Donald wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone uses HyperNewt on a regular basis=20
> and how they use it... or if you have used it and what you=20
> thought of it.
>=20
> Looks like a useful way to link information together...
Not to plug my own software, but...
I used to use HyperNewt pretty heavily, but I don't use it at
all anymore. I'm a big note-hog (~700), and I need ways to group and
associate my notes. With the built-in Notes application, I could group
related notes into "folders", but I could only create 24 of them. The
flat (non-hierarchical) nature of the folders meant, too, that I
couldn't make finely-grained groups children of coarser parents.
HyperNewt gave me the ability to have an arbitrarily large hierarchical
"directory" structure for grouping notes. This was my main reason for
using it.
I also experimented with how to use the hyperlinking
capabilities of HyperNewt. I've always found this pretty clumsy
(HyperNewt installs a new type of stationary for a hyperlink, so each
hyperlink is a separate note). After a while I settled on interspersing
hyperlinks among other notes in a "directory", and using the previous
note in the "directory" to write enough down about the link that I could
know why it was there.
Eventually (after a couple of years), I got fed up with this way
of doing things. The hyperlinks were clumsy enough that I didn't use
them regularly, and I was running into some conceptual limitations of
the directories. I'm including this at the bottom of the mail for anyone
who is interested.
What I wanted was a way to group notes in multiple ways (ideally
by hyperlinks, so that the hyperlinks themselves became the way the
notes were grouped and associated). I also wanted the hyperlinks to be
interspersed in the text of the notes, and I didn't want them to have a
bunch of funky markup interfering with the flow of the document. This
led me to start writing NewtWiki.
NewtWiki allows any word (or phrase) to be a hyperlink, by
making on-the-fly associations between the word (or phrase) and the
title of another note (or date, name, works doc, etc). This let me write
notes naturally, with hyperlinks sprinkled liberally through the note.
The hyperlinks require no markup (links to external applications, and
phrases require a little). The best thing about it (IMHO) is the
accidental nature of the links. If I'm writing a note about the history
of the Newton, for instance, and I mention that John Scully had this
idea about a "Knowledge Navigator" (the quotes delimit a phrase for a
hyperlink in NewtWiki), the phrase "Knowledge Navigator" becomes a
hyperlink (along with every other word and phrase in the note). If I've
already got a note titled "Knowledge Navigator", then I can see it by
gesturing from the phrase "Knowledge Navigator" in the note I'm writing.
If I don't have a note with that title, I can create one with the same
gesture I use for hyperlinking (i.e.: I don't have to know in advance if
a link goes anywhere).
If you want some Newton software to link information together,
you might want to consider using NewtWiki. It's at
http://www.narcosislabs.org/newton
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Longer explanation of the conceptual problems I ran into grouping notes
into directories.
Keep in mind that the main thing I wanted out of HyperNewt was
the ability to associate notes in an arbitrary way. I'm not trying to
say that HyperNewt is bad software, just that my needs didn't match up
with it's capabilities.
I used HyperNewt to associate notes by putting them into the
same directory. I might put a note on the Knowledge Navigator, one about
the Xerox Parc Satchel system, and one about the MSR "Stuff I've Seen"
system into a directory called "information organization". That way, if
I want to read a note related to information organization, I go to that
directory and I can see all the notes that are related to that. While
this works well for a notes primary topic, it limits my ability to make
additional associations. For instance, I might have written a note
talking about how some of the Knowledge Navigator ideas found their way
into the anime "serial experiments lain". If I put this note into a
directory about anime, then it's not associated with the Knowledge
Navigator note. If I put it in the "information organization" directory,
then it's not associated with other anime notes.
What I wanted to be able to do was to associate the note with
both other anime notes, and the Knowledge Navigator note. Plain old
hierarchical directories won't let me do this.
HyperNewt provides the ability to create a link to a note (or
anything else), though. This hyperlink appears as a note with a button
you can tap to go to the item it links to. I could create the hyperlink
to the lain note, and put it in the "information organization"
directory. However, I couldn't include text in the hyperlink to explain
why it was there. I wanted to be able to have the lain note just plain
old link to the Knowledge Navigator note.
In addition, I ran into conceptual limits with regards to
granularity. If I put a bunch of notes into a directory to associate
them, they'd all have the same "strength" of association. To make
stronger associations, I'd have to put fewer notes into more
directories, where each directory had fine granularity. However, this
meant that I'd lose all my weaker associations. For instance, none of
the "information organization" notes had any associations with notes in
other computer and HCI-related directories, even though conceptually
they should.
These are the sorts of things I'm trying to deal with in
NewtWiki.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Jim Anderson
Evil Overlord Rule 68:
I will spare someone who saved my life sometime in the past. This is
only reasonable as it encourages others to do so. However, the offer is
good one time only. If they want me to spare them again, they'd better
save my life again.
-- Read the List FAQ/Etiquette: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Read the Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ This is the NewtonTalk mailing list - http://www.newtontalk.net/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Sep 05 2002 - 10:03:06 EDT