As part of my storyline project, I want to be able to gather notes, images, PDFs etc and categorise them so I can then get at them in related "stories".  

Here's an example of some user stories:

>> I find a copy of a school report. I scan it to PDF. I then want to categorise it against

• date (in this case, either a year or a decade)
• name (of student)
• location (of school)
• chapter (school)

>> I receive a letter from a family friend who reminds me about a family holiday which I may later be able to track down some photos of.  I want to categorise it as

• date (probably a year, at least a decade)
• name (of people who were there - my family, the family friend, their family)
• location (of where we took the holiday)
• chapter (holiday)

As an aside, I can't think of a good word for the areas/categories/chapters/whatever which cover things like school, work, holiday, music, netball, church etc - these are the things that will probably become the central points of the stories I will write, and I already have items on my to write about list such as "Write about Mum and netball".  Any suggestions welcomed.

>> I know that I want to write about Mum and netball, so I look through my collected information based on chapter (netball) and then order by date to get the information in one place. I then use it to write my story - which may include some of the photos, like the photo of her and her team, or a photo of the (tarnished) silver trophy I have sitting upstairs in our spare room.

>> I know that I want to use what I've gathered to put together a timeline of her life - where she was (roughly) and what she was doing when, so I want to get at all the data, ordered by date.

I'd wondered about using evernote, but it doesn't seem to give me an easy way to get my data back out of it in a very usable/transferrable method (happy to be proved wrong). I've experimented with Scrivener, but I couldn't work out a way of tagging chunks of information in different ways. So, what other tools are there? What would be worth me spending an hour or so playing with to see if I can coerce it into doing what I need?

I've been making a lot of use of my Amazon kindle, but I was mildly annoyed that only annotations and highlights from Amazon purchased books end up on the kindle.amazon.com site.  After doing a bit of reading, I discovered that the highlights and annotations are stored in 2 places on the kindle itself.  Firstly embedded in the .mbp files that can be found in the Documents folder when the kindle is mounted, and secondly in the My Clippings.txt file, found in the same place.

The applications and scripts I found to query the mbp files seemed to only return the last few annotations/highlights, which wasn't what I wanted.  I found a few applications that were windows based, but couldn't find anything for the mac, so, I decided to roll up my sleeves and do battle with applescript to write something that did what I wanted.

What I wanted was :

• To use the My Clippings.txt file so I got all the highlights/annotations
• To produce a text file per book listing highlights and annotations ordered by location
• Optionally add the location to the end of the highlight/annotation

I used a couple of my Wednesday afternoon's at home to write the script, learnt quite a lot about applescript in the process, and polished my swearing as I got more and more frustrated with applescript and myself.  

Originally I intended to spend some time refactoring and making it look prettier, but I've got it doing pretty much what I wanted, and having spoken to a few people, they thought it was probably useful as a starter for anyone else who wanted to do something similar.

So, I've added it to my downloads page and made it available here.  The usual disclaimer applies - use at your own risk.  If you refactor this to be prettier/more efficient I'd love to see the changes.

To use it:

• Open the file in the applescript editor
• Take a look at the code if you wish - I've tried to comment the methods etc
• Run the code
• A dialog will be displayed asking you to select your My Clippings.txt file - I've been copying this off the kindle and on to my desktop to ensure I can't destroy the original at all
• A second dialog will be displayed asking you to select an output folder to put the text files in
• A message box will be displayed asking you if you want to delete all files currently in the folder - the default is no
• A message box will be displayed asking you if you want the location data appending to the end of a highlight/annotation - the default is yes
• The script will then work through the My Clippings.txt file producing a text file per annotated/highlighted book (no bookmarks are output)
• A final message box will be displayed telling you how many files it has output

Hope this script proves useful to someone.

Another one for the "note to self" file.

Richard asked me to proof-read a review of a book he'd written.  He sent it to me as a RTF document directly to my kindle via the free.kindle.com email address.  

I found a few spelling mistakes, some grammar issues and some bits which didn't scan/parse as well as they could.  I initially started making notes against them, but realised that without context these were useless, so started highlighting the relevant text too.  Highlights and Notes are stored in date order, with the most recent at the end of a file, which means that to get this right, the order needs to be:

• Highlight the text to give the comment context
• Make a note about the thing that is spelt wrong or whatever

As I hadn't done this, I needed to edit the clippings afterwards in a text file which was time-consuming and painful, and the main reason why I've written this as a blog post.

