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Outliner to find associations
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Posted by Sebastien Berthet
Jan 19, 2007 at 02:06 AM
Franz, Steve and Ken,
Thank you very much for your answers.
I am very surprised that only DevonThink has this kind of feature. It looks brilliant !
This will be the first app I’ll purchase if I switch one day to the Mac.
I can’t understand why other outliners (especially on windows) do not try to have such “AI” features (even if the “AI” terminology is a bit oversized to describe this).
Ken, eXpertSystem is a kind of “predefined cards stock” with intelligent questions made by “experts” to help and guide brainless people during a work session supposed to be creative. They have two (overpriced and useless) products for Fiction writers:
http://richcontent.blogs.com/creative_writing_software/
http://richcontent.blogs.com/expert_screenwriter_softw/
Regards,
Sebastien
Posted by Graham Smith
Jan 21, 2007 at 08:55 AM
Sebastien
>What I would love is an outliner able to propose me *associations* on the
>fly. Indeed, when I write, I constantly gather some keywords out of my new text and use
>them to do a manual search in Treepad to discover which ideas, snippets and notes could
>be used to complete and improve this new text.
Although, this will not be of much help to the majority, but the Remembrance addin for Emacs would seem to do exactly what you want.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs-en?action=browse;oldid=RemembranceAgent;id=RemembranceAgents
As I am still setting my Emacs system up, looking at this will be some way down the line, but it would seem to be a way of combining a good (multi-platform) outliner with the feature you are looking for.
Graham
Posted by Sebastien Berthet
Jan 21, 2007 at 06:31 PM
Thank you Graham,
Unfortunately, it works on unix based systems only, and I can’t imagine working with an engineer-designed word processor like Emacs ;-)
Anyway, Remembrance is very very interesting, and I really hope that developers of outliners will soon consider adding such features into their app.
BTW, I think I’ve found one after reading the following on shashdot:
“The Literary Machine [literarymachine.com] provides a lot of power in a Windows environment. The basic version was free last I checked, though he’s ceased development on it in favor of the Pro version ($20), which is being actively developed and integrates a number of new features (but I haven’t tried it yet). It organizes everything based on a non-hierarchical keyword association system, and while it takes some getting used to (and can be downright messy sometimes), it does allow for the discovery of connections between notes that you might not have put together otherwise.”
source:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/16/236216&mode=thread&tid=185
This software is certainly good, but the UI is a tribute to the computer first ages! Has anyone used it successfully ?
Thanks again,
Sebastien
Posted by Graham Smith
Jan 21, 2007 at 09:07 PM
Sebastien,
>Unfortunately, it works on unix based systems only,
Seems to also work on the Mac, but I’m having problems finding anything positive about a Windows version. It also seems that development has stopped. A problem with Emacs, a rather attractive Emacs gantt chart tool that I got excited about also seems to be no longer developed either
>and I can’t imagine working with an engineer-designed word processor like Emacs ;-)
Well, I have only been using it for a few weeks (in Windows, and spurred on by the thread on using text editors) and I am finding it a great writing tools, with some really nice wrinkles such keystrokes to transpose characters, words, sentences and paragraphs, and I like the fact that nearly all the window is used for text maximising the information I can read when I have several windows open, and I like the outlining and file management capability I have become a fan, and have moved my time management and free form data management into Emacs as well as my writing and small spreadsheet work, but its a steep learning curve.
Not sure about the “engineer-designed bit Stallman was a software developer interested in music and dance and has written science fiction novels. Now I think he is a “full time” political activist.
>“The Literary Machine [literarymachine.com] provides a lot of power in a Windows environment.
>This software is certainly good, but the UI is a tribute to the computer first ages! Has anyone used it successfully ?
I bought a copy years ago, but couldn’t get on with it. Nor does it work the way remembrence does, it relies on you assigning multiple key words and synonyms, which it then recalls via search or hyperlink - if I remember correctly.
My main recollection of it being that it was very difficult to get to grips with, and I gave up - even though ot showed promise.
Graham
Posted by Edwin Yip
Sep 29, 2009 at 04:04 AM
Hi,
Everybody interests in such a writing software (a Word addin) that pretty much combines Microsoft Word?, treepad and SuperNoteCard together to make the whole writing process smoother, check my reply to Sebastien in another similar thread:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/1074/25
Writing Outliner - Turn Microsoft Word into an all-in-one writing software.
http://WritingOutliner.com