Cool Mac Gear

Boswell is a difficult to classify application described by its developers as “a comprehensive environment to store and retrieve your data.”

Somewhat the way a web browser enables you to search and navigate the information on the Internet no matter where it may be physically located, Boswell makes all your own personal text equally accessible to you no matter when it was created. It is more than a database -- “an information managing environment” that enables you to easily store, view, and manipulate it all.

Boswell gives you the accessibility to your own information that the Web gives you to the information of others, but it also gives you an archival permanence that the Web gives to no one.

However, the Internet analogy is useful to understanding how Boswell works.

• The Web has web pages; Boswell has entries.

• The Web has web sites; Boswell has notebooks.

• The Web has search engines; Boswell has a Search Engine.

• The Web has information other people created; Boswell has a library of what you created or found: stuff like your writings, old emails, addresses and contact information, class notes, phone messages, personal diary, letters, articles you got from the web, to-do lists, and research notes; any text you can think of.
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Boswell flexibly organizes, preserves, and retrieves text by creating an archive for you and then acting as your own personal librarian. Once you give Boswell your text, you will be able to get it back whenever you want. If you want Boswell to search through everything it has for the mysterious phone number you just found scrawled on an old piece of paper, Boswell can do that.

Boswell does the work of organizing your information for you. You don;t have to learn an arcane search syntax. You tell Boswell just once where you want things to go and it keeps putting them there until you tell it to stop.

More importantly, Boswell has abilities quite unlike the software you may be used to.

• Boswell lets you file and view your data under thousands of categories.
• You do not have to create these categories before you create your data.
• Boswell automatically cross-references your text items among as many categories as you want.
• You do not have to spend your time “filing things away.”
• Boswell organizes your information without using a hierarchy of folders.
• You cannot lose or mislay your data. Once you have told Boswell to preserve it, your data cannot be deleted or changed -- even accidentally.
• Boswell takes care of iterating through several versions of your writings.
• You can search your data by many criteria including contents, time, or topic.
• You can easily compare items found in a search.
• You can easily remove items mistakenly found in a search.
• You can create a new category from the results of a search.
• You can create “stationery” entries and clone them to create new entries preformatted with recurring text. Think phone message pads.
• When you are writing away in the heat of creation, you can quickly preserve your work and keep on writing so you never again have to worry about inadvertently deleting good stuff.
• Boswell efficiently stores everything just once, in one place where it is always easy to backup.

Copernican Technologies’ V.P. R&D Will Volnak sent me a review copy of just-released Boswell 3.0, which is an evolutionary upgrade form Boswell 2.0, with a cleaner interface and improved terminology (thankfully no more “Zapping”; “Zip-Zapping” etc.), but essentially the same feature set.

Installing Boswell couldn’t be easier. If you have the CD version, simply drag the folder called “Boswell_Folder” from the CD onto your hard drive. That’s it. Boswell does not touch your System Folder in any way. If you ever need to un-install Boswell, just drag the “Boswell_Folder” to the trash. To start up Boswell, double-click on the “Boswell_Library” package or drop it onto the Boswell application.

There is also a folder of tools for importing email archives from Eudora or Outlook Express on the CD
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The Boswell_Folder contains a copy of the Boswell application as well as a folder containing a starter library named “Boswell_Library”, this Read_Me document, and a folder of documentation containing an Overview document and the Boswell manual.

System requirements are OS 8 or 9 plus 6 available megabytes of RAM and 5 megabytes of free disk space to start. Boswell may need more RAM over time. If you are using OSX you can run Boswell in Classic mode. Boswell 3.0 is not yet carbonized, but Will Volnak tells me that work has commenced on that project, and the Carbon version’s feature set will be the same as with Boswell 3.0, so the upgrade should be transparent, and the OS X version will be able to work with Boswell libraries created in earlier versions of the program. The Carbonized version of Boswell will be a free upgrade.

Boswell deals in units of information called Entries, which look something like e-mail messages: a chunk of any text you care to write plus an informational header. The Header area of an entry is similar to the Header on an e-mail message.It contains information about the contents of the Entry as well as some useful pop-up menus. Boswell can handle up to a million of these entries. They are all stored in a structure called a library.

The components of Boswell are:

“Entries” are page-like items of text that are Boswell’s basic building blocks. Besides the text they contain, they have a header area with information about the entry’s text somewhat the way e-mail messages have a header for sender and subject and such. An Entry’s contents can contain up to 32,000 characters.You may choose the font, size, and style of the text.You can search the text using the Find commands in the Text menu.If the Entry is still in the Journal (i.e., still modifiable), the Find-and-Replace command can also be used.The Entry is most effective when it contains a small amount of information (e.g., an e-mail or a Web Page, or an average newspaper article) about a specific topic, rather than lots of text about many things.

“Notebooks” are collections of entries the way three ring binders are collections of sheets of paper. A Notebook is a collection of Archived entries. It can be grown, shrunk, sorted, and viewed in several different ways. Notebook Entries look very similar to Journal Entries, but there are differences. Most importantly, none of its content or fields except the Tag may be modified. When an Archived entry is contained in a Notebook it is also referred to as a Notebook entry.If some Entries have a useful common feature, they can all reside in the same Notebook.The Entries in a Notebook may be further grouped by Sorting them by common Tags, Titles, or Times.All Notebooks are considered equal.There is no hierarchy of Notebooks and one Notebook cannot contain another.It is expected that you might have prefixes on Notebook names so they will sort into groups in the various Notebook lists that Boswell displays.

The “Journal” is a special notebook devoted to newly created entries. The journal acts as a Library’s front door because all Entries pass through it. Just as computer users have only a few files visible in windows at any one time while there are thousands of unopened files on their hard drive, Boswell users have only a few Fluid Entries in the Journal and scads more Frozen ones lying unseen in the Archive.

