Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free . . .
--Bruce Springsteen
“Thunder Road”
The holidays are finally over and once more I’ve miraculously survived. True to tradition, the year-end celebrations often had dodge-ball dynamics. This time, however, I somehow managed to miss the commemorative Last Standing tee-shirts. They must have been handed out when I was in the middle of that six-hour drive to Philadelphia (usually a tad over two hours at my admittedly lawbreaking pace). Or while I was doing that weird Kramer dance around the strewn pieces of my nephew’s new Transformer army. Or maybe as I swarmed Fresh Fields with the rest of the free-range crowd on a kamikaze mission to pick up the turkey (no, wait--that was Thanksgiving; or was it?).
In retrospect, I’m actually thinking of pitching Fox on making The Holidays the premise of next season’s 24: Kiefer Sutherland racing against time, grappling with last-minute shopping, running out of wrapping paper, et. al. As an elevator pitch, I actually think it’s quite compelling . . .
But as usual, I digress. With all the festive horror behind us, it’s once again time to get down and geeky with all the blog-ish things you can do with v1.9 upgrade), here are the simple rules:
I cheerfully stitch together NT blogging solutions, often blowing up things along the way ("So You Don’t Have To" TM). The price I extract for this basically useful service is your acceptance of my luxurious disregard for linearity. After all, Time and Logical Progression are highly overrated concepts. As I see it, my mission is to ensure that this blog’s utility ultimately outweighs its off-the-meds, free-associative self-indulgence. In short, it’s pretty much the same implicit deal that’s struck when listening to a Robyn Hitchcock CD.
While I usually let this blog speak for itself, it’s probably useful to point out that just as the site is proof-of-concept of NoteTaker’s benefit as a blogging tool, its style is also intended to demonstrate that Micromedia can be more than Big Dumb Media left too long in the dryer--something way too many blogs have yet to work out.
The so-called blogosphere is awash in niche media cloning: reportage, punditry, reviews, journaling, etc. For significant numbers of these sites, the only things that makes them “blogs” are their explicitly low-budget, DIY nature, informal prose style and email-level grammar. Most are low-rent Big Media in the same way that Plan 9 From Outer Space was a low-rent, awry run at horror film legitimacy. Put another way, sometimes primitive knock-offs aren’t budding style tropes--they’re simply cheap imitations.
Quentin Tarrantino has noted that his approach to films consists of undermining the so-called Genre Moment. He has observed that in typical Genre Moments, characters invariably talk about the plot--whereas in real life, people frequently speak about everything but the topic at hand. Thus, in his movies, hit men argue about what a Big Mac is called in French, a heist crew debates the merits of a Madonna song and female assassins quote an old Trix cereal commercial.
Why am I riffing on Quentin T? Because niche publishing can be seen as analogous to genre films. And quite frankly, I’m wondering why the tech-tip manual Genre Moment can’t be similarly short-circuited. Let’s face it: As currently written, most tech advice sounds as if it’s being delivered by that MIS guy in those old Saturday Night Live skits. Always be wary of a publishing niche that contextually makes David Pogue seem the class clown (sorry Dave--love your stuff; like your jokes less).
If blogs are a new medium, then they must bring some sort of freshness to communication beyond reverse-chrono structure and a rock-and-roll slur. So see this site as a second-beer conversation with a compulsive tinkerer who hasn’t compartmentalized his life. Other stuff can (and does) bleed through like too-loud drums imprinting on the adjacent track of an analog recording. (Oops. See?) Is it as efficient as biz-as-usual tech manual style? Not on your life--nor is it intended to be. Those of you who need that Daily Express can queue up over there--this is clearly the scenic tour.
Hiatus and blog having been clarified, we now resume normal posting . . .
Although I've been loathe to point this out (for fear I'd change my mind mid-way through), we've got a miniseries going on here. Starting with my rant about the very dodgy consistency of copy-and-paste support by most RSS readers and the agitated grumbling about the use of OS X Services to get stuff into an NT notebook, I've been focusing on the myriad means of NoteTaker gathering. Whether you use NT to blog or harness its power for offline projects, it's easy to see that this is indeed the Ur Question. Because Kids, unless you can get stuff into NoteTaker in the first place, nothing else useful is going to happen downstream.
Let’s pause and cogitate about this. I’m not talking about getting stuff into NT in an absolute sense--doing that is eminently possible; indeed, there’s probably nothing that can’t be put into NoteTaker, given imagination, time and a sufficiently gnarly workaround. No, what I’m talking about here is the seamless (or at least near-seamless) and speedy inputting of raw content into The World’s Best Application. If it takes too many steps and/or too long, well, it’s simply Not Acceptable.
