Try Skim
Wow, thanks! I’m switching to Skim and my workflow page is revised accordingly.
Hi everyone, Im back again (I started this thread)
Ive just been playing with this http://www.tagcrowd.com and I find it rather useful. Ive been processing some of my DT docs to see how my ‘thought clouds’ come out. I find it quite revealing and just want to reiterate the value of a ‘smart’ tag cloud visualisation as a means to quickly gauge what you are fixated on, whats a recurring theme… or even just where you are repeating yourself 
Sure, theres concordance, but SEEING your ideas visually in a relative way (scale and tone) like in a well design tag cloud mechanism is fantastic.
Imagine a DT panel one could open that provides a live visual summary in tag cloud style. What about selecting a range (contiguous or not) of files and seeing the cloud reshape. Nice.
How about it DT team
Hi Christian, you asked “Do we really need another tagging system?” I think we really do.
The hierarchies+replicants+searching-in-comments scheme for DTP is far, far too manual and cumbersome. I’ve tried to use it for tagging, I really have; but I keep giving up on the system. I don’t want to spend all day dragging and dropping files all throughout my enormous hierarchy in order to emulate the features of a real tagging system. And doing comment-based searching only finds what I’m looking for, it never shows correlations or more intelligent results among just the tags.
There are two apps I’ve seen so far which do tagging wonderfully “right”: Nifty Box is #1, and then Yep. In Nifty Box, I tag my entries and it shows me a tag cloud for the current entry. It also shows me a tag cloud for all the tags in all the articles which share the same tags as my articles. This gives me a “next step” tag cloud, which I find immensely useful for quick browsing. Yes, there is “See also”, but this is about browsing tags, not necessarily more specific content.
But it gets better. I can Cmd-Click a set of tags in Nifty Box and see the union of all documents with all of those tags. And a secondary tag cloud which again shows all the tags in those documents, and the documents sharing those tags.
All that NB lacks is a more boolean way to build up these tag assocation trees, a way to Cmd-Click to OR them in, and Shift-Cmd-Click to AND them in, for example. But I’ve yet to see anything that does this today, without a positive click-fest of a UI (I’m thinking of Spotlight).
If I had all of this in DTP, it would be amazing. And THEN I would create hierarchies containing smart groups populated by items that fit commonly searched-for tag groups. Or searches directed at finding a specific tag or set of tags. But what I really want is an easy, comfortable way to browse through my data, when it’s in that inchoate state before real hierarchical organization has occurred.
John
jweigley, I like these ideas.
Improved tagging would indeed be good to show correlations. This is what i find useful in an app like Slipbox (markusguhe.net/slipbox). Nifty Box looks good but is for documents and seems less useful for academic note taking (correct me if i am wrong here).
In general there is one main reason why i still need tagging/keywords for my notes. I might use keywords that do not appear in the text of a note as such and so need to be sure DTPO will find the correct notes. Example: if i have a note that speaks of the Polish brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War i will tag it with Dombrowksi (the name of the brigade). Since this name might not appear in clippings/notes this is the only way to make sure it will turn up during search.
Gerben
This is a important reason to provide an efficient tagging capability. As another example I’m preparing material on hybrid cars but the subject is about market positioning. The keyword positioning is unlikely to appear in any of the material on hybrid cars.
Having an efficient way to tag and see which tags have been used for a subject, like Nifty Box, would be great help.
As a follow-up on tagging: I just tried Nifty Box to tag a document (which are written to Spotlight), then synched my DTPO database but i cannot find the item. I can in Spotlight… Am I missing something here?
Thanks,
Gerben
If you are searching by tag/comment, you need to have the import spotlight comments enabled in the prefs for DTP.
Actually, if you are syncing (not importing), you may not see the spotlight comments in DTP.