Exploring AquaMinds NoteTaker

Introducing AquaMinds NoteSharePssst--Hey buddy, can I share something with you?

Let’s just pretend I’m not really here--okay?

As you may have noted, this blog has been on extended hiatus. But also understand that for weeks now I’ve been preparing for my Big Return: One of those swelling-soundtrack moments, where I do my best Gloria Swanson/Sunset Boulevard impression: It was the blogs that got smaller. . . That sort of thing.

However, events have transpired to upstage my usual, appalling self-indulgence. Just as I was getting ready to once again talk about, well, me (we all have to have a hobby), I find myself obliged to address much larger, more important news.

My old buddies over at AquaMinds have let the cat out of the bag regarding a new, genuinely jaw-dropping product. (I call them “buddies;” they, on the other hand, usually refer to me as “stalker” or, more charitably, as “Cease-and-Desist Boy.”) Where was I? Oh yeah--I opened my Sunday New York Times in an attempt to ignore the biochemical and neural havoc from New Year’s Eve and there it was, this article by Jim Fallows about the Next Big Thing from AquaMinds. And until I carefully reviewed what I could recall from the previous evening--who I might have talked to and even how I managed to misplace my underwear while still wearing my tux--I was profoundly afraid.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, NoteShare, NoteTaker, Web20

Pond Scum Spotlight: In Which Idiots Who Pollute Cyberspace Get the Level of Attention They Obviously Crave

Hi There. I’ve just spent the past hour or so scrubbing spam comments off this weblog. Big, dumb, robotic intrusions into a discourse space with the sole purpose of shoving unsolicited ecommerce past the eyeballs of unsuspecting visitors.

Let’s be clear: This is not the equivalent of email spam--which, loathsome as it may be, is merely junk mail with no barriers to entry. Spam comments, on the other hand, can only be compared to annoying, psychotic non sequiturs that interrupt conversation. Imagine yourself at a party speaking intensely with two other people about something all three of you care passionately about. Now imagine this asshole--slightly sweaty, bug-eyed, in a cheap suit--muscling his way in, screaming Excuse me! Excuse me! I want you to buy a prom dress from me!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen--we’re talking about Business Pond Scum here. People worse than those electronic stores that have 30-year-long going out of business sales; people more creepy than those guys with less than full sets of teeth, who want to sell you stereo speakers off the back of a U-Haul; impolite thugs who basically need to be bitch-slapped into silence and then sent to military school.

Any one who follows the arc of this weblog must realize by now that my politics are not those of the sitting government. However, this morning I had an epiphany: I could finally wrap my head around and fully get behind capital punishment--I’d like to see the cretins who spray-painted this weblog with bad, even misspelled self-advertisements marched before a firing squad. Up Against the Wall, You Mothers. . . Bam! Next?

Of all the guerilla merchandisers who visited like burglars in the dead of night, my personal favorite is the search page which promises “Search Without Junk.” Yeah, that’s right, the hypocritical bastards are spamming to promote an allegedly spam-free search engine. Do me, yourself and every other legitimate Web citizen a favor--don’t patronize this service provider--ever. Forget about some kind of metaphysical rationalization for a boycott--it simply comes down to lying in public: They are junk merchants who say they don’t abide junk. Uh, good luck with your next search with them--you know, that critical one on which your job depends . . .

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 . . .

Honey, Has the Blog Been Fed? Transforming Google Mail Into a Research Database Embedded In NoteTaker

Now time and distance
melt away
No digital delay
And some things
can be written down
that we're too shy to say
Send me an email
that says "I love you"

--Neil Tennant/Chris Lowe

Yesterday, I had one of those 2001: A Space Odyssey Moments. You know--like the ape, downstream of touching the Monolith, looking at a bone and slowly understanding its tool-cum-weapon potential. In my case, however, the Monolith wasn’t that minimalist piece of alien alloy (which, in retrospect, resembled a high-end kitchen counter top), it was Google, the new mothership in town.

