Version 10 of William Duquette

Updated 2002-07-13 15:36:35

Homepage : http://www.wjduquette.com/tcl

Recent Stuff:

Notebook is my latest obsession.

I think that Scripted Documents Are Obscure, even if they are way cool. But by a miracle of timing, jcw anticipated my concern, with his new Starkit/Starpack rebadging.

Notebook:

I also think that Wikit's stand-alone Tk GUI is way cool, and would make a great personal notebook if only it were designed to be a great personal notebook instead of a Wiki. So I've started developing my own Notebook application from scratch; more to come when I've got a version up on the web. Some features:

  • A single user Tk application; a pleasant user experience is the goal here, not creation of a web application. In fact, it isn't a web application.
  • A markup convention incompatible with Wikit's. I think it's an improvement, naturally.
  • Embedded macros in notebook pages, using TclLib's "expander" (see below). Include any desired text or the output of any program Tcl can exec in any page. (Quote of the day on your home page, for example.)
  • Magic Buttons in notebook pages. Like links, but execute any desired Tcl code.
  • Easy creation of "web log" pages, except that of course this isn't on the web.
  • Searching and Indexing

Some things on my wish list (but they are getting closer!):

  • Page maintenance tools (delete, copy, rename)
  • A user-configurable and extendable editor
  • Browsing multiple Notebooks at the sametime.
  • Copying pages easily from one Notebook to another.

Other Projects:

AKA WHD.

Category Home Page

[email protected] asks: re: Notebook application, have you considered the time-based streams approach a la Lifestreams? If you read the Wired article or read the original student's paper on this it is quite fascinating. All "items" be they documents, email, messages, images, etc. are stored with a timestamp and can then be displayed in time order via thumbnails. You can set up streams that filter the data, and have multiple streams. So you could have a stream for email messages containing certain text, and whenever a new email message comes in that is so tagged, it will appear on the top of the heap (since it has the newest timestamp). With the builtin search capabilities and Tcl's ease of scripting it could be quite interesting.

WHD: Hmmm. I've not heard of Lifestreams, but the idea's interesting, and it would certainly be easy to list search results or other indices by timestamp instead of alphabetically. I'm not yet saving modification times on the notebook pages (heck, I've only been working on this since June 28th, and it's only July 7th, I've got a "to do" list a mile long). I'll think about it.