Applications
The following programs belong to the most-used and most-liked programs I use.
DokuWiki
http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki
I can only recommend using a .txt-based Wiki for long-term storage of projects, ideas, and many more. DokuWiki uses .txt-files to store the contents of the wiki (which itself uses only a webserver and PHP) and a dedicated directory to store the media files (which remain there unchanged). I have made some modifications with my version of the Wiki:
- Ferret (Enhanced Wiki) (using Frames to facilitate data entry in Wikis)
- DokuWiki Adjustments (Image Maps, date-dependent links, link-to-edit, color schemes, etc.)
but even unchanged it is well worth a look.
Circus Ponies Notebook
Computers use common metaphors pretty heavily: Files & Folders, Desktop, etc. The best use of a metaphor is Circus Ponies Notebook for OS X. It uses the common notebook metaphor to help you store your … notes, ideas, to-do’s, pictures, files, nearly everything you want to organize into one project. It has very useful outliner-pages (which I solely use), that allow a hierarchical ordering of ideas and folding away any parts that are not relevant at the moment (great for writing a thesis paper). It also has a clipping function, meaning you can mark interesting texts in any application and with the click of four mouse buttons (it’s not Palm) you can send the text to the selected notebook page. While the project may be too large for a single notebook, it is a great organizer and compared to the paper & pen version, you can easily transfer, change or move around whole blocks of information. Screencastsonline has a very good screencast about Circus Ponies Notebook Version 3.
Further Information
- Circus Ponies Notebook and Scrivener for Writing
Short remark about two of my favorite programs for writing projects. - Circus Ponies Notebook for Academic Writing (e.g., Thesis Writing)
Describing my academic (reading) work flow and using Circus Ponies Notebook to write articles with the read material. - Circus Ponies Notebook: The Best Tool for Structuring Creative Writing Projects (esp. Research Projects)
Describing the main functions of Circus Ponies Notebook to illustrate its suitability for structuring projects.
Scrivener
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
What does an author do, when he has trouble finding a good writing software? He writes his own. At least, that’s what the creator of Scrivener did. His program is just … brilliant. It is written by a writer for writers, with all features you would seek if you had the idea. You got all the chapters and parts of chapters on the left so that you can easily jump to different parts of the book, synopsis cards where you can write what should happen in the chapter, tracking of versions, status (e.g. draft, final version, what-ever-you-think-of), document and project notes, a whole area for research (think: documents, pictures, texts), version control, side-by-side compare windows and a full screen writing mode that completely or selectively blacks out the rest of the screen (to focus on the writing and not on the screaming program buttons in the background). I have looked at different programs, but found none that are as excellent as this program. Especially for windows the programs are gut-wrenching: shareware applications that scream shareware in look-and-feels and functions (e.g. a jump to a different chapter prompts the question “You have modified this document. Do you want to save it?” — the typical “I interrupt your work flow because I want to feel more important than you attitude of Windows” that brings down employees all over the world. Scrivener, however, works like a breeze, never interrupting you, even auto-saving every second to minimize the chance of data loss, which, in case of creative writing, is usually non-replaceable.
Further Information
- Circus Ponies Notebook and Scrivener for Writing
Short remark about two of my favorite programs for writing projects. - Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing
Describing my favorite writing program — Scrivener — and its strengths for writing of longer academic texts.
