Plays Well With Others: How NoteTaker Has Deepened Its Web Connectivity

More volts!
I'm sucking the juice from the generator
More volts!
More volts!

More volts!
"More suck at the duct" my dictu
More volts!
More volts!
--Brian Eno
“I Fall Up”

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
--Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future"

As I become an increasingly middle-aged hipster, an interesting distillation process is occurring: The relentless march of time is acting like an acid bath on my world view--eroding the softer, more insubstantial portions of my conceptual framework and leaving the titanium-hard truisms.

During my significantly misspent youth, I often wondered why the Previous Generation seemed to cling to cliches--but now, having morphed from revolutionary to ruling class--I clearly see that in many cases, I mistook naturally evolving philosophic minimalism for intellectual ossification. In retrospect, it seems quaint: Like futile attempts to prove the superiority of baroque art over, say, Robert Motherwell. Lots of stuff going on is not the same as smart stuff happening. (The corollary is that pretty stuff does not imply substantive stuff--unless, of course, you happen to be Uma Thurman.) Put another way, philosophic minimalism done properly is pretty much like holding four aces--you can be forgiven about not obsessing about the other 48 cards . . .

As NoteTaker matures, I’m beginning to sense a similar sort of focus on its own conceptual verities--Gather, Organize, Share-- along with a commitment to be singularly powerful in each of these areas. It’s NoteTaker’s four aces. To be sure, there are other metaphoric cards in the deck but, at the risk of echoing Orwell, All Cards Are Not Equal. This brutal, Darwinian observation, while decidedly not PC, is absolutely true--just ask the Two of Diamonds. I suppose a more gentle way of saying this is to observe the Two of Diamonds suffers from a Court Card Deficiency, but the weather here is ugly and I’m not feeling diplomatically charitable . . .

As a result, there is very little dithering within NoteTaker or in the community surrounding it. Because of these screeds, I get many communications from the NT user base. The theme of 99 percent of these is NoteTaker Power--how to tap it, how to leverage it, how to recombine it and how to increase it. Thankfully, NoteTaker users are not interface fetishists. There is no hand-wringing about verisimilitude or concerns about the purely cosmetic. NoteTaker users (at least the ones who take the time to contact me) don’t want a Barbie’s Dream House notebook--they want an information tractor beam with an ever-increasing increasing range. Much of my email reads like this: “Hey Man, NoteTaker has 45 ways of interacting with other applications and sharing information--when are we going to get 50 ways?” Which, trust me, is far preferable to wanting the groundbreaking contents drawer to “Look more, you know, like cardboard.” (Uh, Barbie? I think Ken’s looking for you--he’s way over there, why don’t you go find him?)

With each incremental release, NoteTaker’s laser-like focus on its four aces has resulted in an astonishing deepening and expansion of its core capabilities. While AquaMinds might be thoroughly bewildered by a Certain Maniac With an NT-Centric Blog, they are crystal clear that incremental releases are most often bug fixes only because of developer-based tradition. And importantly, AquaMinds has decided not to play by those rules.

Take, for example, NoteTaker’s just-released version 1.9.4 upgrade: Significantly enhanced hyperlinking has been introduced, making possible powerful and intuitive annotation. Further, the now 50-plus AppleScripts that make NoteTaker the most extensible product of its type have been built into the application. One of the new script categories is an excellent example of AquaMinds’ ongoing commitment to More Volts (More about this in a moment).

Don’t be misled by the NoteTaker trinity of Gather-Organize-Share. Sharing can (indeed, must) occur in circumstances beyond the seamless exchange of NT notebooks between authors and readers. In NoteTaker’s product category, true power is a function of interconnectivity--sharing--between it and other applications. Without this ability, a database product, no matter how conceptually elegant, is ultimately as lonely and impotent as Napoleon on Elba.

I own a great many of the products in this market niche. One recently updated application now features a grandstanding display of individual and company contact information. But here’s the thing--in order for this showboating to occur, you have to manually open the Address Book, search for the person or company and then physically drag the located information into the “improved” application. Huh? The process is a bit like being forced to crawl to a swank dinner party--it might be nice when you finally get there, but your hands and knees need stitches.

