Exploring AquaMinds NoteTaker

Pulp Blogging: Getting Stuff Into NoteTaker (In Which Mr Sheridan Takes An Inordinate Amount of Time Getting To the Point, Gambling the Tips Are Worth the Ride)

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.

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.

Today's Tangelo Tip: Hybrid Solution or Devil's Spawn?

It's like this: I'm in the midst of overhauling the structure of my blogging notebook in preparation for the next installment to this, the techno-equivalent of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And, as I was working out the pre-fab structure of my newly minted page-per-day approach, well, my attention wandered down to my desktop's dock. Lurking there was a brace of Graphic Visualization Stuff, including the NovaMind and the superlative OmniGraffle (which has produced most of the charts on this site).

I looked at the simple outline I was creating in NoteTaker and then at the GV Stuff. I looked at the GV Stuff and then at the NT outline. And even though I realized I was meddling with things Man Was Meant To Leave Alone, the urge clearly had me--there was no going back: I had to see my NoteTaker outline in glorious Technicolor and CinemaScope.

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.

Archiving Revisited (Or How I Learned To Start Worrying and Love Second Thoughts)

I'm not predisposed to revisiting previous work. My relationship with writing is a bit bipolar: Massive focus up until publication and then, well, I wish the work luck and success Out There and turn my attention to the next nascent prose at hand, thinking little--if ever again--about the finished piece. I suppose my philosophy about my own stuff is like the old Frito Lay tag line: "We'll make more."

Earlier today, however, as I was preparing to add MarsEdit and BlogAssist to the sidebar resources, one of my earlier riffs caught my eye--the one that pointed out NoteTaker could also be used to archive the actual posted blog entries as proof against some sort of Blog Service Provider Armageddon. In retrospect, it's basically my weblog version of Dr. Strangelove's subterranean plan for survivors.