brett…let me know if you have any questions about Ulysses. Actually, it won’t let you do virtually ANY formatting from within it. Their philosophy is that trying to write in a word processor is a distractive process because it’s easy to get more caught up in formatting than the creative process of writing. One you have something ready to go in Ulysses, then you can export it as RTF and do your formatting in something like Word.
Thanks for the offer to help with Ulysses. I agree that formatting mostly gets in the way, especially for journalists, who usually just send plain text or rtf attachments to editors or layout. That’s why TextEdit is just fine for most of my work. For a book that requires footnotes, charts, etc. I’d go back to Word or AppleWorks. The main thing a WP can help me with, now that I use Devon for notetaking and info organizing and services for word count, spelling, thesaurus, etc., is navigating within long documents, which is why Mellel appealed. I’ll give Ulysses a shot and let you know if I need help. thanks again.
As a journalist myself, I’ve tried Ulysses but am staying with Mellel for the moment. Journalists tend to be the sprinters of the writing world. Ulysses seems to me to be very well designed for marathons like novels, but its features are less necessary for article-length work.
On the other hand, I’ve found Mellel’s outlining feature invaluable, if initially challenging. And the promise of line numbering and a “marginalia” feature (which would be something like Ulysses’ notes) coming up is keeping me with this rock-solid word processor.
Also, clients tell me that Mellel’s .doc output is better for their purposes than either the .doc or .rtf exports from Nisus Express or TextEdit. But for all this, the people responsible for Ulysses are pretty innovative, so I’m keeping an eye on things there as well. Anything to ease the pain of writing 
The outlining feature in Mellel (and Zwrite and CopyWrite and others) is a real help in long documents. Mellel’s also said to be good for footnoting, which I haven’t tried but may wind up doing in this book. (I know what you mean about the outlining being confusing in Mellel – that whole process of designating what becomes an outline topic is needlessly complex for a first time user.) And it’s priced nice during the holiday sale.
Yet I’m going to try out Ulysses demo because I am writing a long biography with long chapters.
I’m still tempted to try Devon note as a way to have a sidebar outline, with each outline point being a note. Then merging the whole magilla together when the chapter/article is finished. And I’m still kinda holding out hope that AppleWorks or TextEdit may get sidebar outlining someday.
yeah, were I just banging out quick articles with little review or revision from day to day then Ulysses would not be my tool of choice either.
where I find it helpful is in both organizing complex writing projects, and in organizing projects where there are multiple version changes to track.
example of diverse ways I use it are…
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i use it to organize a book I’m writing. everything’s in one place, easy to find, and the ability to add notes to documents that explain what’s up with that revision is very valuable.
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i also use it for my small business. for example i have a script i use for my voice mail greeting. i periodically change it to see what kind of different results I get. This allows me to track the different versions, the changes, and to note why and what i changed.
but if i had a deadline this afternoon and had to write 300 words on the fire at the county courthouse, i’d use something else.
I have a similar need. For years, I’ve maintained a databased “writer’s notebook” – originally in HyperCard, then migrated to Filemaker. It now has many thousands of records. I search it constantly while writing – particularly while writing fiction.
I assign keywords to each entry, so that I can search not only for literal text but for other concepts I’ve flagged for the record. For example, I might make a note about my father and never actually use the word “family” in the record. But I would flag it as “family” in its keywords – and probably attach many other keywords, too.
Suggestions for doing the equivalent in DT are welcome.
I could send you tab-delimited records, too, but I can give examples of what I would want delimited by the tabs in each record: 1) Title or headline for the record, 2) Text of record, 3) Date of creation, 4) Mod date if possible, 5) Status of record (used, available, high quality, normal quality), 6) Type of record (Idea, Dream, Journal, etc.). And so on.
I’m brand-new to DT, but the column-style browser view leads me to assume (actually, fear) that each record would end up becoming a Group, with each field being a child item of the main text. That seems very unwieldy and I hope I’m wrong about that.
