text file, individually or by the folder.

Newly created or newly imported snippets reside in a kind of staging area. Here you can modify three fields: the body; the title; and a "comments" field. What you do at this point can be important, because later you'll be using keywords to search for snippets. The comments field is a particularly good place to enter these.

From the staging area, a snippet is placed into storage. At that point you are no longer able to edit it (although you can copy it, making a new editable snippet in the staging area). You also can't delete snippets from storage. There is no built-in way to browse the storage as a whole. Rather, you proceed to create lists of snippets.

These lists are just ways of viewing your data. A list may consist of any subset of your snippets, which can appear in any number of lists. Deleting a snippet from a list, or deleting an entire list, has no effect upon any snippets. But although they are just views, lists are not mere ephemera; they are the backbone of your work with Boswell. They persist until you explicitly delete them, and you are expected to give them useful names. At any time, you can see a list of all your lists, and open any of them. Clearly, the important question is: how does a snippet get into a list?

There are several ways. If you can see a snippet, a dialog lets you manage which lists should include it, or you can add it to one or more lists using drag & drop. A dialog lets you populate a list using search criteria. Also, you can associate certain keywords with certain lists and then tell Boswell to add a snippet automatically to any list that has any keywords contained in that snippet.

That's all there is to it. You make lists, and using them, you view your snippets. You can also copy and paste (or drag & drop) text from a snippet into another program; and you can export an entire list, meaning all the fields of all its snippets, as a single text file.

Paved with Good Intentions -- I disagree with the developers' assumptions and design decisions with regard to several aspects of Boswell:

• Boswell stores only text. However, most of the documents in my life are not text; they're PDFs, Internet Explorer Web archives, or Word documents. Why can't Boswell store aliases, or entire documents? It might not be able to search them, but at least it could archive them and organize them through keywords and lists.

• You can't delete a stored snippet. (In fact, you can't even delete an imported snippet from the staging area; it goes into storage eventually, willy nilly.) The developers seem to have a fixed idea that this is somehow one of Boswell's major attractions; their stubborn resistance to all efforts by the public to disabuse them of it has been most impressive. The trouble isn't just that your storage file keeps growing, but that it takes more work to avoid irrelevant material in a search. Other concerns that surfaced in TidBITS Talk include the worry of what happens if you accidentally feed Boswell a very large file, or what happens if some of the information in your Boswell file turns out to be highly sensitive.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkmsg=5627+ 5629+5640+5641>

• Keywords aren't really keywords. They aren't a feature attached to a snippet; they are just some of a snippet's text. For example, you can't distinguish "Adam" as a keyword from "Adam" as content, and a snippet containing "Adamant" would be seen as containing the keyword "Adam." Most important, this means that, since you can't edit a stored snippet, you can't set keywords for a stored snippet. Yet, while the snippet is still in the staging area, and editable, how can you be prescient enough to know what keywords you'll eventually want? Keyword decisions emerge from experience of usage and evolving needs, and you can get that experience only after storing the snippet, when it can't be modified.

• You can't add fields. This makes effective searching difficult. Without fields, for example, you can't distinguish readily between messages that mention Adam and messages from Adam.

Here's a miscellany of further flaws. When importing a file, styling is lost. A snippet must be less then 32K characters; there's nothing wrong with that, but when you import a folder of files, long files are truncated, not split, and you are not told which ones. There is no way to learn all the keywords associated with a given list - a serious oversight. Automatic keyword-based addition of a snippet to lists is too automatic: you can't "lock" a list, and there's no intermediate confirmation dialog, so Boswell can easily clutter your existing lists. Search criteria aren't saved, so there's no telling how a list was derived, and no way to reconstruct it if it gets messed up.

Finally, Boswell's interface is fairly non-standard. That's no crime; personally, I love an original interface, and Boswell's is quite pleasant, with some interesting use of drag & drop. But Boswell ignores even some of the most basic Mac conventions, such as the notion that you select things, then act upon them all; so, for example, you can't select just certain snippets and give them a particular tag or add a certain keyword to their comments. That's unnecessarily frustrating and inconvenient. The manual intimates that Boswell's developers are well aware that this is an unusual design decision, and implies that they gave it some thought. Well then, as with so much else about this program, they thought a lot, but they thought wrong.