The clippings for all books can be found on the My Clippings.txt in the documents folder on the Kindle (or at least they can when mounted on a mac).  This is a text file which contains information like:

==========
<File Name> (<author name>)
- Highlight Loc. 14 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2010, 04:23 PM

<highlighted text>
==========
<File Name> (<author name>)
 - Note Loc. 14 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2010, 04:24 PM

<contents of note>

I needed to go through this file after I'd read the review and match up the Highlight with the Note and re-order.  Definitely something to avoid next time, or to find/write a macro/script to help with

I started using delicious many years ago and have built up quite a collection of (mostly) tagged bookmarks. With the (now confirmed) rumours of delicious being shut down doing the rounds I've exported my data in preparation for a change of service and started thinking about what I currently want from a bookmarking service, and here is what I've come up with:

• Ability to tag my bookmarks 
• Ability to export my bookmarks annotated with tags (and notes if appropriate) 
• Ability to import my delicious bookmarks keeping the tags and notes
• Ability to bookmark pages from a browser via a bookmarklet
• Ability to bookmark an article from my RSS reader (google reader on my laptop/work PC and Reeder on my iPhone) 
• Ability to bookmark a page through instapaper on the iPhone (currently I use ping.fm to do this for delicious via email which is a bit of a kludge) 
• Ability to search through my bookmarks to re-locate a site based on tag or notes 

I'm not too bothered about the social networking side of things with my bookmarks so I don't really have any requirements around this at the moment. I tend to read most content currently via Reeder or Instapaper, both of which have email capacity so I tend to fire off an email containing the link and annotations to relevant people, or even copy and paste the link into a tweet where appropriate.  I don't feel the need to create yet another social presence at this time.

So, what next? I'm going to start by reading through the suggestions made via this collaborative spreadsheet and pick out a few that seem to meet my initial requirements and then do a bit more digging into those.

Just something I noticed by accident the other day. If you've got a URL in your clipboard on the iPhone and open up Instapaper it asks if you'd like to add it to Instapaper. This is really useful functionality which I didn't know about, meaning I've been pasting URLs into safari and then relying on a JavaScript bookmark. This saves me a step.

Last night I forwarded an email I'd received to toodledo so that I could action it later.  I got a reply, this is most unusual, I don't normally get a reply. On closer investigation it was an error message telling me that my mail couldn't be delivered and giving me just enough of a diagnostic message to be potentially useful.

I tried to forward my email again, and got the same response. So I raised my first ever support ticket with Toodledo explaining the problem. Within about half an hour I'd got a response, and they'd fixed my problem.  What was most rewarding though was the message in the response

Thanks for reporting this bug. We were seeing some errors but we hadn't been able to locate the source yet. You helped us find it. It is fixed now. 

That really made me feel that raising the issue was helpful, and useful, and that I'd contributed to the fix.

About a year ago now, I tweeted

Looking for a mind mapping application for the iPhone or iPod Touch - any recommendations?

A friend of mine mentioned iBlueSky and after a look at the website I bought it. At the time I was planning a couple of Madgex ILP talks, and wanted to try out mind-mapping as a way of organising my thoughts.

One year one and I'm making a lot of use of iBlueSky again as part of my NVQ work. So, the time has come to finally review the app for others who may be looking for an iPhone/iPod Touch mind-mapping app.

How do I use it?

I use iBlueSky mainly for idea capture, I like that I can jot down ideas when I get a spare few minutes. It doesn't seem to take long for me to lose myself in the problem domain and add new thoughts. As I mentioned above, I've been making a lot of use of it for my NVQ work, and just the research for Unit D1 has resulted in 3 or 4 mind maps.

Getting started

The first page you're going to be presented with is a list of projects. Clicking on any one of these will open the project for editing. The order can be changed via the Settings application - allowing you to order them manually, by created date or by last modified date (which is what I've chosen to use)

Getting maps in and out

One of the more recent additions to iBlueSky is the ability to import mind-maps. As mentioned on their website, as of version 2.0, released in June

iBlueSky now imports and exports in Novamind, OPML and Freemind formats.

Exports are handled via email, and are provided in PNG, PDF, MM (which works with FreeMind), text, OPML, NMIND and their own BSKY format. You don't chose a format, when you do email the project, all formats get created and appended to the email.

There is also an option to backup all of the projects - this uses Box.Net, a website for sharing files, which comes with a limited free version. All projects are stored in a folder called iBlueSky in the files area. These projects are stored as BSKY format, which are importable via the import function.

How does it work?

I've found the app to be really conducive to getting ideas into a usable format. I start off with a node with the name of the idea/project/task, and start from there. Each branch created off that main node will have a different colour. The colours can be changed if so required.

Branches can be cut or copied and so can be moved around if ideas are found to be more or less related.

The orientation of the map changes according to the way that the device is held. There doesn't seem to be a way to lock the orientation, a feature which would be very useful. You can zoom in to the map, so you can see the whole map or a part of it as you feel you need.

How much?

When I bought it a year ago, I paid £4.99. It is now £1 more at £5.99. It is one of the most expensive apps I've bought, and I do go through stages when I don't use it. But, when I do need to do some mind mapping, I find it great. I tend to use it in conjunction with FreeMind now that these can be imported and so will update sometimes on the iPod Touch, and sometimes at a computer.

Anything else?

I recently had the app crash a couple of times, once when emailing, and once when just generally editing. I mentioned this on twitter, and within an hour had been responded to, given the support email address and was in conversation with Tenero as they tried to resolve my issues - most impressive.

Would I buy it again?

Yes, I sure would. The app has evolved (in a good way) over the past year, and has got some great features. It works well for me and suits what I'm trying to do.

Supporting material

The mind map for this review