Personal wiki / information manager

> Ah, yes, by 'offline' I did mean outside of the mailing list, but that
> was purely out of consideration for the list. If the list wants to
> hear it, far be it from me to keep it from them.
>
> For my part, I am a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I
> have been trying to build tools to facilitate that as I go, from
> taking and sharing notes, to visualizing primary material, to
> (eventually) organizing and writing the dissertation. I have been
> following Offray's updates with interest, as I think my goals are very
> much allied, but I am starting in a slightly different place, if I
> have understood correctly (research and organizing, and not yet
> writing, sharing, or publishing). My efforts thus far have been
> concentrated in two repositories:
>
> Chancery (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Chancery 
> <http://smalltalkhub.com/#%21/%7EEvanDonahue/Chancery>) is an early
> prototype for a note taking system. I am coming from taking notes in
> emacs org-mode, and so Chancery right now is the most straightforward
> collapsable tree outliner/note taker that could give me functionality
> basically equivalent to what I had in org-mode, and serve as a
> platform to co-evolve my research methods and their supporting
> technology. The near-term goals for this involve adding metadata
> (authors, dates, etc) to the sources I am annotating and using that
> for various kinds of historical visualization (and further, attendant
> annotation) eg who wrote what when, referencing who, influenced by
> what, etc), and can I edit all that directly in its graphical form.
> The status of this project is that it is usable by myself and those I
> have worked with on it (and I use it as my primary note taking
> system), but I'm not sure what it would look like to someone loading
> it at the moment (no real intro/docs, as it was just a quick prototype
> to provoke further design discussion).
>
> Trantor (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Trantor 
> <http://smalltalkhub.com/#%21/%7EEvanDonahue/Trantor>) is a
> disttributed p2p system for incrementally keeping data structures in
> sync between multiple, asynchronously connected pharo instances across
> the internet without requiring human attention to resolve merge
> conflicts (think laptos where data is edited offline and then
> automatically synced when they connect to one another); it is my
> answer to sharing and collaboration for things created in Chancery
> (although it is a more general purpose project). Functionally, Trantor
> provides a set of common datatypes (set, dict, text blob, etc) and a
> means to run nodes and peer them for synchronization of said
> datatypes. The goal with respect to Chancery/personal information
> management is being able to easily grab some structured set of notes
> or writing out of the note taking system and share it with
> collaborators or colleagues with a button click, and without having to
> go through the whole export/send/manage versions dance. This project
> is about 85% complete, the proof of concept works, it just needs a big
> refactor to make it usable and quash some bugs.
>
> I guess my observations on using Pharo thus far are first, that it is
> absolutely ideal for evolving prototypes, since you get a sort of poor
> man's gui and persistance (object inspector + image serialization)
> basically for free, which is 90% of the work of such a simple
> information management app prototype. I have a fully functional tree
> outliner at a point when in another language I would still be trying
> to hack a low functionality command line interface. The other thing
> I've found refreshing is that my application can live as one among
> many within the image, sharing data with other programs by passing
> objects around in a way that is impossible to do with a standalone
> application running on a modern operating system. the dream of the web
> is, I think, heading more in this direction, but working with the
> browser (as I was before I came to pharo) requires coordinating a
> separate server process, compressing everything into http/html/json,
> and a host of other problems that vanish when you can just serialize
> objects between pharo instances. In short, I'm getting a lot done in
> this language and I expect I'll be around for a while.
>
> Cheers,
> Evan

> Ah, yes, by 'offline' I did mean outside of the mailing list, but that
> was purely out of consideration for the list. If the list wants to
> hear it, far be it from me to keep it from them.
>
> For my part, I am a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I
> have been trying to build tools to facilitate that as I go, from
> taking and sharing notes, to visualizing primary material, to
> (eventually) organizing and writing the dissertation. I have been
> following Offray's updates with interest, as I think my goals are very
> much allied, but I am starting in a slightly different place, if I
> have understood correctly (research and organizing, and not yet
> writing, sharing, or publishing). My efforts thus far have been
> concentrated in two repositories:

>
> Chancery (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Chancery 
> <http://smalltalkhub.com/#%21/%7EEvanDonahue/Chancery>) is an early
> prototype for a note taking system. I am coming from taking notes in
> emacs org-mode, and so Chancery right now is the most straightforward
> collapsable tree outliner/note taker that could give me functionality
> basically equivalent to what I had in org-mode, and serve as a
> platform to co-evolve my research methods and their supporting
> technology. The near-term goals for this involve adding metadata
> (authors, dates, etc) to the sources I am annotating and using that
> for various kinds of historical visualization (and further, attendant
> annotation) eg who wrote what when, referencing who, influenced by
> what, etc), and can I edit all that directly in its graphical form.
> The status of this project is that it is usable by myself and those I
> have worked with on it (and I use it as my primary note taking
> system), but I'm not sure what it would look like to someone loading
> it at the moment (no real intro/docs, as it was just a quick prototype
> to provoke further design discussion).
>
> Trantor (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Trantor 
> <http://smalltalkhub.com/#%21/%7EEvanDonahue/Trantor>) is a
> disttributed p2p system for incrementally keeping data structures in
> sync between multiple, asynchronously connected pharo instances across
> the internet without requiring human attention to resolve merge
> conflicts (think laptos where data is edited offline and then
> automatically synced when they connect to one another); it is my
> answer to sharing and collaboration for things created in Chancery
> (although it is a more general purpose project). Functionally, Trantor
> provides a set of common datatypes (set, dict, text blob, etc) and a
> means to run nodes and peer them for synchronization of said
> datatypes. The goal with respect to Chancery/personal information
> management is being able to easily grab some structured set of notes
> or writing out of the note taking system and share it with
> collaborators or colleagues with a button click, and without having to
> go through the whole export/send/manage versions dance. This project
> is about 85% complete, the proof of concept works, it just needs a big
> refactor to make it usable and quash some bugs.

>
> I guess my observations on using Pharo thus far are first, that it is
> absolutely ideal for evolving prototypes, since you get a sort of poor
> man's gui and persistance (object inspector + image serialization)
> basically for free, which is 90% of the work of such a simple
> information management app prototype. I have a fully functional tree
> outliner at a point when in another language I would still be trying
> to hack a low functionality command line interface. The other thing
> I've found refreshing is that my application can live as one among
> many within the image, sharing data with other programs by passing
> objects around in a way that is impossible to do with a standalone
> application running on a modern operating system. the dream of the web
> is, I think, heading more in this direction, but working with the
> browser (as I was before I came to pharo) requires coordinating a
> separate server process, compressing everything into http/html/json,
> and a host of other problems that vanish when you can just serialize
> objects between pharo instances. In short, I'm getting a lot done in
> this language and I expect I'll be around for a while.
>
> Cheers,
> Evan