your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

Yeh, Sente's killer feature for me was binning EndNote.

TBH being able to format a citation properly and the amount of swearing it causes in my girlfriend was reason enough not to bother with endnote.

not mac but gotta believe google apps will eat http://www.pixlr.com/ any day now

I've been hearing about Papers, I will give it a try. I use BibDesk to manage my citations (I work almost entirely in *TeX) and I guess it can be used as a paper organizer, but I've not explored that. But what I'd like is a program organizing other author's PDFs in which I could take notes on papers ---and preferably write notes on topics for which there is no corresponding paper; a note organizer in addition to a paper organizer. Right now I have notes scattered all through my folders, because my papers intersect topics somewhat but then I don't know where to put the notes on that topic. There must be something good in all those notes I wrote, say, 5 years ago, that I haven't opened since then!

I don't know how Papers handles this, but in Sente you can do pretty much this: highlight the text of the PDF you want to note, hit "note" and it'll extract it and leave a space for you to type yr note. You can make yr own notes without a reference as well.

Video: http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/videos/notes.html

xpost

See, this kind of thing is why I love and adore Spotlight ... even if I don't know which file or folder I put some random thoughts, I can apple-Space, search for those thoughts and invariably find them.

What I'd really, really like is for Spotlight also to be able to search iPhone notes when it's connected (or even in wifi range) ...

I don't trust spotlight: too often it doesn't bring up results that I *know* are there. It's most obvious with System Preference panes, which should appear but often don't.

I haven't found Spotlight as useful as I'd hoped it would be for finding information in my notes. That's partly a function of how many notes I have, and how many repeated phrases there are in them. I think no automated solution will help with this, though.

xpost exactly

DevonThink's intelligent categorisation might be able to help with that. Review here:
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html

I am very big on devonthink. Organises my mind so I don't have to.

been debating for a while whether devonthink is something i ought to use....not doing research, tho, so it might be overkill.

also, i work exclusively in *TeX, but i'll look into this papers thing

I looked at the DevonThink website, found it kinda bewildering but maybe if I d/l a demo it'll make more sense.

It's one of those "Everything buckets" like Yojimbo, that you drop PDFs, RTFs, .docs, text, pix etc into, and can categorise them, but it has extra auto categorisation that tries to sort them for you. It's pretty handy.

i'm sure it is, but i just opened it up for a minute (forgot i had a copy) and was bewildered

i guess if you don't have a proj in mind, it's not as useful?

dudes, PAPERS

if it exports into .bib then omg

finally got it configured to play nice with my school's EZproxy

yeah!

It is the best, although it doesn't like our schools web vpn. Which is only an issue because I haven't had time to get the proper VPN working.

Thing I like most about Devon think is the "see also" button.

any good ones tht do useless shit like eg sizeup?

why doesn't osx offer sizeup's functionality as standard wtf

It is the best, although it doesn't like our schools web vpn. Which is only an issue because I haven't had time to get the proper VPN working.

― Prince of Persia (Ed), Wednesday, April 29, 2009 8:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

fwiw it didn't work with my 'proper' VPN either---i login with the cisco VPN client and papers totally failed to realize this (whereas my browser doesn't, for example). it wasn't until i went into preferences and entered the EZProxy address (which i found on some grad student's blog) that it started playing well with pubmed et al

i really loathe that fucking cisco client

do you know a better one? serious!

Nah, there's a little app that lets you sign on more quickly, but it's pay-for and ultimately just a wrapper for the cisco one.

I'm hoping there's going to be native support in snow leopard, as the iPhone already has it.

more quickly? mine's like instantaneous, weird

Holy shit. VMWare Fusion is kinda awesome, isn't it? I mean, that's some straight-outta-the-box, just-works action. So I'm writing this in Google Chrome on XP in a virtual PC based on my Boot Camp partition on my Mac desktop. Which is going to be *so fucking useful* once I start some serious NVivo action next year.

