Welcome to the Machiavelli Edition of Blogging With AquaMinds NoteTaker--it's Any-Means-To-An-End-Day, mousketeers! Particularly because the end in question is efficient, effective information capture and processing.
If you'll recall, just prior to my flirtation with the Talkies, I examined the myriad ways NoteTaker can be used as a database of other databases. Of course, this was a transparent and, in retrospect, pathetic plan to get Uma Thurman to notice me (which, by the way, forced her lawyers to rewrite the restraining order to include blogging). Desperately playing the Clever Card in my bid to impress her, I compared NoteTaker's ability to become a database of databases--a metadatabase, if you will--to those 400-plus special inserts that FiloFax sold at the peak of its Reagan-Era popularity.
And you know, I haven't been able to shake the appropriateness of that comparison--even if it was mine. It just goes to show you that Lust and Insightful Thinking are not necessarily mutually exclusive male modalities--despite what endless episodes of Ally McBeal would have you believe. I think I may have backed into one of those highly useful Idea-Objects--an abstract concept that, even though understood, can't fully be played around with until embedded in something that's generally comprehendible. (Those following along at home are undoubtedly bracing for the now-ceremonial wheeling out of the Richard Saul Wurman adage about only understanding something in terms of what you already know. And while this does have applicability, in truth, I'm intellectually strip-mining someone else this time around--Sherry Turkle, who talks about this concept in her book, Life On the Screen.)
In this instance, NoteTaker-As-Virtual-FiloFax is particularly useful because it helped me escape the conceptual corner I had painted myself into. Believe it or not, I actually think about these meanderings in the days after I write them. I know: I should probably attempt to think about the prior to the cranked music, the speed-lashed typing and the near-toxic level of caffeine, but hey--where's the fun in that? After I pushed send on the metadatabase piece and had temporarily shaken off my Uma Ardor, I thought, damn me! While what I inserted into NoteTaker notebooks were very often databases, many other inserts were useful in a distinctly non-data sort of way.
These were inserts that added capabilities to a notebook rather than information. Think online chat, email, RSS feeds, telephony, image processing, HTML editing, Internet radio, streaming video, calendars (shared and otherwise), team collaboration and wikis. In this context, these types of inserts made NoteTaker a deeply powerful toolbox, rather than a metadatabase. And while I get a bonus point for working this out, it did seem to create one of those hard-to-grasp Exception Theories: A = B except when A = C. Me, I'm thinking that Uma isn't going to be impressed with this seeming waffling; Uma's going to want a straight-forward geekiness; in short, Uma is a Unified Theory of the Universe kind of woman. And then I thought about FiloFax.
As I am of a Certain Age and make my living in a complex profession that melds the creative, technical, mechanical and logistical, I pretty much ran my life with a succession of FiloFaxes (sometimes simultaneously) up until Apple's Newton and the original Palm Pilot. Bet you didn't see that one coming, eh? And yes, while there were genuine, albeit static,, "data" inserts (one featured the frost dates for the entire continental United States, if memory serves), the FiloFax folks didn't stop there. Clearly, they saw those four or six rings on the spine of each notebook as Expansion Opportunities that cleanly cut across workaday considerations of usage and design/interface purity.
A significant amount of the things I inserted into my Filofax were tools. I had a solar-powered calculator, a ruler, a Post-It caddy, zip-lock clear plastic pouches large enough to contain floppy disks, a pen holder, and--wait for it--a six-ring hole punch so I could make any reasonably sized piece of paper information an instant FiloFax insert. Towards the end of FiloFax's halcyon days, there was even a six-ringed plastic-and-velcro insert that perversely allowed you to carry a Palm Pilot inside your paper-based notebook. (In retrospect, I think the latter was a Post Modern Statement I was to busy to pick-up on.) These things were all bound into my FiloFax and--most importantly--were not user hacks; they were accessories branded by the company and intended to expand the capabilities of their notebooks.
With this head of geek-nostalgia steam, allow me to further digress: FiloFax's concept of Expansion Opportunity did not end with data and tool inserts. The notebooks did not merely come in a variety of sizes--their actual essence was called into question by the manufacturer: My most cherished Filofax was a double-sided one. It folded open to reveal two notebooks joined together like Siamese twins, each with its own separate front cover--one opening to the left and one opening to the right. I used this Deep-Geek Bad Boy to simultaneously run my private and professional lives--but I could have just as easily run a couple of magazines in tandem. Again--and this is critical--this mirror-image notebook was not a customized job by some leather worker; it was a bona-fide FiloFax product.
So yes, Uma, I hope your six-foot frame is quivering--for I have indeed formulated a Unified Theory of NoteTaker Inserts that handily parallels the FiloFax philosophy and practice. A lesser man would pretty much end this post here--send it from NoteTaker to TypePad via Ecto and then lustfully settle-in next to the phone, waiting for the call with a Hollywood area code. But not me--I'm just warming up. This Way-Back Machine contemplation of FiloFax juxtaposed to NoteTaker's powerful capabilities has made me understand something immensely important about NT that most reviewers don't note: Its notebook metaphor is a point of departure, and not a destination.
