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Charles Moore Reviews Boswell: A Comprehensive Environment To Store And Retrieve Your Data
A little over a year ago, I reviewed Boswell -- a difficult to classify application described by its developers as “a comprehensive environment to store and retrieve your data.” 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. Sounded cool in theory, but there was this learning curve issue. The Copernican Technologies folks were very up front about this matter, warning that Boswell’s “dirty little secret” was that “you have to read the manual...” So, I read the manual, but unfortunately again, I didn’t feel a lot farther ahead after my first time through it. Boswell was not the usual quick study subject. I kept running up against a wall of complexity and unfamiliar terminology (in this context), such as “Entries” “Notebooks,” “the Hub,” “Library,” “Journal,” “Clues,” “ Zapping,” “Zipping,” “Put-Zapping,” and so on. As they put it, “Because Boswell does some very new things, we have had to invent some new words to describe them. To let you know that they do not mean what you thought they did, we capitalize them in our documentation. We realize our terms may take some getting used to, so please allow some time for that.” After spending some time, I did begin to grasp how Boswell works, sort of. You entered data into the Journal, and from time to time you would “Zap” or “Zip-Zap” it into the Library where, with the help of Clues, which are character string references, you could retrieve it when needed. Once consigned to the Library, the data would be there forever, and could not be edited or deleted. You could copy something from the Library and edit it, but the original was permanently archived. Boswell could act as a repository for essentially every piece of text that your deal with, archiving it permanently. 
This had a certain appeal, but after doing the review, I have to confess that I did not adopt Boswell as my personal librarian. My own philosophy of archiving has always been to keep everything in either plain text files -- say Tex Edit or Nisus, or in other types of files that can be easily opened with a text editor, such as Eudora or SweetMail email mailbox files. That way I can always get at my data, even open files with a PC if it were ever necessary. Consequently, the idea of having my archives accessible only with a single, proprietary, legacy Mac OS-only application did not appeal to me, however logical the basic concept. I was planning a future move to OS X (which has lagged more than I thought it would at the time), and I wasn’t sure of Boswell’s OS X support timetable. What would happen, for instance, if, speaking hypothetically, sometime in the future Copernican Technologies went out of business or for some other reason stopped developing and upgrading Boswell to support new Mac OS system versions. (or even if, for argument’s sake? I one day decided to move to another OS platform). If you had years of data locked into a Boswell library, it would be inconvenient, to say the least, although Boswell can export stored data into text documents. However, a couple of weeks ago Copernican Technologies’ V.P. R&D Will Volnak sent me a review copy of the company’s just-released Boswell 2.0, so I’ve been giving the new version another look. Boswell 2.0 is an evolutionary upgrade to Boswell 1.5, with a somewhat simplified interface (welcome), new documentation, but essentially the same feature set. Another bit of good news is that an OS X native version is on the way. 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. 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. 
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. The Contents of the Boswell Library are: 
You input information (i.e., via Entries) into the Boswell Library through the Journal, which acts as the front door to the Boswell Library.When you “Zap” an entry from the Journal, it goes into the Archive.You can then Put the Archived entry into selected Notebooks. 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 
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. 
An Entry in the Journal remains in a changeable state until you Zap it from the Journal, and it is moved into the Archive.Entries remaining in your Journal for more than 30 days are automatically Zip-Zapped for you.Once you are finished with an Entry within the Journal, you Zap the Entry from the Journal to the Archive where it can no longer be edited. 
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. 
Clues are character strings associated with specific Notebooks.A Notebook’s name is automatically considered a Clue for that Notebook.When a Clue is encountered in an Entry’s Header or content text during sifting, the Notebooks associated with that Clue are added to the suggested Put list. If the Entry is being Zip-Zapped, this list will determine the Notebooks that the Entry is automatically Put into.A Clue is case sensitive, and is not delimited by spaces or tabs; it may contain any printable characters 
The user is expected to Zap or Zip-Zap frequently. Unlike a normal Notebook window, the Journal window cannot be closed nor have its Layout changed. Neither can it contain Frozen Entries: the Journal is the only place Fluid Entries can exist and it contains nothing else. The Archive is the heart of your Boswell Library. It contains all the information that has entered the Boswell Library through the Journal and has been Zapped and thereby Archived. You cannot directly view the entire contents of the archive. This is similar to the “closed stacks” in a university library. The Hub can be used for searching the entire Archive for entries that meet criteria you have specified and Putting them into whatever Notebooks you want. This way you can be certain that your search did not overlook any possible matching Entries. Not all Archived Entries reside in Notebooks, nor do they need to, but all can be found in the Archive. 
The Hub Dialog Window has 2 panes. The one to the left contains the list of all Notebooks. You use it as a source for Notebooks to be added or dropped into the smaller lists of Notebooks in the other pane over on the right.The larger pane to the right is called the “Control Center” area. 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:
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: 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. Just as Boswell is a difficult program to categorize, it is equally difficult to rate. First, 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. On the other hand, the program’s seemingly gratuitous complexity, difficult learning curve, disregard for naming conventions, may prove daunting for some users. In the program’s favor are its 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 humdinger of a program. I’m going to give Boswell an Applelinks four-A rating with a bullet, because an OS X version of Boswell is in the works.
 Consequently, Boswell 2.0 is currently available at the limited time price of $49.95 -- $40 off the regular price of $89.95. Current Boswell owners are You can read more about Boswell in the online documentation at: A demo version of Boswell 2.0 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: Appendix 2: Boswell Use Suggestions Appendix 3: Worried about filling up your hard drive with Boswellized stuff?
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