Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

VoodooPad is deceptively powerful and elegant.

I thought it was bad enough that I waste time making to-do lists. Now I can waste time making lists of to-do list applications.

I've tried about 85% of the list. (I'm a junkie for this kind of software.)

I use:

- DEVONthink (as my place for all clippings)
- Hog Bay Notebook (as my place for writing / organizing projects)

I respect but don't use (because the above two meet my needs more completely):

- VoodooPad
- Tinderbox
- iOrganize
- Alepin

Wow - thanks! I've been looking for an organizing tool, now I can take the rounding-up the options step off the list.

I did check out Tinderbox, but found the demo too limiting to figure out if it would be useful for me.

the list looks longer, what with tinderbox and boswell being repeated. Pretty ironic, isn't it, that they cannot organize the organizer's list?

Anyone know of a similar list for us poor PC users?

Anyone know which (if any) of these have Palm versions, or can sync with a similar Palm app?

I finally migrated off Agenda (which requires a VirtualPC purchase, making it a rather expensive piece of free software), and installed a PHP webforum on my iBook, giving me a good free-form method of entering, storing, and querying research data. Now it looks like I may end up exporting all *that* data and moving it to Boswell. (Thanks, Brad!) At least my survey datasets are safe -- using that term advisedly -- in MySQL.

Perhaps I should just store all my data in XML from now on.

The Mac definitely has an abundance of riches when it comes to information tools for writers. There's no one perfect tool, but you could spend a lifetime testing these out.

The only trouble comes from the fact that the tools which are, at first, most user-friendly, often only show their limitations later on; the ones that have the most power (Tinderbox, for instance) have a fairly steep learning curve, so that one has to devote some time and effort to exploit their potential.

Giles Turnbull has written fairly widely about 'outboard brains'. I'm still looking for the one true snippet organiser, though. It has to be fast, have a free-text search, have a degree of structure (for my quotation/citations) and not be confined to a data format that, should I decide to change, holds my data hostage.

And the funny thing is that the weblog is probably the best, though least suited, tool of all.

(I like Notational Velocity, btw.)

Thanks for this great resource -- i'll be checking out those which offer classic versions since I'm still using 9.2.x

There's also NotePod for both classic & OSX
http://personalpages.tds.net/~graffix/software/mac.html

ecpepper, for the PC try:

http://www.netsnippets.com/

I found it quite good.

I've looked at about two-thirds of the shareware on this list together with OmniOutliner and another not mentioned, Project HQ (available at http://www.ttpsoftware.com/).

The ones I use are

VoodooPad (for its wikilinks and implementation of OSX text-editing; very clean interface)

DEVONthink (for its ability to import and index PDFs, though with more than a hundred or so it starts to slow down)

MacJournal (where I keep a few notes, mostly because I like the interface and the text-editing, which is as good as VoodooPad's -- the "styles" that both of them allow you to create are system-wide, which is good if you want uniformity across applications, bad if you use lots of special-purpose styles that vary from one to another)

These are all useful, each in its own way. I tend to think that attempting to be useful for every purpose that people might have when they organize their stuff makes for big badly designed programs. With enough memory (I have 1Gig on a G4 Powerbook) you can run several and get the benefits of all.

ProjectHQ, which I haven't used much, looks like it might do well with information gathered with some particular purpose in mind (as its name implies).

I should add that for collections of little pieces of related but unstructured info (e.g. bibliographical entries, software registrations) I use a couple of files in Tex-Edit that are opened at startup. This even though Tex-Edit is behind the times with its text-editing and flaky in its unicode implementation (but it has the best Applescript library). Virtually every other way of doing this requires you to think about where it's going in an outline or set of linked notes (as in Voodoopad); for stuff of this sort it isn't convenient or necessary. Styled text plus grep find does the job nicely, and Tex-Edit is also good for cleaning up stuff copied from web pages & email (for that I also use TextSoap).

One other useful item is CopyPaste, which extends the clipboard but can also serve as a repository fro snippets. Its text-editor has some nice features, too -- it lets you extract in one step all the URLs from a document, or all the words containing a given string, or all the anagrams of 'lizard', and then sort them in various ways. Lots of cleanup operations too.

Scaligerius,

I've also tried Project HQ. It has a much better concept than it does execution. It's kinda useless in practise, IMHO.

Tex-Edit does indeed have a kickass AppleScript library. But if that's something that is useful for you, then Microsoft Word deserves a long look. It has about 5 different scripting languages available, including a brand new AppleScript library for the '04 version. And it can script and customize pretty much anything you can imagine.

---

nick,

"I'm still looking for the one true snippet organiser, though. It has to be fast, have a free-text search, have a degree of structure (for my quotation/citations) and not be confined to a data format that, should I decide to change, holds my data hostage."

DEVONthink is the answer.

For the PC, John Redmond has a good if somewhat dated review at http://john.redmood.com/organizers.html.

I'm still looking for the perfect combination. In the meantime, my choices:
Single pane outliner: tkoutline
Multiple pane outliner: keynote
Save webpages: Surfsave or Mybase (but they don't work with Mozilla/firefox).
To do list: Tasks (PHP/MYSQL)
Random info storage: a private wiki configured to accept html.

Nice to a see such an "embarrasment of riches" for the Mac. PC users, come and see the light!

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