MadaboutDana wrote:

Sorry, @tberni – History Book's available via the Mac App
Store, in fact, and is also available for iOS/iPadOS (I use iCloud to
synchronise between my MacBooks and my iPad).

Thank you MadaboutDana. I have already been reading about this app. I am using GoodLinks (from the author of 1Write) with a similar use. The difference is that History Book does an automatic save and with GoodLinks the save has to be voluntary. Both store articles through iCloud. I think Goodlinks is more elegant, and on the other hand it uses tags and has several export options (including markdown).

With History Book a question arises for me: do we need an automatic and (potentially) infinite archive, of all the websites or articles we browse on the internet? I think it seems excessive, overflowing at the end of the day. Maybe we should keep deciding what we select and what we don't, from the beginning. What do you think?

I agree, it's the key question, and one I carefully asked myself before switching History Book on. I save a lot of web pages to specific repositories anyway, in the course of my daily research, so did I also need History Book? Well, the short answer is: yes. I've already had occasion to do searches through pages I've visited in the recent past and somehow failed to capture or annotate while I was actually visiting them.

I've also been impressed by how efficient History Book's storage is – it doesn't save images, you see, it only saves text, which in the greater scheme of things takes up very little space; the images are downloaded (purely for convenient reference) as/when needed. It's not totally unlike the options available for the FoxTrot iOS app, which can either save documents in their entirety, or simply save them as searchable text. But History Book is in many ways more elegant: the "reader" layout is far more user-friendly, and images are included if available, or if you're offline, left out.

As a totally obsessive researcher, I'm a total convert, personally! But I wouldn't be if I was running my life on what 22111 amusingly describes as a Windows slate, i.e. (I assume) a machine with 4GB RAM and a 64GB HDD. Very convenient for some things, totally useless as a large-scale information repository.

Please note that I don't have a vast hard drive, however, and I sync History Book data with my iPad, too (which has 128GB of storage). And I'm impressed by how little room it takes up, even though I've been steadily – and unconsciously, as you say – collecting web data for the past couple of months.

Cheers!
Bill

tberni wrote:

With History Book a question arises for me: do we need an automatic and
(potentially) infinite archive, of all the websites or articles we
browse on the internet? I think it seems excessive, overflowing at the
end of the day. Maybe we should keep deciding what we select and what we
don't, from the beginning. What do you think?

Piqued by your question and with my interest now aroused, I had a root around in History Book to find out exactly how much data it has been saving over the past couple of months (I've been using it since, I think, the end of May).

So I opened up my iPad, synced History Book with my Mac so it was right up to date, and dug into the iPad's usefully informative "Storage" settings. And find that after a couple of months of collecting data, History Book's actual data repository is just 28 MB in size (the app itself is extremely lean and only takes up a few megabytes; I'm talking about the stored data here).

Nowadays, 28 MB is nothing: just a few web pages saved as PDFs can easily come to 28 MB (I should know, I have a vast PDF repository!). Whereas I can search through hundreds of web pages in History Book, even though they only take up 28 MB. Remember, I spend a lot of time on the web researching all sorts of stuff.

Impressive, no?
Cheers!
Bill

MadaboutDana wrote:

Piqued by your question and with my interest now aroused, I had a root
around in History Book to find out exactly how much data it has been
saving over the past couple of months (I've been using it since, I
think, the end of May)...

Impressive: yes! It is very true that plain text archiving is inexpensive relative to everything else that runs on the web. I also understand your argument supporting your use of History Book and thank you for your explanation. Another big issue, involved with all this, is that of the "workflow" of each of us: if it helps us to organize, and above all, to understand: this alone justifies every system we use. Speaking of obsessions, mine right now is to simplify while maintaining efficiency.

Taking advantage of this dialogue, I am going to ask you a new question: does History Book allow the export of articles in some kind of format?

Now that is a really good question – funnily enough, I'd asked myself exactly the same thing before reading yours!

The short answer is: no.

So now I'm going to have to find out how to disinter the data from CloudKit (because it certainly isn't stored in the open iCloud directories).

I might ask the developer – he's happy to answer queries, apparently. He might even agree to create an export function!

tberni wrote:

Taking advantage of this dialogue, I am going to ask you a new question:
does History Book allow the export of articles in some kind of format?

MadaboutDana wrote:

I might ask the developer - he's happy to answer queries,
apparently. He might even agree to create an export function!

For me, an export function would be an incentive to use History Book, and to be able to use its “registry unattended”. At the moment my use of GoodLinks relies on its export function (mainly Markdown, but also TXT and PDF) of those articles I want to work with later.

Thanks again Bill!

Just to confirm that Zhenyi says exporting data is on the roadmap. Hurrah!

tberni wrote:

MadaboutDana wrote:
>I might ask the developer - he's happy to answer queries,
>apparently. He might even agree to create an export function!

For me, an export function would be an incentive to use History Book,
and to be able to use its “registry unattended”. At the
moment my use of GoodLinks relies on its export function (mainly
Markdown, but also TXT and PDF) of those articles I want to work with
later.

Thanks again Bill!

Anyone aware of such an application for Windows?


MadaboutDana wrote:

Sorry, @tberni History Book's available via the Mac App
Store, in fact, and is also available for iOS/iPadOS (I use iCloud to
synchronise between my MacBooks and my iPad).

MadaboutDana wrote:

Just to confirm that Zhenyi says exporting data is on the roadmap.
Hurrah!

ߑ

The MacPowerUsers podcast's latest episode is a 100-minute 'deep dive' into Craft. I generally don't listen to the podcast because in the past there was too much padding in it and its deep dives sometime missed the water, but at least in this case the links in the show notes seem to be useful.

https://www.relay.fm/mpu/650