OWL
Phil Jones Wiki And Outlining project, hoping to support Off-Line/private NoteBook. https://github.com/interstar/OWL
Trying it out on my laptop
- it uses a little WebPy server so it can save files
- you don't have a choice of the place to save your files (but it's Open Source, so that's easy to fix)
- it doesn't do Automatic Linking of Smashed Together Words - you click on any chunk of text and hit the Link button, and it creates a link for a page named to match that text. It doesn't distinguish working links (to already-existing pages) from not-existing (yet) pages.
- each page is an OPML file -
<outline text="This is the <a href="#FrontPage">FrontPage</a> of <a href="#BillSeitz">BillSeitz</a>"/>
- with an.opml
file extension
Android app version to save pages as OPML files to the SD Card of your Android device. https://github.com/interstar/OWLdroid
- Phil sent me an apk file
- I had to manually make an
OWL
directory - Now it works.
- Can't drag/drop lines to re-arrange, have to select a line then use menu to Move Up, etc. (which isn't bad if just moving 1 position, but not great to significantly re-arrange a To-Do List) (this behavior comes from Concord/Fargo).
Concerns
- this doesn't feel great to make as a writing UI on either platform, but maybe just need some practice
- nervous about committing to OPML
Next steps - done Jan13'2014
- make
OWL
folder in Drop Box via laptop - done - use Drop Sync on Android to sync the Drop Box OWL folder to the OWL folder hard-coded into the Android app - done
- make sure synching works - done
- tweak source on laptop to us a folder within Drop Box - was having some problems getting started because notes I'd tweaked before were generating an
invalid XML
error inside Chrome, but eventually got a fresh start- use this for some side-notes to get a better feel for it - copied/pasted a few pages in (did nice job of indenting bullet lists that I pasted in, though left the bullet chars in place)
- need a RecentChanges!
- re-synch with Drop Sync (hmm, smells a bit slow, will have to test more in future)
- re-synch after changes on Android - 1 new page, 6 pages changed: 37sec!
- re-launch on Android Tablet - yes those pages are available now!
Update: having done some writing in this now, my conclusion for the moment is that the UI is annoying enough to be a distraction - e.g. issues with clicking at the end of a line to add more text, splitting a node into 2 nodes (you have to cut/paste, vs just hit Return and add bullet), etc.
also an ontology language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
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