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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: May 19, 2006, 08:30 PM »

Here's few more specific responses:

Thanks for the Eclipse link, Jimdoria.  The name sounds familiar in this context, but I don't remember specifically what it was.  I'll be checking that out.

Superboyac:

--How do you deal with notes you wish to keep private, or only accessed by password?  If each note is a separate file, wouldn't someone be able to look at it any time, without the use of a program?

With this approach to organizing I don't think the Virtual File Manager would be responsible for that.  If a file you accessed through it was otherwise password protected (ie: by Windows, or a compression/encryption application) you would be prompted by the OS or the associated program for the password.  A feature of the VFM could be to keep such files open as long as you were using the file manager so that you wouldn't need to re-enter the password every time you switched away from and back to the same note.  If you wanted a whole bunch of files to be password protected you could just store them on an encrypted drive instead.

--What do you do about captured content?  Like Surfulater, which can capture content from webpages and other applications...how do you incorporate that into a format where each note is a seperate file?

There are already a number of web capture programs that save web pages as HTML and their associated files directly into a Windows directory rather than into a database.  The Firefox Extension- Scrapbook for one.  The VFM would work with these files.

Nevf:

In my opinion you are better all around to a) maintain (auto) synchronized copies of your external files within the database,..

I think this solves the key problem of how to search file content and your added metadata simultaneously- and this is probably where my idea breaks down.  On the other hand, as far as I can see, the problem of tracking external files still exists- only now it's for the purpose of syncing the internal copies with the external files.

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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: May 19, 2006, 02:39 AM »

Rover brought up the point I left out in my first post- search.  A virtual file manager on its own doesn't fully replicate the most important features of note software, something very much like a desktop search program is needed too.  I don't know whether any existing ones could be recruited to do the job or not, and I think this is probably the greatest weakness of this approach to building the Ultimate Note Software.  Those who know please correct me if I'm wrong, but my guess is that making an arrangeable tree with links to files on the disk is the easy part (by comparison) and that developing an indexing desktop search engine along the lines of Google's is a pretty big undertaking.

Rover also mentioned that the way to make this work is to associate new attributes with existing files.  And like JimDoria says, since Windows is quite limited here we need to store and link these attributes ourselves.  This is where I wonder whether GDS could do the job: we need some way to connect the attributes/metadata we add in our virtual file manager with the files concerned and base our searches on both.  Is anyone here familiar enough with the GDS API and this sort of problem in general to comment on the possibility?

If we have an indexing search application that can work closely with the Virtual File Manager, this should help some with the with the file tracking problem mentioned previously.  With the indexer monitoring when files are moved, added, deleted etc, this info becomes available to the VFM too.  The chief problem I see is knowing with certainty which files are which.  (I'm getting seriously out of my depth here so please blow the whistle whenever you care to! ) - As far as I know there are no entirely unique file identifiers in the Windows file system.  So what we are left with are attributes like filename, size, location, creation dates, access dates, etc, most of which can change.  With these alone it is probably not going to be possible 100 percent of the time to maintain links between the metadata in the VFM and the files concerned.  Still, it will be better than no tracking whatsoever.

So what do you think?  If we had both a virtual file manager and a closely cooperating search application, do you think it would float?

And now for the hard part! - Is something like this doable by mere mortals, or does it take a Google or a Microsoft?

More coming...

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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: May 19, 2006, 02:18 AM »

Hi, thanks for your comments.  I agree, the file-system-as-back-end approach has many limitations.  With current Windows (I don't know a lot about other operating systems) there are missing pieces that make implementing something like this more difficult and less satisfactory.  It's interesting that the future Windows file system, (the one they left out of Vista) seems to be moving much more in the direction of a database with a virtual approach to organizing files (so Rover, I think your idea of a better OS is coming).  OS X already has hints of this with its Smartfolders, and probably other aspects as well.  It seems that future OS's will be much more like PIMs.

Like Jimdoria and Nevf point out, one of the biggest issues with trying this now is keeping track of files when they are moved from their original locations.  Keynote certainly has this problem.  One slightly mitigating factor is that if the Virtual File Manager (let's give it a name) is the chief way you organize your files, then their actual location in the file system becomes less important and there is less need to move them.  I have other ideas too- more later.

As for moving the data or syncing it between computers, I wonder if this is as difficult as it seems.  There are currently lots of ways of syncing a set of files from one place to another- consider backup schemes for example.  If the Virtual File Manager stored the locations of the files you were organizing within it then it should be possible to use that info to copy or move those files elsewhere.

The issue of which capabilities to include in the viewer/editor is one of the most difficult.  Overdo it and you create so much bulk and slow things down to the point that using the original applications is less trouble.  Under-do it and you are constantly switching to the original applications to do what you can't do in the viewer, so you might as well just use them anyway.  Exactly which capabilities are needed depends on the user, so an approach similar to Extensions in Firefox might be a good way to go about it.  This way each person can decide what is useful for them and what trade-offs are worth making.

I think there are definitely benefits to being able to work on files directly within the managing application.  If not we wouldn't bother with note applications, we would just use the Windows Explorer to arrange a bunch of text files or whatever.  For me the key benefits are speed and avoiding the distractions of switching contexts.  A single interface with my data and the tools I need all at my fingertips is a so much more efficient way of working.

This is getting pretty long, so I'll continue my comments in another post.

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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: May 16, 2006, 08:38 PM »

Hi, I'm new here.  I guess you can see that this is my first post ever to these forums.  I joined because this thread is one I've been looking for, for years.

In describing the Ultimate Note Taking Software several people have been talking about a database engine with a really flexible front end that can be whatever anyone wants it to be (sorry, I know that's over-simplified).  I agree that in many respects this would be my dream software as well.  However, having used Keynote for the past year and a half I have found another approach also growing in my mind.

One interesting feature of Keynote that few other programs have implemented in quite the same way is its virtual nodes.  In Keynote's implementation it is possible for a node on the tree to be a text or rtf file completely separate from the Keynote file itself.  It took me awhile to find a use for this, but now that I have discovered its usefulness it is gradually becoming one of the most important features.  The key benefit is that it offers instant interoperability with other programs without the need for importing or exporting- the content is right there to be accessed.

This has led me in a different direction in thinking about the design of The Ultimate- something a bit more like a virtualizing explorer/viewer program.  Instead of creating a database and bringing whatever I wanted into it, let the file system be that database and use the program to impose whatever forms of order upon it I saw fit.

The key point would be that whatever organizing I did with my data, this would have no effect whatsoever on the actual organization of the files on my hard disk.  An example would be like if the Windows Explorer filetree were completely virtual, and I could shuffle the files and folders around to my heart's content without anything being copied or moved.  Moreover I could save a variety of alternative filetrees and switch between them.  Each would simply be a 'view' I built with a particular organization of a particular set of files I chose to include.  The organizational data would be saved in a file separate from the actual data files being organized.

Of course this would not be a worthy notes program unless it also offered instant access to the files being organized.  For this it would need a editor/viewer pane that instantly opened a selected file without the need to start up an associated application- probably easiest for things like text, rtf and HTML.  New files would also need to be able to be created from within the program.

These are incomplete thoughts still rolling around in my head, but I thought I would throw them out for your consideration.