While it's already becoming fashionable to look askance at the burgeoning ubiquity of the Big Polychrome G, I've always perversely enjoyed the early days of any first-class invasion—whether Pod People, cicadas or Windows v.3. There's something Very Casablanca that appeals to me—the whole "We'll always have Paris" thing, respectively recontextualized as Earth, Our Gardens Next Summer and Cupertino. And let's face it, Google is beginning to resemble Thomas Jerome Newton's World Enterprises ("I don't believe it. I can't believe it. You have nine basic patents here. Nine! That's basic patents. Do you know what that means?"). But like Farnsworth, I'm not looking the gift horse in the mouth, content instead to queue-up at Google Labs to eagerly use the inevitable next step of the Occupation (which for a brief moment was GoogleX—presumably before the Apple legal department stirred and woke).

So you folks over in the Resistance might as well save the e- cards and letters; I'm simply not ready to be Turned at this point: See me as a Digital-Age Louis—content to play both sides in a state of amoral grace.

Do You Wanna Talk About It? How To Run Your Mouth (Or At Least Your Fingers) Without Leaving NoteTaker

It was a quietly brilliant plan: Publicly proclaim my ardor for Uma Thurman and then--in the same post--make all six-feet of her swoon at the Indisputable Cleverness of my NoteTaker-as-metadatabase theory. After that, all that remained to be done was hunkering down by the phone on Valentine’s Day. (Yes, even the timing was given extensive thought.) But tragically, Uma failed to call. Granted, many of you did contact me about the Metadatabase Thing--and while I encourage you to keep sending those e- cards and letters, let’s be clear: None of you were Her of the Fabulous Face and the Non-Photogenic Feet.

And so, as the sands of Valentine’s Day trickled into the lower chamber, I felt a deep need to speak of my rapidly breaking heart: To reach out to others similarly scorned by Movie Stars Who They’ve Even Never Met But That Doesn’t Matter. After pouring my feelings into the Loathsome Middle-Age Diarist section of my NoteTaker notebook, I suddenly thought, Hey! This is a Swiss Army Knife-cum-Metadatabase. If I fail to use it as such, I’ve played to what was certainly Uma’s serious doubts about my discovery. Later, when she comes to regret missing this quicksilver opportunity to know me, I don’t want to have inadvertently handed her an easy excuse like “See? He opened up another application to find the solace of contact.” God knows, my failure to commit to a single application was the number one complaint of most of my ex-girlfriends--and as Yogi Berra once sagely suggested, who needs deja vu all over again?

And thus, for all three of you out there who regularly read these occasional screeds (hi mom, hi dad, hi sis!), let’s talk about the various kinds of online astral projection that are possible inside a NoteTaker notebook. However, at the outset, know that computer-predicated communications give lie to my geek stance, exposing me for what I really am--a digital dilettante; a gentleman tinkerer. Think of Thomas Dolby around the time of his first release; that’s me: She's tidied up and I can't find anything! All my tubes and wires and careful notes and antiquated notions. So yes--Science! indeed.

Wham! Bam! Bam! Bam! In Search of the Lost Shortcut

Here we go again, playing the fool again.
Here we go again, acting hard again.
All right!
Well, I'm beginning to see the light!
I wanna tell you, ooh-oh-oh!
Hey, now, baby, I'm beginning to see the light!
--Lou Reed

This is an instructive tale about hubris, human interfaces and hidden helpful features. But let's start at the beginning. My entanglement with Apple computers goes all the way back to Lisa. Say Hello, indeed. It was love at first sight and from then onward, the soon-to-be Mac OS and I matured together and even made some very cool side excursions like reveling in HyperCard. Because I love to tinker, the jump from OS 6 to 7 and from OS 7 to 8 were more traumatic then they needed to be. But as a result, I learned most of the nooks and crannies of Apple's operating system and the importance of backing up. While on no occasion did I ever proclaim myself a Mac Deep Geek, I confess I thought of myself in those terms--secretly smiling about my secret identity.

