Note: Hog Bay Notebook: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

July 06, 2004

Note: Hog Bay Notebook

Hog Bay Notebook is, in many ways, a very nice program. Some other more powerful note-taking programs with more features have the unfortunate "feature" of causing my cute little laptop with its measly 640MB of memory to thrash in a most painful fashion. (Get more memory! Get a bigger laptop! But I like my little laptop--it's so small and light that I do find myself taking it almost everywhere, and thus it is useful in a way that other, bigger laptops that get left behind are not. Besides, why would anyone ever need more than 640MB of memory?)

But Hog Bay Notebook would be a good deal more useful to me if it could do one-click importation of text and graphics from .pdf files as it does from .doc and .html files...

Posted by DeLong at July 6, 2004 12:05 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this post

Comments

Brad,

If you have the full version of adobe acrobat, you can export the pdf just the text or just graphics to other files. And then import them.

Posted by: laddy on July 6, 2004 12:11 PM

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So, what exactly is note-taking software, and what are some examples for windows? It sounds like something that allows one to capture parts of files, take notes, organize them intuitively, etc. Perhaps like a suped-up version of procite? It sounds like something I'd be interested in, but I haven't seen a good description / example. Any advice? thanks

Posted by: albert j on July 6, 2004 12:17 PM

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Just to echo what is said above, is there any such software for PC users?

Posted by: Jerol on July 6, 2004 12:29 PM

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And to create an echo chamber...

I've been waiting patiently for Tinderbox to come out with its Windows version, but I've about given up.

Just what _is_ there for windows users (aside from migrating to Mac...)?

Posted by: Rich on July 6, 2004 01:27 PM

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Hogbay lists a Windoz product from a "partner": Notelens. http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/notelens.shtml

I have no idea how good it is, having been a Mac fan from the outset . . . .

Posted by: Robert on July 6, 2004 02:37 PM

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Hogbay lists a Windoz product from a "partner": Notelens. http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/notelens.shtml

I have no idea how good it is, having been a Mac fan from the outset . . . .

Posted by: Robert on July 6, 2004 02:39 PM

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Check out DEVONthink and note, too. I switched from HBNBk and love it. In-note PDF's, surfing, auto-concordance, ranked search, etc...

Posted by: borducks on July 6, 2004 02:42 PM

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Alas! DEVONthink is one of the things that makes my laptop thrash...

Posted by: Brad DeLong on July 6, 2004 03:05 PM

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The new iBooks aren't limited to 640Mb of RAM. (They're limited to 1.25 GB)

The obvious solution to running Hog Bay is... A new iBook!

Posted by: 16 on July 6, 2004 06:13 PM

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Try Infoselect, a great program for sorting out data, all types of files (well I haven't tried pdf) in research.

Posted by: paulo on July 6, 2004 06:29 PM

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I'm a pre-cambrian. I just set up a data base and put in link-words that identify the stuff in my files. It's old fashioned, but then I grew up shuffling note cards, and it's a lot better than that.

Posted by: Knut Wicksell on July 6, 2004 06:42 PM

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Brainstorm is a software developed in Britain that takes files, notes, etc. and cross links them into searchable file units. It was designed for journalists, writers, and other creative types. The trial is free and it isn't a huge download. Brainstorm.com I think. Procite was a disappointment, and when I need to organize data in some fashion some combination of Excel and Access usually works. Procite is okay for bibliographic references but it seems to puke when you make annotated bibliographies, on a variety of systems. And it is done for now, bought out I think.

Posted by: E on July 6, 2004 11:16 PM

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The smartest purchase for any Mac laptop owner? Memory. Max out your RAM. And don't buy it from Apple.

I'm guessing that the 'who would need more...' line is tongue-in-cheek, given that it's 'famous last words' from so many technologists. My first PC (1997) had a 2GB hard drive and 32Mb of RAM. I'm up to 400Gb and 1Gb respectively now. (And my iBook has 80Gb/768Mb.)

Posted by: nick on July 7, 2004 01:02 AM

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Well, my first pc had 640K of RAM and what I would have given for a 10MB hard drive. Brad's joke is, of course, in reference to Bill Gate's supposed comment that no one would ever need more than 640k of RAM.

Posted by: Jeff on July 7, 2004 06:00 AM

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As programs get bigger and badder, it makes sense that the PC must keep up, but it sure gets expensive with all these upgrades... more memory, better video card, bigger HD, faster CPU.

Posted by: Kim on July 7, 2004 07:05 AM

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There's a fairly fresh discussion of info organizers on Macintouch:

http://www.macintouch.com/organizers.html

Posted by: Blue on July 7, 2004 07:42 AM

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The main reason we need 4GIGHz processors, 640MB of memory and 100GIG drives is that the software continues to get more and more bloated and therefore slower and slower.

WP 5.1 came on less than 10 diskettes and that had to include printer drivers. WP 10 or Microserf Word takes up much of a CD and does not really have significantly more functionality.

Posted by: ____league on July 7, 2004 09:20 AM

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1 word: (X)EMACS

Posted by: CSTAR on July 7, 2004 11:00 AM

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_____league: WP 5.1 came on less than 10 diskettes and that had to include printer drivers. WP 10 or Microserf Word takes up much of a CD and does not really have significantly more functionality.

Than WP5.1? Er, yes, they have significantly more functionality. Whether its functionality you, in particular, use or need is another issue.

Posted by: cmdicely on July 7, 2004 11:04 AM

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in response to E:

Actually the site is brainstormsw.com. It's Windows-only so it's no good to a mac user, but if someone wanted to check it out there's the URL.

cheers,
dt

Posted by: dt on July 7, 2004 12:27 PM

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> The main reason we need 4GIGHz processors, 640MB of memory and 100GIG drives is that the software continues to get more and more bloated and therefore slower and slower.

Well, to some extent. But not really. The biggest motivators for hardware upgrades are OS manufacturers and games producers. And while today's office software runs perfectly well on last year's hardware, today's home computer is used to rip CDs, do photo-editing, and other things that would have been the domain of the high-end Mac people in the mid-90s.

You have to admit that the feature sets that most people demanded from home/office computers, say, ten years ago are not that dissimilar from the feature sets now demanded from a PIM or a smartphone. And that a program built to handles your entire research library in a freeform database is a bit different from WordPerfect for DOS.

Posted by: nick on July 7, 2004 12:53 PM

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Ahhh. . . the beginnings of bloatware! The users request just one more feature!

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