To repurpose an analogy I’ve used elsewhere, no one wants to change cars four times during a trip to a grocery store that’s six miles away. Is it possible to reach the store in this fashion? Sure. Is it desirable or advisable? Nope.
With regard to NoteTaker, what I want to do is fly through cyberspace, shoveling anything and everything that even looks like it might be useful into my blogging notebook. I’m quite content to later sort out the whole mess with an extended NoteTaker session. However, the earlier noted copy-and-paste glitches really tripped me up. And I was further frustrated by the unwieldily implementation of OS X Services.
And so over the holidays I finally decided to resolve these interconnected pains in my digital ass. While hiding from my nephew and his plans for the Transformer domination of the world, I cobbled together an effective solution that approaches my stuff-into-NoteTaker ideal. As with much of life, the solution took work, involved toe-stubbing and demanded money be thrown at it.
Through previous trial-and-error, I had ascertained that the excellent NewsFire was the only RSS reader to abide by OS X copy-and-paste standards--thus playing nicely with NoteTaker. One of the challenges was to leverage NewsFire while simultaneously circumventing the mouse-driven OS X Services. Here’s what I did:
Using the good-as-undocumented way to assign keyboard shortcuts to Services (paraphrasing Douglas Adams, the process might well have been in a locked file cabinet in the dark corner of a sub-basement guarded by a tiger), I managed to use the F12 key of my PowerBook to trigger the Clip To Notebook NoteTaker Service. With the more elegant--and obvious--shortcut creation capability of FastScripts, I assigned Cmd-= (Command Key and Equal Sign) to the new NoteTaker v1.9 AppleScript that enables a selected entry to be made its own page in a current or new section of a notebook.
The next step involved purchasing the highly useful SideTrack, a utility that allows programming of the trackpad in the manner of a multi-button mouse. Being right-handed, here’s how I set it up: Vertical scrollling was assigned to the right edge of the track pad. Horizontal scrolling was enabled along the bottom edge of the pad. Sidetrack further allows all four corners to be programmed, as well as the center of the trackpad. The lower right corner of my trackpad evokes the F12/Clip To Notebook shortcut. The lower left corner of the pad triggers the Cmd-=/New Page From Selected Entries shortcut. Tapping the upper left hand corner of my pad now launches the contextual menus--in other words, it is the equivalent of a right mouse key. (This gives me access to the contextual menu version of the Clip To Notebook command iin the event I’m in an application that uses the F12 shortcut to accomplish something else.)
The other helper-application I purchased was Concierge, which adds slide-out URL search and navigation access along with a website scratch pad and session histories. Helpfully, a keyboard shortcut is already assigned to the f the drawer control and I programmed it to the top right corner of my trackpad.
Are your eyes crossing yet? Things will become clear if we step through what I'm now able to do. (Remember--the goal is hands-on-keyboard as much as possible.) Using QuickSilver, I launch Safari with my keyboard. With the browser fired-up, I tap the upper right corner of my trackpad and reveal the Concierge drawer. I type in part of the name of a site I want to visit and the URL search engine gives me list of likely sites. I click on the correct one and arrive at the content source site. Scrolling through the site using the edge of my trackpad, I see something I might want to later post about. Selecting the item, I tap the lower left corner of my pad and Finder-like access to every page in every one of my NT notebooks appears in a dialog. Wam, Wam, Wam, Bam! and I’ve copied the content to a new entry on a page of my choice, in a notebook of my choice. But wait: This is such good information, it deserves room to grow into a posting. Keeping the new entry selected, I tap the lower left corner of my trackpad and create a new section and then a new page in that section to house the entry. Back at the source website, I want more spacious browsing: Another tap and the Concierge drawer retracts, restoring the full window size of Safari.
Similar seamless fluidity is possible when compiling RSS feeds from NewsWire. Even though it is currently in beta (v.62 at this writing), smart feeds (filtering), grouping and flagging are already possible. Plus, of course, the critical fact that NewFire feed summaries can be copied and pasted and still retain their full text and live links--unlike, ahem, every other Mac RSS reader I tested. Imagine this scenario:
Within NewsFire,I create a smart folder called NT Blogging Citations. The only filter for this folder is that items must be flagged. I have also created other smart folders with more extensive filtering. These focus on areas like Blogging Theory, Blog Clients and RSS Readers. I let the topical news folders sort-out feeds upstream of my review. The results are configured to display both their headlines and summaries so I can easily flag those of particular interest. The flagged feeds are automatically moved to the NT Blogging Citations folder, where, after further pondering, I perform a Cmd-A (Select All) on a particularly promising one. Having selected the feed in this way, I tap the lower right corner of my trackpad and send it, as a new entry, to a specific page in a specific notebook.