A few years later, OS X entered the picture and (flexible, if nothing else) I scrambled aboard as a beta tester. Though business sense led me to keep my magazine OS 9-based, I personally never passed through the OS Luddite stage of other Mac users. I embraced the new interface and was not philosophically bothered by Unix living in OS X's basement.

Truth be told, however, my Mac Deep Geek appearances have become infrequent and much narrowed, like a superhero in retirement--think Mr. Incredible. I did not grow up with Unix and so my relationship with OS X is less deep. For a number of reasons (all of them my responsibility), I am essentially under house arrest at the interface level. Not for me (until now, at least) the deep juju of the Terminal. After all, the last time I seriously interacted with a command line was the C: prompt in DOS.

You Can Never Have Enough Dubious Insularity

A quick update--I finally got around to testing the most recent version the NewsFan RSS aggregator and it also failed my simple-yet-critical cut-and-paste test. Remind me to send a case of Scotch to the folks over at NewsFire in appreciation of their standing as the only rational news reader on my computer.

Coincidentally, NewsFire has just released a v.4 update which can be found here. If you agree with my frustration with RSS aggregators that do not support simple cut-and-paste, download NewsFire and give it a spin. The developer should be given all the encouragement that can be mustered.

Friday, December 10, 2004 12:00:04 AM

You Can't Get There From Here: The Dubious Insularity of Most RSS Readers

Accidental discoveries: You gotta love them. The possibly apocryphal history of Happy Accidents includes Ivory Soap, Silly Putty and the fact Ben Stein is funny. Unfortunately, however, there is also a long list of Uh-Oh Revelations: Asbestos-related respiratory ailments, the unintentional hard-drive havoc of a certain Apple updater and the possibly career-morphing trauma of the delayed understanding that Reply All isn't like Reply.

Add to this latter group the hypocritical insularity of many RSS readers. But before I lurch ahead with my idea-cum-rant, let's note the changed structure of this post. Usually our Quality Time here takes the form of an over-caffeinated episode of Columbo. I tend to shamble around the Observation Du Jour, rumpled and spouting seeming non-sequiturs. But by the end of the post, some previously uppity technology turns out to be the culprit--pretty much like Patrick McGoohan, if he were downloadable or thought to be a "solution."

I bring this up because I had originally intended to file one of these classic Colonel-Mustard-In-The-Library-With-The-Candlestick entries, but I tripped over a widespread, navel-gazing school of RSS content management. So let's approach this post in reverse order: First, the point I wanted to make, followed by the bloody nose meted out by most of my RSS readers.

Bell-and-Whistle Siren Song: Does the Street Always Find a Use for Things?

Now here's something that, like a fly in amber, may forever be encased inside the Intriguing Idea category. See it as a way-cool NoteTaker grace note; a toy surprise at the bottom of the AquaMinds box.

All of the semi-documented app-launching text commands in Safari work with the embedded NoteTaker browsers I've recently been exploring. By typing the following into the address field of an embedded NoteTaker browser, the self-evident applications are launched:

addressbook:// ichat:// sherlock:// ical:// mailto:ADDRESS

However, because NoteTaker is not designed to be browser-centric, I'm not certain how these techno-echoes of Safari can be turned to my very specific and esoteric blogging advantage.

But stay tuned: Much like that old playwriting example, a gun has been introduced in first act--and you just know it's going to somehow be used by the end of drama . . .

Wednesday, December 1, 2004 12:08:15 PM

Future Shock: Beyond Yesterday's Tomorrows

No Future.
Punk Manifesto, circa 1978

During Thanksgiving--no doubt abetted by the extravagant cigar and the fine single-malt scotch--I resumed pondering blogs and their overly defined place within the time-space continuum. Recently, I ranted about the crypto-fascist temporality of current blog structures, but somewhere between cutting a V into the cigar crown and searching for wooden matches, it struck me that blogs (as currently crippled) are not temporal enough for those who buy into their Reverse March of Time model.

