TidBITS examines information storage and retrieval utilities
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Storyspace, the long-standing hypertext application from Eastgate Systems, was the first program I ever reviewed for TidBITS, and I described a new version of it last year
What's in your digital shoebox? You know, the place where you stash those pesky snippets of pure text, be they a few words or many paragraphs, snippets that you know you'll need later but you just can't categorize
In our perpetual journey towards better ways of storing and retrieving information, a simple text-snippet keeper like iData Pro, discussed in TidBITS-675, was merely a side trip to a simple, restful pool
Back in 2001, after I'd written several TidBITS articles about intriguing ways to store and retrieve information on your Mac, a number of readers attempted to impress upon me that for some folks, simpler is better
In case you've forgotten what a snippet keeper is or why you might need one, here's a case in point. Last week, a note appeared on TidBITS Talk, containing three URLs pointing to Web pages with information I found especially valuable
Normally, Matt Neuburg looks at all the text management and snippet keeping utilities for TidBITS, but back when AquaMinds' NoteTaker and Circus Ponies' NoteBook were coming out, he dove into NoteTaker (see "Take Note of NoteTaker" in TidBITS-677) and I opted to take a look at NoteBook
After a long beta period (and a name change), TAO 1.0 has finally been released. In the immortal words of Calvin (from "Calvin and Hobbes"): "This is so exciting I have to go to the bathroom!"
TAO is an outliner - a writing space for working with items of styled text arranged hierarchically
The world is not a tidy place. That's why I'm constantly discovering new and interesting ways to store and retrieve information on my computer. Typically, those ways involve imposing order through hierarchical arrangement, or retrieval through sophisticated searching: I'm drawn to outlines, databases, keywords, indexes