NoteTaker is a "notebook" in the same way that OS X is a "desktop." That is to say, it's not really one and NT doesn't get hung-up by this fact. Ironically, we're back to Turkle's Idea-Object. Calling Notetaker a notebook (or the Mac operating system a desktop) is a handy way to conceptually play with program. To ask for deep notebook verisimilitude is Missing The Point--it's the equivalent of demanding cartoon file cabinets for the folders in OS X. I think that NoteTaker's refusal to make its interface metaphor its reason for being not only makes the program more powerful than the other products in the computer-based notebook niche, it also makes it unique.
Once I thought of NoteTaker in terms of FiloFax, it suddenly became obvious that other products in the category that uses Book, One, Journal and Note in various combinations aspire to be Mead spiral notebooks or composition books, albeit on digital steroids. That is pretty much their goal, whether stated or not. It's what they want to be. The more self-conscious products suggest that this is design purity--the genuinely clever, doubtlessly crafted simulacrum of notebook-ness. I should know, I probably own a full 90 percent of the products in this category, NoteTaker obviously being my favorite. Other offerings fill me with the same sort of wonder I reserve for Faberge Eggs and functional Zippo lighters that are smaller than my fingernail. But it also makes me want to reach for my copy of Baudrillard to work out the why.
With years of distance, it is equally clear that FiloFax conceived of its products as data- and information-capturing tools that happened to be in the shape of notebooks. Their very ring-bindings suggest that modification and enhancement were their intended modalities. And indeed, I could not have run a magazine from a Mead spiral, despite its undoubted purity as an object.
I may be wrong, but I can't see a great deal of soul-searching and focus-grouping occurring at FiloFax the day that Jenkins walked into a meeting and Mr. Filo and Mr. Fax and suggested creating a multifunction calculator that could be clipped into the notebook line. I can't imagine that there was dithering about Notebook Purity when Jenkins informed them the market was demanding this useful addition to FiloFax products. Despite the elegance of their construction--and the singular durability of the dyed moroccan or ostrich leathers--FiloFaxes were open-ended, powerfully customizable information capturing systems. They too are "notebooks" in the same way OS X is a virtual "desk."
There was a multitude of reasons I lived a FiloFax-predicated life Way Back When--and not surprisingly, they are exactly the same reasons NoteTaker is my computer-predicated hierarchical, multimedia, free-form database today: An unprecedented flexibility that extends the inherent power of the product in ways that not even AquaMinds initially realized.
And now, how about I stop talking about NoteTaker Tool Inserts and actually tell you how to make one? In fact, if you're reading this, no doubt you soldiered through the bulk of my rant, so how about two tips, just so we're square?
On-Demand WYSIWYG HTML Coding In NoteTaker
1. Create a new page in your NoteBook
2. Create an entry with this URL: http://www.hexidec.com/ekitdemo.php
3. Make a template out of this entry.
4. Make sure that Templates are accessible from the NoteTaker toolbar.
5. When you need WYSIWYG HTML coding, merely insert the HTML editor template, double-click the NT @ icon to open an embedded browser and code there.
6. Once finished, select and copy the results, paste them into your notebook and then delete the HTML editor entry--it's a template; you can always create it again in an instant.
7, Oh, and one more thing--after pasting the HTML code as an entry, just double-click the resulting NT @ icon to toggle between the HTML and the browser-formatted version of it.
Adding To Your NoteTaker Notebook When Away From Your Computer
1. Go to WebNote and create a free account: http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/
2. Note the URL of your personal space for subsequent use. Also create an embedded browser using this URL in your NoteTaker notebook.
3. If you're at work or at a cybercafe or using your sister-in-law's computer and want to add something to your notebook, simply go to your WebNote account and create an entry.
4. Later, back at home and inside your NT notebook, turn to the page that features the embedded WebNote browser and click to fetch what it calls the "previous" version.
5. Voila! There are the notes your left yourself while away. Float the embedded browser (Cmd-Click> View > Float), flip to the page where you want to add the notes, and copy/paste them into your notebook page.
In lieu of the Big Ending, let's go with a confession. You know that "spiral binding" that NoteTaker features? I turned that sucker off the first minute of the first day I used it and haven't looked back since. Real Men Don't Have A Need For Mead . . .
See Uma? I can use 25-cent words and still be macho: What's there not to like?
Tuesday, March 8, 2005 6:17:32 PM
i know what you did. you took mercy on me and all the other code-cripples is what you did. they're all quietly copying this excellent post into their notetaker demos, but i got no shame: i thank you, my blog thanks you, *all* the little people thank you. they *will* get back to you.
Posted by: zo | March 15, 2005 at 12:46 AM