A typical weblog is the ultimate review mirror: This is what I've previously written, in the order I wrote it. But it's pretty useless for signaling authorial intent. In other words, while it does a too efficient job letting you know what I wrote last Tuesday, there is is no elegant way to communicate what I plan to post next Tuesday--and the Tuesday after that. In order to do so, I'd have to create an instantly and automatically archived post about, well, the future. And while the National Archives building informs me that The Past Is Prologue, forcing visitors to dig through historical content to discover what next week promises is conceptually dissonant; a weird online exercise in Back To the Future.

May The Blog Backgrounders Be With You: Another Use For The Blog Book Concept

I've finally gotten around to exploring another promising use for the previously discussed Blog Book. Imagine the idea being brought to bear on a specific, potentially complex topic. The weblog and site references in this type of blog book would be tightly integrated aspects of a single argument. This variety of blog book would be less 3-D blog roll and much more a literal backgrounder that could be used to efficiently reference a complex topic without having to skim its surface within a weblog post.

No Getting Jiggy With the Architect: Assumed Blog Behavior As Weblog Reality

There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept . . .
As you adequately put, the problem is choice.
The Architect
The Matrix Reloaded

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
Brian Eno / Peter Schmidt
Oblique Strategies Card

And how could it be so wrong
When it was so right?
Lloyd Cole
"I'm Gone"

In the wake of my circumlocutious posting about Miles Davis, jazz authenticity, studio composition and--oh yeah--blogging, I've continued to ponder its implications. Which goes to show that even left-field rambling can trigger logical and argumentative dominoing that end at surprising destinations.

An embarrassing product of a Jesuit education (certain members of the Society are still blushing at the dubious achievement of me), I nevertheless had Big Intellectual Fun in school and am particularly grateful that the concept of Right Questions being more important than Right Answers was driven so deeply into me that it merged with my DNA.

It's a simple and somewhat obvious thing, but also enlightening in a Zen-like way: Perfectly correct answers to Wrong Questions paradoxically result in the self-satisfied adrenaline rush of being Absolutely Right at the same time you are Utterly Wrong. But being a pleasure-seeking species, we rarely look beyond that satisfied high. This goes far in explaining many--if not most--of humanity's screw-ups: Smartly reasoned responses to thoroughly stupid queries.

Blog Books Redux: Organization As Meaning

A couple days downstream of invention's white heat/white light, I'm considering blog books (think blog rolls on steroids) in a more tactical fashion.

If the main reason to focus the power of NoteTaker on blogging is to deepen nearly every aspect of that process, shouldn't the same be true of NoteTaker-based blog inventories? And yes, while the aforementioned proof-of-concept did an excellent, gleamy-spandex-and-ray-guns job of demonstrating that blog rolls could be Significantly Different and Flexible when fueled by NoteTaker, let's face it: In the adrenaline-rush of Hey, we can do this!, I'm afraid I opted for nothing much more than a gratuitous, tech victory dance in the blog end zone. And while "Ha! Top This, You Bastards!" does have a certain joie de vie about it, I think we'd all be better served by further examination under, ahem, Adult Supervision.

I'd Tell You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You

Honey, I'm home. . . . Now someone much smarter than myself would simply reach for the Dallas Dream Season Stratagem: I could simply pretend that this was indeed September 1st and hack the posting dates to mess with your collective minds. But of course, That Would Be Wrong. Suffice it to say, I can't tell you what I've been up to in the past five weeks because many of my associates would wind up behiind bars or worse. However I can tell you that the seriously bent incident concluded with me waking up in the back of a 1954 Chevy in Rio with no clear idea how I got there. And there is the other small matter of a tattoo that says Res Ipsa Loquitur in the precise Old English typeface of The New York Times. Indeed. If I needed any further evidence that my Speedo days are over, this is certainly it.