I greatly admire the whole premise of DEVONthink, however, and in theory would like to move my whole writing life to it. Ability to import tab- and paragraph-delimited text files seems utterly essential.
I’ve been searching for the best note-taking program for a long time. I initially used FileMaker Pro for this purpose, since you can design a FileMaker Pro database with lots of nice fields for searching, AND you can cross-reference it to an EndNote-generated bibliography database (I type the number of the reference in FileMaker Pro, and the author and title appear in the particular FileMaker Pro note record. But the records couldn’t be rearranged or reorganized, and it’s not that easy to export them (but not impossible, either). So I tried Hog Bay Notebook for a while. It’s very competent abilities as an outliner solved many problems, but it’s not really robust, and it did pose the problem of how I could automate the bibliographical labeling of each note. I resorted to using SpellCatcher glossary entries for this, but it was a pain to update the SpellCatcher glossary every time I added a new bibliographic entry. So now I turn to DEVONThink. It isn’t as competent an outliner as HBN, but it’s a lot more robust and can easily export. Another MAJOR advantage of DEVONThink is that it allows me to incorporate other documents into the note-taking database (Word docs and pdfs of original docs). But how can I incorporate bibliographic labeling (i.e. easily add a bibliographic reference for eachc note)? Could this be done with some sort of hyperlink / Wiki-style link. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Two suggestions: a) you can export a .rtf bibliography from EndNote and inport it in DT, you can also make a link from an entry in this list with your new note, b) you can copy in EndNote with Option+K a formatted cite and past it in your note in DT (my way)
victor[/list]
I just made a little hack to TextEdit to make it do full screen … read on…
I agree that full-screen mode is indispensable for really getting some writing done (especially for people for whom the coolness of their OS itself is a constant distraction 
) … I sincerely hope that the DT developers will add a full-screen editing mode to a future release!
I’ve looked all over for something to use in the meantime … looked at Ulysses and found even it to be needlessly complex for what I need: a minimalist text editor w/ full screen mode that will just get out of my way and let me write. That way I can do all my research, notetaking, and organization of larger writing projects in DT, then when I just want to focus in on one document and write I can clear away all distractions. Nothing I could find fit the bill.
Then I remembered seeing an article on how to make a full-screen app in cocoa…
cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000028.php
… and that the Panther dev tools comes with the source code of TextEdit, which is essentially identical to the rtf editing mode in DT (which is what I currently use to write my articles … I’m a science journalist, btw). So I took a stab at it and managed to add a full-screen mode to TextEdit. (My first app/hack ever! Been reading up on Cocoa a little lately, but that’s the extent of my experience.)
Anyway, it works pretty well, so I figured I’d share it here for the other writing-oriented DT users out there … at least to hold us over until a full-screen mode is added to DT.
Here’s a link to the .dmg file with the modified TextEdit, along with the modified source code:
afn.org/~afn03639/TextEditFS.dmg.zip
(the changes I made are in the first method of the Document.m source file)
Please keep on reading, because I need to explain how to use it right … it’s a bit of a hack (in the positive sense), so it’s not perfect … but after using it for a few days there don’t seem to be any major bugs. One weakness: if you go into full-screen mode and then close the front window before leaving full-screen, the key combo for leaving full screen won’t work and you’ll seem to be stuck with a black screen. Hitting cmd-Q to quit TextEdit will quit the app with no problem, though, so it’s not really a problem … just wanted to warn you. As long as the document you’re working on is still open, you can leave full-screen mode just fine by using the same key combo that got you in it.
So here’s how I use it: aside from having full-screen mode, this app is identical to the TextEdit in Panther … so I trashed the old TextEdit and replaced it with this one. Then, while working in DT, I just choose the txt or rtf document that I want to work on and use the “Open in TextEdit” command (cmd-shift-O). It pops up in my modified TextEdit. Then I hit cmd-shift-F to go into full-screen mode. write write write write … the way I programmed it, nothing can interrupt you in this mode … no system dialogs, no pop-up windows, no dialogs from other apps, no Dock, no menu bar … you can’t even cmd-tab to switch apps while in this mode. You can’t even see the formatting pop-up menus in the ruler of rtf views, so you can’t get distracted by messing around with defining styles and such. All the key combos for TextEdit commands do work, though, so you can save as you go and you can quickly add bold and italics and such. To get out of full-screen, just hit cmd-shift-F again.