The Butt End -- To James Boswell we owe our knowledge of Oliver Goldsmith's assessment of Samuel Johnson: you couldn't argue with him, because "when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it." In the case of Boswell the program, the "butt end" that knocks you down is the manual. Much have I travelled in the realms of jargon, but I never before saw so much misappropriation of terminology crowded into one place: "journal", "archive", "notebook", "entry", "library", "fluid", "frozen", "browser", "hub", "zip", "zap", "zip-zap", and more. It's all quite mind-numbing, rather unbelievable, and thoroughly unnecessary, since Boswell is a very simple program.

TidBITS readers know that I'm hugely sympathetic to, and practically obsessed with, information storage and retrieval utilities. And as a way of organizing data, Boswell's persistent lists are a brilliant and exciting device. Yet I can't quite envision what I'd use Boswell for. I wouldn't import my Eudora mail messages into it because Eudora itself is better at searching archived messages. I wouldn't use it as a contact or bibliography manager because it lacks fields. I wouldn't use it as a writing tool because snippets are unordered. I can imagine using Boswell to get a grip on miscellaneous notes, but I feel put off by the inability to delete - I wish I could use it to organize without also being forced to archive. On the whole, I still prefer a true database such as Helix, an outliner such as MORE, a field-based outliner such as IN Control or Web Arranger, a dedicated snippet organizer such as Idea Keeper, or even just good old HyperCard (doesn't anyone remember Mark Zimmerman's FreeText?). Still, if what it does is what you want done, Boswell has the inviting virtues of ease and simplicity; you'll have to decide for yourself whether the price tag cancels the invitation.

<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1196>
<http://www.his.com/~z/c/>

Boswell costs $130, and requires a PowerPC-based Macintosh running System 7.1.1 or higher. A demo is available as a 1.6 MB download.

<http://www.boswell.com/html/demo.html>

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Over the course of my relentless lifelong search for useful ways to squirrel away information on my computer, organize it, and find it again later, I've reported in TidBITS on various outliners, databases, writing tools, and combinations thereof that have appealed to me or that I hoped might appeal to meShow full article

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Over the course of my relentless lifelong search for useful ways to squirrel away information on my computer, organize it, and find it again later, I've reported in TidBITS on various outliners, databases, writing tools, and combinations thereof that have appealed to me or that I hoped might appeal to me. Whenever one of my reviews appears, I get email messages from readers telling me about some alternative program they like to use. Typically, I investigate these; if I find myself intrigued by the suggested program, I may report on it, but otherwise I generally remain silent, my rules being that TidBITS is first and foremost about the experiences of its contributors (rather than attempting to be comprehensive purely for the sake of completeness) and that TidBITS prefers to focus on the positive.

<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1196>

In this article, I'm going to break my rules by describing briefly three inexpensive "snippet keepers" - programs for storing miscellaneous bits of text - that don't particularly appeal to me, but that do strongly appeal to some TidBITS readers. Why would I do such a thing? Mostly because my tastes aren't everyone's. For example, I tend to like such things as multiple hierarchical levels of organization and scriptability; but many folks feel that simplicity is a chief virtue, and that fewer features are better. They want a program that does one thing well, is easy to use, and can be learned quickly, preferably without even reading the manual. These three programs meet that description; plus, they are all free to try and inexpensive to purchase. For each one, I'll try to give a sense of why I don't use it, not in order to imply that you shouldn't, but just to clarify my own biases. My purpose is a positive one - to let you know that these programs exist and might possibly interest you more than they do me.

StickyBrain 1.2.1 -- In Chronos's StickyBrain, each window is a note (a text snippet). These windows are modeled on those of the Stickies utility that comes with your Mac, which are themselves modeled on 3M's Post-it Notes. They have no scrollbars; they have a thin title bar that vanishes when the note isn't frontmost, a tiny L-shaped grow icon in the lower right corner, and a colored background. StickyBrain also lets you use a picture or texture as background, or you can escape the Post-it Notes look altogether and give a note an ordinary Platinum appearance. Unlike Stickies, a StickyBrain window is a full-fledged styled text editor.

StickyBrain lets you show and hide individual notes, and its chief organizational device for helping with this is the "category." You can create as many categories as you like, and you can assign default appearance features to each category (background color, text styling, initial text, initial size, and so on); a note will have its category's default features when it is created or when its category is changed. You're also free to override these for any particular note. You can show just the notes of any one category; and you can use a list of all your notes to show any particular note.

Through a supplementary background application called HotKey, you can use key combinations to access certain StickyBrain features from within other applications, even when StickyBrain isn't running. A category's key combination copies the current selection into it as a new note; a note's key combination pastes its contents into the current application.