Because it is still an imperfect computing world, further processing needs to happen after a selected feed is made into an entry. Even though NoteFire works well with NT in terms of copy-and-paste, two unintended things happen. First, the feed source--say The New York Times --is invisible in the NT entry. This is because NewsFire displays its feed source names in white type against a blue background. Within a NoteTaker entry, this means the feed name starts out as white on white. The solution is to select the feed name and choose a black font color with NT’s formatting tools.
Additional processing must be done if you want to further assign the feed-entry to its own page in the notebook. Selecting and pasting the feed into NoteTaker also pastes NewsFire’s HTML-based forward/previous buttons. These screw up the New Page From Selected Entries command in esoteric ways I’ve haven’t wrapped my mind around. However, I get around this problem by deleting the buttons while I’m making the feed name black.
What’s the payoff for doing this extra stuff? Well, let’s say that out of 10 NewsFire feeds transformed into entries in my blogging notebook, three deserve further research. If I’ve removed those pesky HTML buttons, I can select the live feed-source link in the entry, tap the lower left corner of my trackpad and make the live link its own page, with an embedded browser automatically created and open, displaying the feed source. How cool is that ? Further comments or observations about the embedded, live feed source can be children of the browser entry. To tidy things up, you can then fold up the children under the browser--and if more room is needed--you can double click on the NT @ icon and toggle the open source site into a simple URL.
The merging of NT-related keyboard shortcuts with a programmed trackpad also has impact on offline research and information compilation. Any program where F12 is not in conflict is a potential source of easily created NoteBook entries. And if F12 is being used, well, there’s always a tap in the upper left corner of the trackpad to launch a contextual menu that also features NT’s Clip to Notebook command.
I’ve also successfully copied and pasted from Mail and Entourage using my trackpad. A tap and four clicks successful transforms text selections into NoteTaker entries on any page of any notebook. However, while a lower right tap works perfectly on selected text within Nisus Express, evoking F12 in MS Word triggers the Save As dialog. But tap-launching the contextual menu handily gets around that.
Despite the effectiveness of the shortcut configuration outlined here, a major stumbling block remains with the highly uneven implementation of Mac copy-and-paste by developers. The Gold Standard is (or should be) Apple’s own relatively low-tech TextEdit--how could it be otherwise? And yet using this yardstick, many applications fail to optimally copy-and-paste. The point is that if you decide to implement the setup I’ve advocated here, it may only take you so far--only to the actual instance of copy-and-paste. So do what I do: When you run across an expensive, complex application that copies and pastes less well than TextEdit, email the developer and bitch about it. Ask them directly why the free Apple text editor does a better job than their product. And if they don’t blink, say “Shame on you.” Because they truly deserve it. Five years into OS X, nonstandard copy-and-paste is inexcusable.
Okay, this is pretty much the post, so let’s review: You found out too much about my holidays (yawn); you discovered why obscure pop culture references regularly punctuate this blog (yea--he’s not totally crazy) and--most importantly--you learned how to copy-and-paste to any page of any of your NoteTaker notebook without taking your hands off the keyboard (omigod, that really is useful). Additionally, you were taught how to turn Notebook entries into their own pages--also without taking your hands off the keys.
In light of all this, I like to think we’re square: You suffered me undermining Genre Moments in exchange for time-saving workflow improvements that can be implemented within the hour. It seems a fair deal to me, at least--and I’m pretty sure Tarantino would agree.
Stop Press: As briefly noted above, NoteTaker has just released its v1.9 upgrade--and it’s fabulous. Beginning with the next installment, I’ll be devoting some well-spent time examining NT’s new capabilities and their implications in terms of information management and blogging . . .
The composition of this entry was made possible in part by The Days Of Our Lives from the album "High" by The Blue Nile
Monday, January 10, 2005 2:20:27 AM
You sure you just don't want to start Vlogging?
I got a head-ache and glazed over half way through this post.
I know your on to something.
Onward and Upward, dude!
Posted by: ZuDfunck's Mac Gonzo Vlogger | May 20, 2005 at 01:41 PM