NOW THIS IS IMPORTANT! At this point, your writing is saved, but IT’S NOT SAVED IN DT!! For some reason, DT doesn’t (yet) automatically import the changes you’ve made back into the database … right now, it’s saved in a temp file stored at /private/tmp/DEVONthink/yourusername/yourfilename.rtf … so if you just close the file in TextEdit now and go back to DT, your changes won’t be there. They won’t be lost either, so don’t panic if this happens … that temp file is still in that obscure directory and you can get to it through the Terminal … but that’s the hard way of doing it. When you’re done and leave full-screen mode, be sure to copy the newly edited file back into DT one way or another. The way I do it is to grab the file icon in the title bar of the TextEdit window and drag it back to the contents list of the DT “vertical split” view to import the file. That way the old and new versions of the file are there … sort of a sloppy form of versioning.
One thing you do lose this way is the live word count of DT … that’s important for some of us … the work-around I use is that I have a “service” in my services menu that does word counts for any cocoa app (I forget where I got it … may even be from devon, not sure) … that service has a key combo attached to it, but the window it calls is not visible in this full-screen mode. So I just quickly leave full screen, hit the word count key combo, close the count window that popped up, then cmd-shift-F back into full screen. Relatively smooth.
Anyway, hope that helps some of you.
(btw, as far as I can tell from the legal statement in the TextEdit source files, there’s nothing illegal about modifying and redistributing the app for free … if someone knows otherwise, please let me know and I’ll take the file off the server!)
On keeping a writers notebook:
For years, I’ve used a database for almost every thought I’ve had related to writing: ideas, journals, dreams, etc. First it was Hypercard, then I migrated that data to Filemaker. I developed a pretty nice Filemaker template that worked for me pretty well, and was fast. My fields allowed me to enter extra keywords off custom pick-lists, say whether the note was an idea, dream, journal, etc. with checkboxes, and of course I could search on all those things, coming up with records that matched “women AND music AND technology” or whatever.
A key component of this, for me, is carrying a Palm pilot with a db on it (Filemaker Mobile or a third-party Palm db manager). I enter records on the Palm while out in the world, then sync to Filemaker pretty effortlessly.
Now I’m using DT and eagerly awaiting Pro (hoping that the “table” feature of Pro – which I cannot quite imagine – will let me import this Filemaker db and respect its field structure, and somehow finally give me the best of both worlds – structured db, free-form entry, the AI aspects of DT, etc.)
Any ideas for integrating the Palm into this? Any possibility for a DT Pro conduit of some kind? Or am I stuck with tab-delimited export out of a Palm db manager (at best)?
Did you notice that CopyWrite now has a Full Screen Editor?
http://www.bartastechnologies.com/products/copywrite/
I tried CopyWrite because of it’s basic formatting features. I missed them in Ulysses, thinking that the full screen is not important for me. Now I use this feature quite often…
Unfortunately until now I did not find the right way tu use DT for my writing. But I am very interested in your experiences!
Ursula
I know that rmathes23 doesn’t like to hear mention of DT Pro until the public beta is actually announced.
But Pro will have full screen editing.
I posted this back in January. I’m still eager to import my Filemaker db into DT. I’d like to hear suggestions for structuring each DT record to include my Summary, Full Text, Keywords, created date, modified date, etc.
I note that the current DT PE has tables. I’m not sure if table columns are the best practice for creating such individual records in DT.
I’ve waited on this because DT Pro beta seemed imminent. I hope it still is. But I’d like to get going. I really can’t benefit from DT until I can get my legacy Filemaker stuff into it, and I want to do it right.
