Cool Mac Gear

Copernican Technologies, Inc. has released a long-anticipated OS X version of their innovative Macintosh application, Boswell 3.1.

I’ve always found it a challenge to classify Boswell. It has many of the earmarks and characteristics of a database application, but Copernican emphatically protests that Boswell is not a database, and it does not want to be one.

They explain that databases are wonderful for keeping track of very precise, carefully formatted information; the kind of thing large organizations live and breathe, but private individual computer users are different, with information needs that are simply not neat enough to be dealt with by a database. Boswell was created for this sort of user. As the Copernican developers note:

“Life is sloppy. It presents you with emails about several topics and articles about a bunch of different people; a few lines of poetry you composed on a whim. Although Boswell can handle formatted information like names and addresses for you, 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. Toss in your diary, letters you are drafting, instant message conversations, little notes you write to yourself, recipes, and, yes, even your contacts and to do lists. Anything there is the slimmest chance that you might someday want to look at again qualifies. If it is text, Boswell will happily take care of it for you.”

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.

So perhaps we should call Boswell a text information archiver, retriever and organizer. 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. So it is indeed more than a database -- “an information managing environment” that enables you to easily store, view, and manipulate it all.

The Internet analogy is also 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.

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.

.Boswell is especially targeted at “word workers” including journalists, novelists, screenplay writers, marketing communications professionals, executive recruiters, researchers, technical writers, business people, government professionals, and students. It flexibly archives, organizes, manipulates, and retrieves any text you give it: original writings, email, instant messages, web clippings, research, and class notes among others. When such information is “Boswellized” it becomes a library of data that can be automatically cross-referenced among thousands of categories, grouped, sorted, and searched in very powerful ways.

For writers Boswell can preserve multiple drafts so you can delete and alter with abandon. You never have to worry about throwing good stuff away during the process of creation. It can also search through all your notes so you can, for instance, see everything that references both character X and location Y. Boswell organizes your notes for you, preserves all the intermediate versions of your writing, then lets you change the order of the sections until it is just right.

For students Boswell can organize all your stuff for you and quickly search through it for whatever you want, for example finding your notes from last term that will help with the paper you are writing now. If there is a concept you are having trouble with, Boswell can collect all the notes you have about it in one place for you to peruse.

You can use web browsers for research and then have Boswell preserve and organize the information for you. In effect, you can build your own personalized textbooks.

With Boswell, researchers need never again worry about losing or mislaying data or notes. You can create thousands of categories and Boswell will cross reference your notes among them automatically -- you only need to specify once where things should go.

Ever try to return to an informative article you read on-line only to discover the web page had disappeared? Boswell can preserve all that information for you and let you find it again later -- along with other articles about the same thing.

For business people, as you’re getting up to speed on Monday morning, Boswell can show you everything you were doing on Friday afternoon: all the phone calls, e-mails, and notes you made to yourself -- in chronological order. of coffee. If you are a one person business, Boswell gives you a “research department.” If you are about to make a phone call to an important client or customer, Boswell can gather all the notes from your previous calls and all the e-mail you have exchanged with them in one place, sort the items chronologically, and then let you search through for important words while you are talking on the phone.

If you are managing a project, giving your team Boswell can preserve all the information your people have. If one of them is out of the office, the others can get information he has right then. Should any of the team decide to leave, their information will stay behind and that will get newcomers up to speed much faster.

Boswell has abilities probably unlike other 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 pre-formatted 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.

Sounds cool in theory, but there is this learning curve issue. The Copernican Technologies folks are very up front about this matter, warning that Boswell’s “dirty little secret” was that “you have to read the manual...”

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. Each entry can contain up to 32 KB of text which is about as much as is in fifteen printed pages in a book. That is more than you might think. Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” could be contained in only three entries. Thoreau’s “Walden” would require eighteen.

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. Entries are all stored in a structure called a “library.”

“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.

You can have up to four thousand notebooks There is no hierarchy. One notebook cannot contain another, and all notebooks are considered equal. The same entry can be in many notebooks.

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. While Boswell allows you to create more than one library (say, one for your personal stuff and another for your employer’s) it can only open one at a time and Copernican recommends that you have only one library. That way you never have to remember which library you put something in to find it again. One library also makes backing up all your stuff easy and simple.

Learning Boswell also involves familiarizing yourself with some new terminology.

“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.

This may seem a lot to digest, but I have actually only scratched the surface of Boswell’s capabilities in this overview. You really do have to read the manual to get the best out of this program.

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.

Because a library can contain up to a million entries, some users may worry about it filling up their hard drive. However, text takes up very little space compared to other data types and with today’s today’s huge hard drive capacities, Copernican estimates that you would have to type for an entire working lifetime to fill up just two gigabytes and a whole year’s worth of entries can take up no more room than a few digital photographs.

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.

Boswell 3.1 is essentially a Carbonized version of Boswell 3.0, which was released last fall. 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
.
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.

In summary, Boswell is an amazingly powerful information managing program with a steep learning curve, but rewards for those who climb it. If you think Boswell sounds interesting but still aren't sure, there is a downloadable demoware version (3.0 MB) that limits the amount of data you can give to Boswell, but is otherwise fully functional and creates libraries that can be used by the regular version if you decide to purchase the full version.

Boswell 3.1 runs under Mac OS X, as well as OS 9, and sells for $99.95.

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