There are also numerous special features, many of them remarkably similar to Idea Keeper, which I reviewed a bit over a year ago. You can password protect a note, and a note can include an alarm. A note can include an email address that will create a new message in your email program, a URL that will navigate in your browser, or a file alias that will launch the file. A note can include boxes that you can click to show or hide a check mark, making a to-do list. You can search and replace text, across multiple notes if you like. There's even inline spell-checking.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/05931>

StickyBrain is certainly full-featured, but to me, Stickies themselves have always seemed a dreadful metaphor, with the no-scrollbar window being the worst possible editing milieu; Post-it Notes are just clutter, and even though you can change the window style to the more standard Platinum appearance, the fundamental StickyBrain action of summoning simultaneously all the notes of one category feels like clutter on steroids. StickyBrain's background features depend purely on key combinations which can rapidly grow too numerous to be useful. There's no export feature, and your information lives all in a single file in a proprietary format; what if this became corrupted? Still, many readers swear by StickyBrain, so it might be your cup of tea as well.

The $35 Sticky Brain runs on any Mac with Mac OS 8.1 or higher, and requires 5 MB of RAM, 5 MB of disk space, and a 640 by 480 screen or larger.

<http://www.chronosnet.com/>

EZNote 2.01 -- John Holder's EZNote used to be a control panel with a rather modal interface, but now it's an ordinary application permitting multiple windows, which is much nicer. It maintains snippets of styled text as files within folders; these folders are treated as categories, with the text files within them treated as notes, and everything lives inside a main folder you designate. In fact, you can browse your whole hard disk with EZNote and create or examine the contents of folders anywhere (any file of type TEXT will be seen as a note). However, EZNote sees only the top-level folders of its designated main folder as categories, and it works with them in a special way. For example, you can navigate instantly to a category, transfer a note to a category, and so forth.

An EZNote window consists of a browser pane and an editing pane. The browser pane, on the left, lists in a column all the folders and text files in the current folder. Selecting a text file's name in the browser pane displays its contents in the editing pane. You get the standard basic behaviors for styled editing, plus you can have named text styles. You can search and replace, across multiple notes if you like. A number of plug-ins let you munge selected text in various ways (change case, strip linefeeds, strip HTML tags, that sort of thing). Switching to a different text file listing in the browser automatically saves the current file.

EZNote works well as a background application, through keyboard shortcuts that you can configure, or through a floating palette that appears anywhere. The floating palette offers less functionality than the keyboard shortcuts provide, but it does solve a major problem that StickyBrain doesn't: with no shortcut at all, you can designate the category in which to create a new note from the current selection, or choose any note from any category to paste at the current insertion point. EZNote thus implements multiple styled-text clipboards, and is great for boilerplate that you need to paste often. You can also run a plug-in on the selected text. Conversely, within EZNote, you can create a new note from the clipboard, and you can paste the selection into any running application.

EZNote has a few shortcomings. You can't export multiple notes (though you can append each note to a single note first, and export that). You can't delete a category (but you can delete the folder itself, in the Finder). And I personally consider the save-without-asking behavior dangerous. On the other hand, in my view, EZNote's interface, though some details are slightly clumsy, is vastly better than StickyBrain's, and there is certainly much comfort in keeping your snippets in a plain text file. If you don't need StickyBrain's visual fluff (like background textures) or its extra features (like spell-checking, to-do boxes, or file aliases), I think EZNote is, hands down, a better choice.

EZNote runs on any Mac with System 7 or higher, needs only 2 MB of RAM and less than 2 MB of hard disk, and costs a mere $20 shareware. While you're visiting the author's Web site you might want to look into his other utilities; if what you really wanted was multiple clipboards, or if you want to store more than text, his QuickScrap control panel and ScrapIt Pro application are well worth considering.

<http://www.northcoast.com/~jvholder/ ezndesc.html>

Z-Write 1.2.1 -- The window of Stone Table Software's Z-Write is remarkably similar to EZNote's: a list of notes runs down the left side, and clicking a note's name brings up the note's content for editing in the right side. Like EZNote, you're editing styled text, and you can create named styles; and like EZNote, there's a miscellany of text-munging features, such as changing case, eliminating multiple spaces, and so forth. However, Z-Write has no categories; instead, it has documents, and what you're seeing are all the notes in a document. What's special about Z-Write is that it's intended as a writing tool; so you can rearrange the notes (which Z-Write calls "sections"), drag entire notes from one document to another, and export selected notes as styled