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<p class="entry-content"><div><p>I was wondering again about easy data input paradigms, this time with text/writing/blogging in mind. The <a href="http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page">Freemind</a> mindmapper has come along somewhat since I last looked, though being stuck in a tree is still frustrating. (I was planning on buying Tinderbox when I got a Mac, still not got around to it). I also had another look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer">Dave Winer</a>'s OPML Editor, this time on the iBook. It looks a lot better than on Win32, and the outlining does seem to work well for working with simple text structures. Works mostly keyboard-oriented (like the emacs outliner), definitely has potential were the junk ridded. I really must get around to making an outline-friendly HTML editor soon (trying this outliner served frustratingly well to remind me how redundant OPML was).</p> <p>Heh, while hunting around to see if anyone had done a usable, web-friendly outliner since I last looked, I stumbled on this Doug Engelbart interview where he refers to <a href="http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/englebar.htm#tc15">outline processing</a> as part of the stuff they were doing in 1968. I guess everything looks shinier <a href="http://diveintomark.org/">second time around</a>...</p> <p>PS. In comments, HarishKumarM said: <br></br></p> <pre> [[ </pre> <pre> Speaking of not wanting to be "stuck in a tree", I couldnt help wondering about what happened to Ideagraph. Wasnt it supposed to essentially subsume outlines? </pre> <pre> It's odd that we still do not have a outliner/thinking-tool that is based on rdf. </pre> <p>]]</p> <p>This reminded me I'd not tried Martin Dvorak's <a href="http://mindraider.sourceforge.net/">MindRaider</a> recently, billed as a <em>Semantic Web Outliner</em>, it is an outliner/thinking-tool based on rdf. I just had another look, it's very impressive. I need to spend more time with it, but first impressions are that it's got a lot to like. TWiki interfacing is very cool, the RDF I glanced at looks fairly reasonable (nits, but nothing major).</p> <p>There are two things that put me off a little. The MDI interface is like <em>too much</em> for the way I personally tend to work. Until recently I'd drop little notes into a local Wiki (or this blog), but my Wiki's got to the stage where it needs a lot of gardening, so I've reverted to mostly text notes (Aquamacs emacs). What's lacking is the ability to tag/file these in a useful fashion (to get the benefit of SemWeb tech). Winer's got things half-right with his outliner, the basic editor window is comparable to emacs in outliner mode (I've been using org-mode), the rest of the system gets out of your way. The big front end of MindRaider is probably useful for organising and finding stuff in a big-picture kind of way, but lacks the immediacy for quick note jotting (at least for the way I tend to work). I'm not sure, maybe that's possible through the TWiki capbilities. Having a non-proprietary RDF datastore behind the scenes is absolutely spot on, although it would be nice to be able to address the model as a whole (this would probably fairly easily hackable, the persistence appears to be mostly RDF/XML spread across a few directories with some kind of custom XML gluing it together).  </p> <p>It's funny, the longer I postpone resuming work on IdeaGraph (simply haven't had time) the more the way I plan to do things change. Making things project/goal oriented is the biggest conceptual shift, but having a lightweight outliner I think could make a huge difference in overall usability. Dunno, it really calls for a self-contained outliner component that could be plugged in where needed, emphasising MVC separation a bit. With something like the MindRaider setup I could imagine the quick notes with minimal metadata (folksy tags, or similar categroy thing) maybe being saved/POSTed to a staging area (as microformatted XHTML) which would enable more sophisticated linking when the Big mindRaider interface was brought up.</p> <p>Oh yeah, aside from those conceptual and UI shifts, I'd definitely go for a different dev process. A bit of up-front architecture would be needed to get a backend triplestore in place, but aside from that I'd try and do everything driven by immediate requirements - that outliner thingy being top of the list, then maybe search and publish-to-blog. Wherever possible reuse existing kit with loose coupling, but still try and get a consistent in-a-box feel.</p>@en </div></p>
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