Note Taking and Organizing Research

I have discovered a new application for note-taking and research and has quickly become my "favorite."

If you're familiar with the kind of websites called a "wiki" you know that its a webpage that users can edit. Voodoo Pad from Flying Meat is a "wiki" that runs on your own Macintosh.

If you're not familiar with a wiki, let me describe it this way: Imagine opening up a blank page in Safari that you were able to edit as if it were TextEdit.

You can create lots of pages within one document like a website, giving each page a name. Anywhere in the document where the name of a page occurs is automatically linked to that page. This makes it very easy to cross-reference items. Voodoo Pad will automatically suggest links for any text that is in mixed upper/lower case, like "MyPage" but you can highlight and link any string of text.

Imagine an electronic book with a glossary where anytime a glossary term appeared in the text it was linked to the glossary definition. I have recently developed an interest in wine tasting, so I created a Voodoo Pad document as a glossary of wine terms. I copied and pasted a glossary of terms from a website, and created a page for each term. Now as I copy and paste wine reviews and articles into my Voodoo Pad document, all of the terms are automatically linked to the glossary!

I also do a lot of genealogy research, which can quickly become complicated since one reference can apply to multiple people, whole families, or specific time periods or regions. I've tried using outlines, but have found that I have to copy lots of entries in multiple places, making it ineffective. For a while I gave up, and just collected lots of separate text files with notes, which I tried grouping in folders. Again I found that some references applied to more than one family, so my filing system approach fell apart. At least I was able to use Spotlight to search them!

Voodoo Pad has been a much more efficient tool for organizing this kind of unstructured information. I've created a page for each family name that I'm researching, and pages for each country, state, county, town, etc. When I find information on a specific person, I create a page for them. Other names or places that I have already researched are automatically linked, making it very quick to cross-reference. Entering the names of spouses, parents and children are automatically linked, without requiring any special formating.

Voodoo Pad allows you to define 'aliases' to pages, which are alternate names for the page. These aliases are also linked automatically whenever they are found in the text of any page. This works nicely for multi-language terms or names, or for people who were known by different names, or maiden vs. married names. Entering the married name as an alias to a page named with someone's maiden name ensures that either form of the name links to the same individual's page.

The pages can be plain text, or styled text. Pages can have rulers for margins and tab stops. There are basic style settings for fonts, sizes, styles, colors, and alignment. The text editing works just like TextEdit, so its very functional, although not exactly a complete "word processing" application. It also supports various styles of bullet lists and outline numbering, as well as simple tables. You can also drag and drop images, website urls, files, and applications into VoodooPad and they will be linked and ready to be opened just by clicking on the link. Linked pages can be opened in the main window, in a separate window, or in multiple tabs like in Safari. Voodoo Pad can also list of all of the pages in the document, even if they aren't linked from any other pages.

Voodoo Pad comes in three different flavors. There is a "lite" version that is completely free. The standard version has many additional features, but requires that you purchase a shareware license for about $30. There is a 15-day trial period so that you can try out all of the features. There is also a "Pro" version for about $50 that includes its own web server, so that the documents can be shared with multiple users like a "wiki" website. Their website has a cross-reference chart of features in each version for comparison.

The licensed version supports AppleScript, various plugins, and can export to the iPod, as well as multiple document formats like HTML, Word, RTF, or XML. One of the plugins can build a list of all of the pages in a document, which I use to periodically regenerate my main index page. There is also a plugin to alphabetize the lines (paragraphs) of selected text, which comes in very handy. Another plugin scans for "to-do" tags, which can collect to do items from any place scattered through your document. The licensed version also supports tagging pages with categories, so that related pages can be grouped together. You can also see a listing of other pages that link to the page you are on for bi-directional cross-referencing. See the full list of features here.

For techies, Voodoo Pad can also contain scripts in several languages, including AppleScript, shell scripts, Perl and Python. Any of these scripts can be executed from within Voodoo Pad using the "Run as Script" command.

In the couple of months that I've been using Voodoo Pad, its been updated several times for bug fixes, a few new features, and compatibility with Leopard. Its been very stable, and has always worked predictably. I have found it to be an indespensible tool for my daily work. I liked the lite version so well that I've purchased the full version, and love having the additional features.

If it sounds interesting to you, download the lite version, or the trial version, and give it a try. You can download it directly from the developers website listed above, or search for it on Version Tracker or MacUpdate. Give it a try!