I love it when Shit Just Works.

good for your circadian rhythm: http://stereopsis.com/flux/

can someone recommend a to-do widget or something? I need to start setting up reminders now that my brain has turned into a sieve.

don't both iCal and google calendar take care of that?

yeah maybe. I found something called "to-do" that gives you a little notepad that puts those into ical for you.

i think I really want a widget to actually do all the tasks I need to do for me, but widgets seem unwilling to drive to another town and collect rent checks from people, take in my dry cleaning, or code bullshit webpages.

xcal

oops i mean xpad

http://bpfrommer.com/newest_images_2/ermaBombeck.jpg

"i think I really want a widget to actually do all the tasks I need to do for me, but widgets seem unwilling to drive to another town and collect rent checks from people, take in my dry cleaning, or code bullshit webpages."

I use both xPad for lots of note storing and this To Do Dashboard widget that pulls from your iCal To Do list.

i use omnifocus because i am a total aspie, but i have heard good things about http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

Use taskpaper here.

I've started using Remember The Milk (on your recommendation, Stet!): web-based task manager that syncs with iCal. So far I'm impressed (even though the interface is a bit barking) and will probably stump up the cash for a subscription further down the line. Need to play with the iPhone client first.

I think you need to subscribe before you can use the iPhone client. I really like it though.

I think you can get a free trial for a couple of weeks.

ooh task paper looks neat. right up my alley. any tips?

Smoking Apples has a pretty thorough review of the four major task management apps at:
http://smokingapples.com/software/reviews/gtd-on-your-mac-part-1-things-and-the-hit-list/
http://smokingapples.com/software/reviews/gtd-on-your-mac-part-2-midnight-inbox-and-taskpaper/

FWIW I went with Things but for me an iPhone sync/client is mandatory. Task Paper is pretty cool, but I think if I was going to go that route, I'd just install Dokuwiki on my server and access it from anywhere.

Things just seems so pricey ... I'm quite sure it's magnificent, but I can't justify that outlay for functionality I can, ultimately, cobble together in other ways.

^yeah agreed, honestly it's hard for me to justify paying for these apps for generally a prettier version of this kind of thing

Things just seems so pricey ... I'm quite sure it's magnificent, but I can't justify that outlay for functionality I can, ultimately, cobble together in other ways.

I wouldn't disagree at all. Ultimately, I was in a hurry and needed something up and running immediately. Plus I realized that the purchase would be eligible for a tax write off and that's what got me to pull the trigger.

I bought DevonThink after thinking about a lot. I sprang for the top model which was very pricy but I played with the demo and the integration with OCR was excellent---I have lots and lots of scanned documents from which I spend plenty of time typing long excerpts, and now I won't have to. I still don't know how it's going to fit into my workflow but I'm optimistic.

cool, please post updates. i've tried a couple of times but felt like i was being slowed down.

I played with the demo and the integration with OCR was excellent---I have lots and lots of scanned documents from which I spend plenty of time typing long excerpts, and now I won't have to. I still don't know how it's going to fit into my workflow but I'm optimistic.

How does it's OCR compare with the one in Evernote? (assuming that you've used Evernote)

I've not used Evernote so I can't say. It's just the Abbyy OCR package, and it seems to have done a good job of recognizing the text from a pretty mediocre scan. But what was the real deal for me is how I can add the PDF to DevonThink and then just click a button to make it a text-searchable PDF, and it automagically adds the text to the database for further searches.

I also d/l'ed Scrivener and am using it to put together a talk I have to give in a couple of weeks. Normally I just work in whatever program I'm going to use for the final project (in this case, Keynote) but with Scrivener I can draft the talk informally and keep a bunch of notes for it at hand, and then ripping out the presentation should be straightforward in the end.

writing talks in keynote or powerpoint never works. i just use an outliner or text editor though.

I've written a lot of talks in recent years right in Keynote, but this talk is pretty complex and so it's not working. Maybe I just have been giving too easy talks in recent years! Actually, it's just that I'm still formulating what this paper is saying as I'm writing the talk; it's not just rehashing old thoughts.

i tend to structure my papers a little differently to my talks, so it always needs structural work even if i already have one to work from when writing the other.