EagleFiler is good about letting me stuff all kinds of things into it. Also good about letting me drag entries out. And it stores things as real files with real URLs. So here’s a scenario:
- I’m going to be revising my RubyCocoa book for MacRuby eventually. I’m finding links to topics or examples I’ll want to cover. As I find those, I can pop them into EagleFiler and tag them appropriately.
- But I’ll also want to apply some structure to the corpus, link them together. A wiki might work, but I tend to think crudely-visually, using spatial proximity, overlapping, etc. (Scrivener makes me be too neat, at least in older versions.) So some blobs-with-links visual pane would be good.
- I could drag from EagleFiler to create a new topic, annotate and link it in the hypertext app.
- When I want to organize topics into a todo list, I can drag a hypertext node (or an EagleFiler item) into Things.
- Things, EagleFiler, and my hypothetical app live in one Space, with the Eaglefiler dropbox living on the edge of my main workspace. (Might be nice if it, like Yojimbo’s, were present in every space.)
So EagleFiler takes care of storing, a hypothetical app takes care of arranging, and Things takes care of scheduling, talking to each other over the pasteboard. This isn’t ideal, but it might be better than being overwhelmed or trying to cram myself into an outliner.
I could even potentially use EagleFiler’s metadata plist as a read-only source of tags, though I’m not sure when it actually gets written.
This is sketchy idle thought right now.
