Solve all your unlabelled items problems!

I am rubbish at labelling things — largely because of lack of tool support — which results in multiple folders on my desktop “to read”, “to bib”, etc., and hundreds of bookmarks in a “to sort” subfolder.

I'm usually very good with music (because it's not too hard in iTunes), but titling, commenting about, and labelling photos is a bitch (though Tim Falconer's working on that). My biggest failing is in bibliographic management, because filing and documenting each paper I download is very time-consuming and physically painful.

If I could do it one at a time, without the startup cost (opening folders and apps, and so on), then I'd solve the problem.

My idea, then, is a background application. Whenever the machine wakes from sleep, or the screensaver is deactivated, it suggests in a slightly nagging way that you do one of the following:

• Fill in a bibliographic record and file one of the PDFs in your “To Bib” folder. It presents a clickable PDF, a field to pipe into Quicksilver or Safari to search online for the details, a folder hierarchy in your /Papers directory, and a text field for the BibTeX info (or a button to open BibDesk).
  This would, of course, have to be configurable: setting folders, types, and so on.
• File and rename a bookmark: it shows the URL, a button to preview the page, and your folder hierarchy.
• Set the ID3 tag for an untagged MP3 (perhaps all the ones in an “untagged” playlist).
• Set the metadata for a photo: title, keywords, and so on (if iPhoto is open).

Assuming I didn't just tell it to go away all the time, in the average day I might annotate a paper or two, and file a few bookmarks. In a few weeks, my papers would all have been sorted, my bookmarks would actually be useful, and I would be meta-data happy.

It all comes down to the interface.

Posted at 2004-05-27 04:13:47 by Richard • Link to Solve all your unl…
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Actually the funniest thing ever

This has so far made my day.

I had a dream last night, in which Hawaii and Massachusetts became a single political entity named “Hawaiachusetts”. Their slogan was “Hard to say, hard to spell, and as noncontiguous as it gets”.

Made me laugh out loud. In my office. On my own.

Posted at 2004-05-27 02:15:40 by Richard • Link to Actually the funni…
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