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ConnectedText v5
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Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Sep 26, 2011 at 08:42 AM
@Daly
@Graham
@Eduardo
I consider ConnectedText as one of the most impressing applications available today even I don’t have use case for it.
PersonalBrain is the perfect tool for me. That’s neither good nor bad nor does it mean that PersonalBrain is better than ConnectedText. In the end, I can’t even compare these two applications because they are so different.
Apart from creating links to other thoughts with jumps/parents/childs you can add direct links to other thoughts in the notes section of the active thought similar to the wiki style: Just type the name of the thought you want to link to -> highlight it -> right click -> choose ?“Insert link to a thought” and you are done.
All the best,
Dominik
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 26, 2011 at 11:27 AM
@Daly
If you are still interested in giving CT a trial, there are some topics in the “Welcome to ConnectedText” project written by users which can help you get started. The one I found most valuable is named “Texting to your Taste.” You can search for this topic, or—in some ways easier—open the Topics pane (via the View menu). I like to keep this pane open all the time anyway; I drag it to the right side of the screen where it anchors. You now have a handy index of all the topics in the project arranged alphabetically. Anyway, the Texting to Your Taste topic provides some handy advice for how you might approach using CT.
I would add, as a pretty novice user myself, that I think the best way to approach CT if you’re feeling stumped is to open the Topics pane (as described above) for reference and then to just create notes as you need them. Don’t worry about linking notes unless it feels natural. While CT is a desktop wiki, it is first and foremost a notes database. Wiki links is just one of the handy ways to organize and relate those notes. But the beauty of CT is that it provides many other ways to work with them. I’m stilling learning these.
I do agree that one of the bigger stumbling blocks is the wiki markup. Basic markup is pretty easy to master. But using some of the more advanced features like setting attributes requires learning some expressions, and I personally don’t have a good mind for learning these easily. Baby steps is how I’m approaching things.
As an aside, I’ve started seeing ConnectedText as the Windows version of Tinderbox. There are a lot of similarities in the programs. Great power for those who invest the time to learn to use them properly; a mysterious mashup for those who (reasonably) prefer their applications have a more intuitive feel.
Steve Z.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Sep 26, 2011 at 12:19 PM
>Baby
>steps is how I’m approaching things.
Yes, I think that’s the right approach and agrees with my current CT learning experience.
Otherwise my own learning approach was slightly different. After reading the help topics Stephen points out, I actually chose to create a single topic and then work it to death rather than creating multiple small topics. Because of the interlinked nature of the beast, I wanted to understand what happens as you add markup. So I imported a topic, changed the layout, added images and so on, to check what happened. Then I added URLs and internal links and checked what happened. Then I added properties and attributes, and checked what happened. And so on. I found this enabled me to work out what would happen if I ..., because CT does a lot of background work which is valuable and saves extra input. For example, if I add the capital city of each country in a different topic but add a “capital city” property to it, if you do it right you’ll get a new topic with all the capital cities together.
If you’re interested in where I’ve got and what I’ve produced, you can look at http://www.grcdi.nl/cttest/hungary.HTML
Graham
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 26, 2011 at 01:02 PM
@Graham,
Impressive! Thank you for sharing what you can do with CT.
Steve Z.
Posted by Cassius
Sep 26, 2011 at 01:41 PM
Connected text looks interesting, but:
As I am now retired (am I the only one here?), I really have little use for it.
The need to learn a markup language is a turn-off. It seems to me that the markups could be semi-automated with menu items (with associated keyboard entries) that would insert the markups, possibly without the symbols appearing on-screen or with common words or symbols appearing in place of the markup symbols. EASE OF USE is what sells software.