And that takes care of that--or will have to until certain statutes of limitations run out. Now, in the immortal words of Pink, "I'm comin' up so you better get this party started . . . "

New Rulez for a New Technology

I recently had lunch with former coworkers from a couple of lifetimes ago. We don't do this often and so there's much to catch up on, both personally and professionally. At one point, the conversation turned to weblogs--or, to be precise, business blogs. (Remarkably,I didn't bring the subject up, preferring instead to keep secret my alternate identity as Blog Concept Guy. Doing so ensures that the front of my house isn't paint-balled by all of those loathsome Teen Diarists I regularly bang on.) One of my friends went slightly wide-eyed and said her firm was thinking of establishing a blog, but "What if someone said something bad on it? It would be up there forever for everyone to see!" (For once, the italics are not mine--they're hers.) Indeed, what would happen?

The wonderment was not ironic, and I sensed that no one around the table was humoring her with their well-what-are-you-gonna-do smiles. Quickly finding a nearby phone booth, I changed into Blog Concept Guy and came to her rescue. I suggested that perhaps people talking back online was not a bad thing at all. That there was a definite Zen to blogs and, begging the pardon of Bill Maher, New Rules--or, nodding to the online nature of the topic at hand, New Rulez. And that's when I got the humoring smiles absent when the table contemplated that if you spout an opinion (corporate or otherwise) in public (online or otherwise), be prepared for rebuttal (and, in certain dubious circumstances, the possibility of a broken beer bottle coming at you, held by someone shaped like a refrigerator.)

Before we go further, let's lay our cards on the table--yeah, all of them. If you're here reading this post on this weblog, you've gone through a multi-level process of self-selection: You blog or you want to blog; you use a Mac; you are a current or potential NoteTaker user (or the competition fruitlessly attempting to gather strategic intelligence), you are sufficiently advanced as a computer user that combining the functions of multiple applications is actually seen as Good Thing, and because of all this, the idea of people civilly commenting to blog postings is no reason for paradigm meltdown. On the other hand, you may simply be here because I use "Free," "Sex" and "Now" as metatags for all of these posts--in which case, please accept my apologies . . .

Moblogging: Mo Hassle, Less NoteTaker

Once again I'm in Digital Nomad mode: On the road and grappling with industrial-strength, attention-shattering stuff. So the postings of the next few days may be closer to randomly occurring shards--pretty much like dispatches from the Front, which, given the nature of this trip, they are.

Prior to reporting in, I stared at my Clie NX-80 (to differentiate it from my 12-inch PowerBook, I call it God's Other Machine). I thought about how I had the foresight to not only set up my TypePad moblogging account, but also to test it. I also thought, well, I'm mobile, and, yeah, I have a blog, and if I file from the road, I suppose I would be moblogging, so . . .

But then I thought again. I'd need my Clie, the Sony 100 collapsable keyboard (the quiet realization of my lifelong James-Bond-Gadget fetish), the wireless card for the Clie and probably my messenger's bag to carry all of this expensive stuff. And then I looked at my PowerBook, Zen-like in it's Incase bag, ready--in one housing--to do what the other four things were valiantly trying to achieve, only in miniature. And, okay, the Clie has a built in camera--big deal, there's room in the outside pocket of the Incase for my Canon Elph. (And what, precisely, am I using the thing for, beyond proving that I can post photos from my table at Starbucks? The very idea of lining up a shot of Anonymous Coffee Teen preparing a Vanilla Latte bores me as a concept--so I can imagine how interested you're going to be.)

