Sitting in on the Jam
I fear I may have opened a can of worms: I forwarded this article to my teenage daughter, who plays the sax, drums, and guitar. Now, I’ll have to keep the CD-Rs locked up.
—John Hinds
Panther Little Black Book Review
I was going to publish a review of this book for Apple-X, but never got around to it. Honestly, I didn’t find it all that useful, but then again, I’ve been using Unix variants for years and Mac OS X since it was in beta. This book isn’t going to appeal to any power users.
That aside, I think this is a very handy book for those who are not power users. It contains a lot of decent information and, for those not familiar with the “black book” style books this publisher releases, they are very much aimed at helping with tasks. Each chapter has a decent overview at the beginning and then launches into a list of common problems/needs/actions and solutions.
—Dave Giffin
Cloning Mac OS 9
Cloning Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X by creating a universal bootable CD or an emergency FireWire drive has been extensively covered (with diagrams and step-by-step info) in my new e-book, Fix a Troubled Mac.
—dirtymouse
Thanks for that link. I’ll be sure to pass that information on to anyone interested in such topics. I have already checked out the link and will be parting with some cash soon. If the book is as well written as your articles are the price is more than reasonable. —Sylvester Roque
Outliners: NoteTaker and NoteBook
Thanks for the columns. I posted a comment back to 9.12 back in December saying that this series was perfect timing for me, and I haven’t been disappointed (although I’ve yet to find the perfect application for me).
The notebook metaphors employed by NoteTaker and NoteBook seem terribly restrictive to me. Both implementations are very ugly too.
I think it would be extremely useful for you to mention changes to applications in the outliner zoo as they are made. The number of applications in bewildering, and a lot of them are in very active development. That would really help a lot of us.
—Michael Williams
A column on outliner changes was slated for this issue, but it had to be postponed due to a hardware failure. ATPO will return next month. —Michael Tsai
• • •
I wonder what NoteTaker does with a post-parental enter command. Is this maybe an acid test for thoughtful design? On Windows, Word idiotically inserts another parent which adopts the disinherited children. OneNote carries over this irrational behavior. NoteMap gets it right, as does ADM.
ADM, by the way, implements outlines of outlines in a consistent fashion so that the same outlining commands apply throughout. (These commands, moreover, include cloning, an innovative double hoist command, mark and gather, and a new way of mass-migrating headings.) But you aren’t the only person ignoring ADM. Its developer could be another.
Thank you for the article—for me, the most thought-provoking one yet.
—Stephen Diamond
• • •
Firstly, thanks for a most informative article. I would like to draw attention to InfoSelect from Micrologic. I was using this whilst confined to the Windows tedium. It was the one product that made me want to hang onto my PC. Its strength was the heuristic search capability. To me, the most important feature of these new free form databases is the ability to find the stuff that you carelessly throw in. I don’t want to have to think about tagging and labelling info. I will never remember how to find it again. The power is in the search and find abilities of these tools. Your review seemed more interested in input rather than output. Does anyone know of an OS X application that has the abilities of InfoSelect (Micrologic won’t write for Mac)?
—Darren Eger
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Reader Comments (2)
My knowledge of InfoSelect is second hand, but as I understand its real time search capability, the OS X program Hog Bay Notebook has it and seems designed around a method of working like Darren Eger describes.
Tinderbox, if you try to use it to the limits of its capacity, has a pretty formidable learning curve and is not a poor man's game - it's sale priced at the moment at "only" $95 [www.eastgate.com], but it is a remarkably powerful application and quite flexible. Ted wrote about it at some length in the series (speaking of which, it's too bad that we missed another installment - that's three passes since the series started [two equipment problem misses and the not-very-substantive April Fool's Day parody] makes me realize how attached to it I've become.
Darren, I'd suggest reading the back issues of Ted's articles posted on the ATPM web site and focusing in on Tinderbox and DevonThink. You can download trial versions of each. I downloaded my trial version of TB about a year ago and it was lamed a little, but still functional enough to give me an idea of what it could do and I bought it. The DevonThink trial seemed unlimited and does not, I think, have an expiration date. I didn't wind up using it but I think my evaluation copy is still working.
Good luck. (should we setting up a hardware fund for either Ted or ATPM?)
Stephen
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