AquaMinds, on the other hand, has from the outset understood what real power means--thus its track record of deepening interapplication connectivity. NoteTaker’s newly built-in AppleScripts are categorized by operational type and I strongly recommend a serious look at the scripts tucked away in the Web Research Agents folder. One in particular is guaranteed to leave you both slack-jawed and instantly unable to remember how you functioned without it. It’s called MegaSearch.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say I’m researching musician/producer/theoretician Brian Eno. Prior to NoteTaker v1.9.4, I could have typed Eno’s name into the search box that resides in the NT toolbar. Pressing Enter would have created an embedded browser in my notebook page featuring the search results of whatever search engine I had chosen. (NoteTaker’s search box is programmable; you can add engines at will.) I could have then perused the results in the embedded browser and visited the source sites of the results that interested me--all from within NT.

It was convenient and, yes, it was powerful--but not powerful enough for the AqauMinds team. They correctly understood that for all the built-in convenience, they had only gotten me half-way to my goal of researching Brian Eno. Because at a certain point, the dynamics and process of a traditional Web search inescapably clicked back in. Eventually, I was back to deduping and culling results by hand--albeit within a NoteTaker notebook. The AquaMinds team understood that real search power and value could only be had if NoteTaker’s connectivity and interaction with search engines was deepened. This is what the MegaSearch script does.

With MegaScript, I can initiate a search in number of ways. Of course, I can still type “Brian Eno” into NT’s toolbar search box. But I can also simply create a new entry for “Brian Eno” or I can select “Brian Eno” within the content of a preexisting entry. Or I can copy “Brian Eno” to my clipboard for delayed processing.

Regardless of how I create or capture my search string, the next step is launching the MegaSearch script. This can be done from the NoteTaker menu bar or by Ctrl-Clicking, which allows access to the AppleScripts collection via the contextual menu.

After MegaSearch is launched, the process is completely automated. No further user intervention is needed. I often use the a MegaSearch session as an opportunity to step away for more of what’s already Too Much Coffee. Had I chosen to remain at my desk, here’s what I would have seen: Using the created or captured search string, NoteTaker automatically searches Google, Teoma, Yahoo and MSN for matching results. As it finds them, NT proceeds to build what can be described as a search overview. On a single notebook page, open embedded browsers are created, featuring the results of each of the four engines.

NoteTaker then establishes a notebook section entitled Summary of Search Results. This features separate entries for each of the top 10 results from each of the four search engines. In essence, these are closed embedded browsers--to open the source site for any of these 40 top-ranked results, you only have to double-click NT’s @ icon.

However, this automated search process is not finished. Depending on the results, as many as four additional notebook sections are created. These are comprised of deduped search results, categorized by the number of search engines that independently found them. Thus, the sections are respectively titled 4 Listings, 3 Listings, 2 Listings and 1 Listing. If three of the four search engines found the same result, it will be featured in the 3 Listings section; if two engines found the result, it will be sent to the 2 Listings section and so on. Each one of these ranked results is listed on its own page. In this way, the embedded browsers containing the highest ranked results across search engines are given enough room for full expansion.

Once again, this is an automatic process; I’m free to get that cup of coffee, make a phone call, or even continue to edit a foreground document.

And when MegaSearch has run its course, the resulting embedded browsers behave as you’d expect them to: You can easily float them in palettes above the notebook that allow the dragging of content onto other NoteTaker pages.

MegaSearch illustrates how NoteTaker is deepening and extending its information processing power by increasing its connectivity with other applications. It also demonstrates that AquaMinds has rejected the “automobile model year” paradigm of software upgrades. That the addition of advanced hyperlink annotation and MegaSearch is the basis for an incremental release is indicative of the company’s commitment to perpetual innovation and ongoing feedback loops with users. Finally, it shows that AquaMinds realizes NoteTaker is first and foremost a tool on which that growing numbers of users depend--and that when users need enhanced or extended features, they need them now rather than later on.

At a time when too many developers allow more than a year to elapse before releasing substantive upgrades, in a period when too many of those “new” features are merely catch-up with competitors, it’s good to see AquaMinds breaking innovative, useful ground and doing so on a regular, almost casual basis.

On reflection, it’s good, but not surprising--after all, in the end, nothing beats four aces . . .

The composition of this entry was made possible in part by My Winter from the album "Catch The Fall" by The Dolphin Brothers

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 11:02:24 AM