Email In Blogs: Maybe Not Snow or Rain, But Sometimes Compatibility Can Complicate Things

In general, the idea of weblogs is still overly narrow (see yesterday's post for a taste of My Favorite Rant). Feedback to a posting is still seen to come primarily in the form of visitor comments. And while most blogs dutifully feature an Email Me option, there is no seamless way to integrate email with blogging: Annoying cut-and-paste seems to be the only way. And, as usual whenever I stare at weblogs, I simply ask "How come?"

In making it easier for blogs to incorporate real-time comments than email responses, weblogs once again speciously suggest that when they are not busy being diaries, they are a broadcast medium--or at least a weird, nonprofessional's idea of broadcasting. Imagine that your only effective response to a radio show with which you took exception was to call into the show. While you might be encouraged to write the station, all mail was treated as some ambient, after-the-fact focus group thing; not seen to be directly engaged in dialog with the broadcast content. That's pretty much my take on how email currently relates to blogging. And, again, I'm here to say it doesn't have to be this way--especially when using NoteTaker in concert with Ecto as a powerfully enhanced weblog client.

Theoretically, NoteTaker should do a bang-up job handling mail; it has proven itself many times over as a peerless organizer of multimeda content. And after all, what's email but one more medium to be thrown into the mix?

Oh, And One More Thing

Yes, that is a live-browser view of the TypePad controls panels you see embedded in the notebook's page, conveniently close to the entry being posted. I should feign hipster insouciance about this little feature, but, hell--how drop-dead cool is that? (There goes 20 years of cyberpunk posturing down the drain.)

Sunday, June 6, 2004 9:53:20 AM

Getting Started: The NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript

Here's what you need to do to get NoteTaker and Ecto talking ot each other:

(1) Download the NoteTaker/Ecto AppleScript here.

(2) Decompress the file. (It's in StuffIt SIT format.)

(3) Open your computer's root Library and then open the Scripts folder. Alternatively, you can open the user Library and then the Scripts folder.

(4) Drag the saved NoteTaker/Ecto Applescript into the NoteTaker folder within the Scripts folder. (If you don't find a NoteTaker folder within the Scripts folder, create one.)

(5) If it's running, close and then restart NoteTaker.

(6) The NoteTaker/Ecto script is now available in NoteTaker's "Scripts" menu (found on the application's Menu Bar).

Everything you want to know about the finer points of AppleScripts can be found here.

Friday, June 4, 2004 11:28:09 AM

Once Upon a Time . . .

This weblog is designed to be proof-of-concept with regard to using AquaMinds' NoteTaker application and Ecto for directly posting entries to TypePad blogs. Additionally, it is intended to be an Index of Possiblities: Tricks, tips, work-arounds and enhancements that can be when working with these three applications.

The concept of blogging has resonated with the general public because, paradoxically, it's seen as the easiest way of creating a website--even though the real revolutionary breakthrough is that a weblog is a cheap and effective content management system.

Blogs have proliferated across the Internet with almost viral speed. But even though they are ubiquitous, there has so far not been a simple, feature-rich and powerful way to blog. At one end of the spectrum, professional blogging clients undermine the idea of blogs as "easy websites" by demanding significant levels of HTML knowledge and experience. At the other end, there are simplistic, WYSIWYG diary-based blogging clients that do little more than put a friendly face on weblog input screens.

But what if blogging could be pursued via a virtual notebook? A notebook that has the power to clip and save items from the Internet? A notebook that allows content searchs of itself? A notebook that can be structured to mirror the organization of the user's weblog? A notebook with entries that are transformed into blog postings with a mouse click?

What if this blogging notebook enabled a user to search the Internet from inside of entries, enabling her to gather information that can then be used in a blog posting? What if this notebook could also clip passages from other documents on the user's hard drive that could similarly be used in entries that are then seamlessly posted to a weblog?

This is what the blogging enhancements of AquaMinds NoteTaker promise to do. These capabilities are now made possible by an AppleScript that allows NoteTaker and Ecto, the premier blogging client, to interact with each other. That sudden draft you feel is the arrival of increased weblog ease and possiblities.