Writers are obsessive about tidbits of data that they might be able to use someday. Keeping a useful archive of collected data helps if one can both document the provenance of the information and successfully search for items
saved. This mini-review looks at three scrapbook or organizer programs, Caboodle, EagleFiler and Yojimbo, with a focus on the writeris needs.
Before I even downloaded the three programs, I wrote down the key features that I thought would be important for such an organizing program. I knew that the programs would have lots of features, and I knew that I could get distracted or overwhelmed by those unless I defined an underlying theme. Here they are:
- Database driven for scalability.
- Assignable, searchable keywords.
- Thumbnails.
- Drag and drop.
- Cut and paste text – without changing font – directly.
- Provenance: able to trace back to the original source, for example, URL.
- Project oriented: named collections of different items.
- Active viewing for movies.
- Encrypt/protect data.
Next, I created a directory of items that reflected the kinds of data that I might be archiving and created a table so I could take notes on how each program handled that kinds of data. I looked at these kinds files:
- Movies
- URLs
- Pictures (.jpg)
- Drag and drop text
- Text file
- RTF file
- Complete Web page
- E-mail (reminder entry)
In a very specific sense, I reviewed these programs for how well they accomplished the desired tasks with these data sources with a mind towards meeting the needs of a writer. Because of that, this is a mini-review, not a full fledged review of each product.
Caboodle
Caboodle 1.2 from dejal takes a very visual approach to storing and displaying data. It has the look and feel of a scrapbook into which the user drags data. Currently, data is saved as XML property lists and a hierarchy of custom objects, but a future version will convert to Core Data and a SQLite store.
 Caboodle 1.2 |
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