Journal Entries are
(1) Your original writings
(2) Imported text files from other sources such as e-mail
(3) Cut and pasted text from Web pages; or
(4) Cloned as a new Journal entry from an old Archived entry residing within a Notebook.

There is only one Journal in a Library. It is intended to be a workplace where thoughts and information are collected before being filed away in the Archive and Notebooks. The Journal is a specialized Notebook into which new Entries can be keyed, Cloned, or Imported, but it should not grow infinitely.

Your “library” contains the journal and all your entries and notebooks.

“Add” means to place an entry into a single notebook or into many notebooks and “Remove” means to take an entry out of a notebook. Removing it does not destroy the entry -- you can always find any entry again in an area of the library called the archive.

“Clues” are character strings you have associated with specific notebooks. A notebook’s name is always considered to be a clue for that notebook. In the journal, clues can be selected from a list and then drag-and-dropped into the comments area of an entry. Boswell searches the text in a journal entry’s contents and header for clues to create a list of notebooks which will be suggested as destinations for adding. There is a popup menu in journal entries that will show you this list of notebooks.

“Auto-archive” removes an entry from the journal, preserves it in the archive, and automatically adds it to notebooks without you having to decide where it will go. It looks for clues, assumes the list of destination notebooks created were exactly what you want, and adds the entry to them without bothering you with a dialog box. Double-clicking clues into an entry and then auto-archiving can accurately “file away” a journal entry while saving you an enormous amount of time.

“The Search Engine” is a dialog window which is the heart of Boswell, enabling you to search through all your entries. It allows you to copy entries from notebook to notebook using every criterion we could think of: time, what its text and header information contains or does not contain, and whether or not it is in other notebooks. You can also use the Search Engine to remove entries and make other changes to them.

The “Info Strip” is a small area at the top of the journal and notebooks windows which shows you how many entries it currently contains. There is also a pop-up menu which tells you how the entries are sorted and lets you change their order.

Boswell was created with the intent of having only one Boswell Library per user. It works best that way .Having only one Boswell Library frees you from having to decide which Library should contain a specific new Entry and later searching through several Libraries to find it again.

You are, however, given the option of creating more than one Boswell Library:

1. One for each member of the Family, and/or

2. One for “Work” and one for “Personal.”A starter library which contains information about Boswell itself is included with Boswell.

Boswell has the ability to import text files.Importing turns text files into Journal Entries. Files may be Imported one-by-one or you can choose to Import all the text files in a folder at one time.Newly Imported Entries appear in the Journal with the file name as the Entry’s title.

Boswell is claimed to be a robust application, but Copernican recommends that you to make regular backups of your Boswell library. Because everything is contained in one place, this is as simple as selecting the your library in the Finder and keying command-D. Needless to say, storing copies of these backups on removable media which are stored in a safe place is a good plan. Boswell can also make backups of your entries as text files. If your Library ever becomes corrupted, you can use these text files to re-build it from an uncorrupted backup copy.

Copernican insists that Boswell is not a database, and does not want to be one:

“While Boswell can handle formatted information like names and addresses, it was made for the sloppy stuff. Give it poems and e-mail and articles you found on the Web along with your research notes and drafts of your term paper, and Boswell will happily take care of it for you.... You do not need to go through your notebooks cleaning out entries that you think do not belong. You do not have to decide exactly where every entry will go... The notebooks may be sloppy, but your queries and their results are very precise.You will get what you want. The worst that might happen is that you could get a little more than you want, but that simply reassures you that nothing was overlooked.The tradeoff is that all you had to do was set up your original categories as notebooks and clues; Boswell did the work of filing things away for you. When Boswell was a little too precise and saw a category that you did not really intend, you were freed from verifying the decisions or cleaning up afterwards. In the long run, that results in excellent search results with much less work for you.”

System requirements:
To use Boswell on your Mac system requires the following:
• Power PC processor
• Mac OS 8x or 9.x (Classic mode under OS X)
• 6 MB Available RAM
• 5 MB hard disk space
• CD-ROM drive

A word about the name of this program. It’s a tribute to James Boswell, the great and famous lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson’s friend and chronicler who spent years writing down everything the great man said and preserved his brilliance for us. He also nearly drove Johnson nuts.

As Peter Martin puts it in his “A Life of James Boswell” (Yale University Press). Boswell was an “inflated, gluttonous creature” -- vain, buffoonish, dissolute, snobbish, and narcissistic and a sex-addict (Samuel Johnson complained, “You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I’m sick of both”).

Dr. Johnson’s mixed feelings about his friend and biographer are echoed analogically in my impressions of the latter’s software namesake.

I stand in genuine and sincere awe with respect to the amount of thought and work that has obviously gone into conceptualizing and programming Boswell. With this version, the complexity, difficult learning curve, and disregard for naming conventions, that I criticized in reviews of earlier versions have now been addressed to a considerable degree.

Also commendable are Boswell’s ease of installation and non invasion of the Mac OS System Folder with shared libraries and extensions. And if this sort of comprehensive organization of your data appeals, then this is a very cool program.

I’m continuing to give Boswell an Applelinks four-A rating, and I’m looking forward to checking out the OS X version when it’s released.

Purchasers of Boswell 3.0 will be entitled to a free upgrade to the Mac OS X version of Boswell. Boswell 3.0 is available for the pre OS X price of $49.95. That is $50 off the regular price of $99.95 for the forthcoming Mac OS X version.

You can read more about Boswell at
http://www.boswell.com/.

A demo version of
Boswell 3.0 is also available at:
http://www.boswell.com/html/demo.html

For online purchasing as well as more information on Boswell,
visit the “Home of Boswell” web site at:
http://www.boswell.com

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear