Review: Boswell - A Comprehensive Environment To Store And Retrieve Your Data

Earlier this week, I linked to a report by TheStandard.com's Elinor Abreu on Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter's idea that we should rethink the conceptual paradigm for organizing our hard drives, and ordering and retrieving our ever-growing base of computer data.

Gelernter's new software, Scopeware, abandons the file folder metaphor in favor of a line of index cards streaming into the distance, creating a searchable index of all text information on a computer.

Scopeware is currently only available for Windows, but there is an application for the Mac called Boswell -- the subject of this review -- that also attempts to revolutionize desktop data management. Boswell was developed by Copernican Technologies Inc., of Santa Cruz, Calif., who kindly sent me a copy to evaluate.

In my recent review of the little Swedish desktop database program NotePad Deluxe, I noted that I am not a fan of programs that promise to make your life easier and more organized, but that give you a steep and slippery learning curve to climb first before you reach that level of organization.

Happily, NotePad Deluxe isn't like that, and I have continued to use it can now find it a helpful tool, mainly for filing and retrieving current research materials. However, I found that the learning curve for Boswell is much more "vertically oriented."

Nevertheless, this is a very interesting program, described by its developers thus:

"Boswell is intended to be a small, always-open application that should be the users' preferred way of entering text into their Mac and referring back to what they entered previously, whatever task that text might be associated with. The text is stored permanently, so users never have to worry about it getting lost or accidentally deleted; nor do they ever have to spend time deciding what to throw away.

"Moreover, it allows users to easily maintain a chronological record of almost all the text they enter and possibly all the e-mail they read. As time goes by this becomes increasingly valuable. It provides to the individual the advantages of augmented memories that huge computerized databases have long given to corporations and governments; and it gives it to them with a minimum of fuss and administrative overhead.

"Boswell is not an 'application' like a word processor, but more of an 'environment' like the Finder or a Web browser,... that flexibly organizes, preserves, and retrieves text by creating an archive for you and then acting as your own personal librarian. Your text can be any text: old e-mail, articles you have copied from the web, research notes, tasks that need doing, appointments, jokes, phone messages, bright ideas, addresses, love letters, phone numbers, and any writings you are working on. If it is text, Boswell can take care of it for you. You will never lose it, mislay it, or accidentally throw it out. You will never again have to spend time deciding whether text should be kept or discarded.

"And 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 can preserve what you write and what you have read -- and then put it together for you so you can recall it and compare it whenever you want."

Sounds great doesn't it? Unfortunately, there is that learning curve issue. To their credit, the Copernican Technologies folks are up front about this matter in the pamphlet that comes with Boswell. "What is Boswell's dirty little secret?" they ask rhetorically. "Okay, here it is: you have to read the manual..."

So, I read the manual. Unfortunately again, I didn't feel a lot farther ahead after my first time through it. I still did not understand. Even after installing Boswell and feeling my way around in the program for a while. Consequently, I sort of dropped the review project for several weeks.

However, the Boswell CD case kept lurking there reproachfully on my desk. Was I that dumb that I couldn't figure out how to use a piece of consumer software?

So, once more into the breach. Unfortunately a third time, I once again ran 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."

All very well, but I can't help but think that the good people at Copernican Technologies could have made life a lot easier for people who want to use who want to use their software by incorporating nomenclature that corresponds to familiar Mac conventions.

For example, in NotePad Deluxe you have is essentially three levels -- Database; Topic; and Note; which is relatively intuitive to interpret. Boswell of course is a lot more complex program than NotePad Deluxe, but the terms applied to Boswell's various elements seem gratuitously counterintuitive, a point tacitly acknowledged in the Boswell documentation which suggests: "If you ever feel a little lost about what you are doing, choose 'Show Balloons' in the Help menu. This will cause little help balloons to pop up as you investigate Boswell. They may become annoying after a while, but contain a great deal of information for you."

Reading through the instructions yet again, I began to grasp how Boswell works, sort of. You enter data into the Journal, and from time to time you "Zap" or "Zip-Zap" it into the Library where, with the help of Clues, which are character string references, you can retrieve it when needed. Once consigned to the Library, the data is there forever, and cannot be edited or deleted. You can copy something from the Library and edit it, but the original is permanently archived.

And here we encounter another of my personal misgivings about this program. One of the features of Boswell is that it can act as a repository for essentially every piece of text that your deal with, archiving it permanently. You can't edit frozen entries or throw anything away once it's frozen.

I guess that may or may not appeal, depending upon your views and tastes on the matter of archiving. Personally, the idea of having a database that I can't get it or cull rubs me the wrong way. Copernican Technologies have a very rational-sounding rebuttal to that objection, arguing that:

"Every time Boswell is explained to people, they consistently react, 'Why would I want to keep stuff around that I can't throw away and can't change? Won't my hard disk fill up?'

"If you typed at a speed of fifty words a minute with eight characters in a word for forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year (no holidays off, but you get a vacation) from age 20 to age 65, you would generate approximately two gigabytes of text and be in a terrible mood. Ten years ago 80 megabytes was a reasonable size for a hard drive. Now there are floppies that exceed a gigabyte and hard drives that exceed 20. Larger and larger drives seem to be announced every month. Macs now have a 100 gigabyte capability. This is a world where storage capacity increases faster than people can type. Boswell is not worried; you should not be either.

"And if you have all that capacity, why bother to throw anything away? If you do discard it, you know the chances are that you will soon be searching for it. If you have ever dutifully cleaned out a closet or a garage, chances are you threw out something you needed just a few weeks later. It seems to be a law of nature.

"Bytes, after all, hardly take up physical space or weigh anything: today's ten gigabyte drive is smaller and lighter than the twenty megabyte drive of ten years ago.

"As for not being able to change archived material, who needs to change their old e-mail? What percentage of the text files now on your hard drive do you ever expect to change? And of those, how many are you completely uninterested in having a previous version of? Be honest -- there are very, very few. Certainly not enough to overwhelm your hard drive.

"Technology has given you the ability to be a data glutton to an extent undreamed of by the great minds of human history. Why not put your feet up and enjoy it?"

Sounds reasonable enough, but I'm still not convinced.

My own philosophy of archiving is to keep everything in either plain text files -- say Tex-Edit or Nisus, or other types of files that can be easily opened with a text editor, such as Eudora or SweetMail e-mail 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, Mac-only application does not appeal to me, however logical the basic concept.

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 very inconvenient, to say the least. As much as I like NotePad Deluxe, I use it only for relatively transient and ephemeral information -- current article research and the like -- for exactly this reason. Its database files don't open in a text editor. Actual articles get archived as text files. A command that would do an automated dump of all the information stored in a Boswell Library into plain text files would address this objection.

[Addendum - Reader Chris Murga has brought my attention to this information in a Q&A on the Boswell Web site:

"Moreover, you can use Boswell's notebook exporting feature to make text file backups of your entries. For instance, you can create a new, empty notebook called "0101_Boswell_Text_Backup" and then use the hub dialog to put into it all the entries in the archive that were created after midnight on January 1, 2000 and before midnight on February 1, 2000. If you sort the notebook by creation time and export it, you will have a text file containing all those entries in chronological order in a form that can be read by most any word processor now or in the future and you can then safely delete the notebook.

"You would then, in essence, be able to maintain your independence from Boswell at any point in time."

That does seem to effectively address my concerns in that area. Thanks to Chris for the heads up. CM]

Nevertheless, if that issue doesn't bother you, the idea behind Boswell does have a certain integrated elegance. I can see how it could be a very convenient to have all your data files available at your fingertips in one program.

Installation is amazingly easy. If you have the CD version, simply drag the folder called "Boswell_Folder" from the CD to your hard drive. That's it. Boswell does not touch your System Folder in any way.

The Boswell_Folder contains a copy of the Boswell application as well as a library named "Boswell_Library", this Read_Me document, and a folder of documentation that contains the all-important Boswell manual in PDF format and a copy of the Boswell_Library in the form of a text file which you should be able to open from within most any word processor if you ever want to read it that way.

To get started, read the file called "*Read_First_Or_Nothing_Happens*" and then read the Boswell manual. They're not kidding. You really do have to read the manual, and take it from me, you'll need to read it more than once.

The default Library contains more than a hundred Entries which explain the details of Boswell itself. The Journal and a few Notebooks like "__Boswell Overview" and "__Boswell Glossary" should be open when you begin. These will introduce you to Boswell's terminology and concepts.

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 -- 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 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.

Some fashion watchers say that brown is the "new black," a style cue enthusiastically adopted by Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore during last year's election campaign. If you, like Al, are a fan of brown, Boswell's motif will suit you just fine. The CD case is brown, the Boswell Web site is heavy on brown, and the user interface is mainly two shades of brown. Brown is not my favorite color, but I rather like it in this context.

To use Boswell on your Mac system requires the following:
• Power PC processor
• Mac OS 7 (7.1.1 or higher), Mac OS 8.x, or Mac OS 9.x
• 8 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").

It is simply not possible to get a full impression of what using Boswell on a regular basis would be like by playing around with it in the course of a review evaluation, so I asked reader Stephen Diamond, with whom I have corresponded on the topic of text applications and databases from time to time over the past several years, and who has used Boswell in ernest, to comment. Stephen writes:

"I have familiarized myself with Boswell, and can provide some impressions. Boswell offers the centralized efficient storage of completely diverse data, the organization of stored data by numerous cross-classifications, the facilitation of data retrieval by both cross-classifation and sophisticated filters, and the organized output of data by sophisticated sorting options. I cannot think of a more efficient way to store large amounts of data. I cannot think of a more rapid way to input data to the numerous cross-classifications. The manual is weak in providing an overall sense of what Boswell is about, so this brief summary might help orient you."

Stephen initially found Boswell to be crash prone, but eventually eliminated the instability by discarding the default Library file, and building with a new one. He found that the original had been corrupted, "which seems always or almost always to happen when the name or location of the library is changed." Something to keep in mind, and you have to wonder how that characteristic will impact making hard drive backups.

Dr. Johnson's mixed feelings about his friend and biographer are echoed analogically in my impressions of the latter's software namesake. Usually by the time I have finished reviewing a product, I have formed a distinct point of view about it, but not in this case.

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, and the Library corruption issue cited by Stephen Diamond, might incline me to give it a middle of the road three smiley rating.

However, someone for whom Boswell would be just the ticket for solving their data organizational problems, might give it a full five smiley rating. Also in the program's favor are its ease of installation and non invasion of the Mac OS System Folder with shared libraries and extensions.

Consequently, I'm going to cop out and give Boswell a four smiley rating. I'm still not very confident that I have a real handle on this program, but I hope that this review has provided you with a basis to, as Jessica Fletcher used to say on "Murder She Wrote" -- "figure it out for yourself."

Boswell sells for $129.95, and may be purchased from the Boswell website.

Appendix

These suggestions from Copernican Technologies might be some help in figuring it out. Boswell users are characterized as:

They get in the habit of "Boswelling" their e-mail and transform the clutter of their accumulated old messages into a resource.

They use web browsers for Internet research and then have Boswell preserve and organize the information for them.

They write long documents and books. Boswell organizes their notes for them, preserves all the intermediate versions of their writing, and lets them change the order of their sections until it is just right.

They re-use text from their old school work for the assignments that are coming due.

They compare progress reports to previous predictions of progress.

They know the folks they owe Christmas cards to.

They always know when they bought a stock and how much they paid for it.

They know if the warranty has expired.

They can re-live the early days of their romance when they received a passionate e-mail every evening.

They keep track of what they did today and what they plan to do tomorrow.

They keep a diary.

They keep records of all their on-line auction transactions just by Boswelling their e-mail.

They take notes during phone conversations.

They keep track of genealogical notes.

They have the source for all the previous versions of their web site.

They remember to return phone calls.

They know when they last changed the oil in their car.

They collect quotations.

They work on many projects at once.

They re-read all the e-mail they exchanged with their grandchildren to make sure they don't repeat themselves.

They never lose a research note.

They store their joke files.

They catalog their books, videos, and CDs.

They can find phone numbers.

They keep track of their pupils and the work they have done.

They never lose an address.

They are going to write a novel someday and are able to preserve the great ideas they get for it that occur to them when they are in the middle of something else.

They can remain lovable, disorganized slobs, but still find things when they need them.

They squirrel away articles they read on the web for possible use later.

They plan itineraries, agendas, and schedules.

They keep recipes on this thing.

Whatever they want to do with text, they discover they can do it with Boswell.

You are what you remember. Be more with Boswell

For more information, visit:
http://www.boswell.com/

Charles W. Moore

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