Thanks.
I, too , am still interested in migrating my previous notes, in my case from Hypercard to DN. I don’t have filemaker, but maybe I could use Spacewalk’s method to export my info from Hypercard and importo the appleworks DB program, and thence into DN. Haven’t actually tried it so I don’t know if it’d work, but even that would be a lot easier than cutting and pasting hundreds and hundreds of cards.
You don’t need Filemaker or Appleworks, or any other database program. You need to get your records out of HyperCard into some delimited text file – presumably tab-delimited. That’s where every field of a record is separated by a tab, and then a carriage return ends the record itself.
I used to live in (and for) HyperCard, but haven’t seen it in years. You must be running it under Classic, right? If you write HyperTalk yourself, you may be able to create a script that will write your records out to a text file.
AppleScript would be an even better way to make HyperCard do this, but I have no idea if OS X AppleScript can control Classic apps.
I’d be willing to bet that Tiger’s Automator app cannot control a Classic app, but I haven’t tried it. Don’t even have Classic on my machine anymore.
HOWEVER, all this pre-supposes that DT Pro will be able to import a tab-delimited file. I’m almost positive that Christian told us it would, months ago. I also recall Christian asking you to send him a tab-delimited sample file to make sure that DT would do it. Did you ever send it to him?
I offered such a file, but no one took me up on it or responded to the post – again, months ago.
DT developers: Will we be able to import tab-delimited text dumps from databases? If so, in what format or structure will they end up in DT? Will it be every legacy record as a table record in DT, with the fields turned into table columns? If not that, what?
I’m surprised by the silence on this, because this WILL be a big issue for MANY potential DT adopters: getting their legacy stuff into DT via some text dump. I’m willing to help with it. But somebody has to respond and give a bit of direction here. Thank you.
Yeah, it’s the only Classic app I still run and I’d LOVE to be done with Classic and get it off my Mac. I don’t write HyperTalk myself. Hypercard does do an export, and I sent Christian a sample of it, but – this was months ago, and I can’t remember why – it didn’t work. maybe the export wasn’t really tab delimited, or maybe the import into DevonNote would lose my keywords (which are crucial for this project) or combine all the cards into one file. I’m not at my home Mac at the moment so I can’t retrieve his message or try out Hypercard here at my office. I dimly recall, maybe, that the problem was that hypercard’s export created one big text file containing the content of all the cards and it wasn’t tab delimited. So I guess what I need to do is figure out a way to turn that big text file into a tab-delimited file.
Anyway, I realize that very few if any other Devon users are in my position with Hypercard, and I don’t expect the company to spend time just to deal with my particular issue. But it does seem as though others would be able to take advantage of Spacewalk’s suggestion, so I hope Devon does give that capability to DevonNote (not just DT) soon.
To the several users who want to export database entries from EndNote, HyperCard, FileMaker, or other software: as others have noted, if your text export is a single file, then DT/P will only see it as a single file.
However, if you select any string of text in the text file and drag it to DT/P, that string becomes a separate item. The subject line is the first few words of the string. Revise those as needed, and you have a series of entries.
I often use this method to break up large notes within DT/P: select and drag the text to the listing pane, and that text becomes a new note.
If someone has mentioned this method previously, my apologies.
That’s a cool technique. I was not aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out. I’m always impressesed by the thought that has been put into DT useability.
Regarding your comment that “DT will see it as a single file,” Christian has clearly stated that DT will support tab-delimited text import. How it will be supported is what I’m asking about.
Surely, he cannot have meant that an entire tab-delimited text-dump would come into DT as one file.
No. DEVONthink Pro will feature spreadsheet-like sheets and records. Think of records as containing the cells in a spreadsheet row, and the sheet as displaying the ‘spreadsheet’ view. This is one of the last features receiving ‘polishing’ prior to the release of the public beta of DEVONthink Pro.
Ah, now this sounds promising (as we wait with great anticipation for DT Pro)! 