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Craft 2.0 - For Everyone!
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Posted by tberni
Jul 21, 2022 at 03:40 PM
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?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 22, 2022 at 10:28 AM
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?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 22, 2022 at 10:58 AM
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
Posted by tberni
Jul 22, 2022 at 12:11 PM
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?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 22, 2022 at 03:22 PM
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?