Comments on: A Greased Up Platypus for Anthrosource-Google Synergy

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Race to the bottom: anthropology websites in comparative perspective

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:28:57 +0000

[…] But then there are other reasons that sites fail to draw serious traffic. In the case of our official AAA websites that reason is, to my mind, lousy design plain and simple. The current AAA website is truly amateurish (although a new one is supposedly in the works which will hopefully be better). AnthroSource’s search function is so lousy the wider community created work-around solutions like greasemonkey scripts and browser plugins. I feel like one of us should get up at the next AAA meetings and pull a Steve Ballmer on them: “Developers developers developers.” […]

By: itsalljustaride

itsalljustaride — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 04:14:12 +0000

that’s a good idea. I’m going to dig around with it a bit more. hopefully some of my frustrations are merely caused by me not using it right.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:06:30 +0000

Have you tried giving feedback? The Bookends developer is very responsive. He\’s implemented almost every feature I\’ve ever requested from him, and he\’s busy making some major improvements – including switching to Cocoa so that he can have a universal binary build, and implementing OpenURL …

By: itsalljustaride

itsalljustaride — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:55:20 +0000

I’ve used Endnote and Bookends a bit, but they seem to suffer from the problem that many such programs do, and that’s that they are a bit obtuse and overly complicated. Bookends less so, but I still can’t get it to open a PDF that is attatched to a list item with a double click. It just comes up with the reference info, which I have no need to edit since that is all imported when I put it in the library in the first place. Its management of attatchments leaves a bit to be desired too, since it doesn’t delete attatchements from the folder that you had it automatically put them in when you un-attach/delete it from the library item.

Bookends’ ability to function as a server is interesting, and I havn’t tried it out yet, but the problem with that is that when you use a server you usually have a client that talks to the server. You could do similar yet more limited things with a paired-down iTunes-like manager using a Bonjour connection (just like iTunes does) and share PDFs between people on your network (i.e. everyone in your department, provided they are using the program) with no server necessary.

Anyway, back to my original point. All i need is a program that gives me a library of the articles/web pages/documents I have on my hard drive, organizes those articles, and allows me to open them from that interface. Much like iTunes does for my music. Bookends’ ability to make citations and bibliography pages with certain formates is wonderful, but the simple act of organizing and accessing the articles is clunky to me.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 07:19:44 +0000

Actually using iTunes for PDFs is a hack. It makes much more sense to use something like Bookends or Sente – both of which are designed to handle this kind of metadata, and also work as reference managers. I recommend Bookends, since my previous experiences with Sente’s handling of in-text citations left much to be desired; however both applications are quite good. Endnote somewhat less so as it does not have an iTunes-like interface.

By: itsalljustaride

itsalljustaride — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 01:07:12 +0000

the fact that iTunes can import and keep track of not only music and video but also PDFs is promising. I wasn’t aware of this until now. The task now would just be to write a Cocoa plugin for iTunes that alters the way iTunes handles those documents so the Artist/Album paradigm is something more like Author/Journal/etc. Then there is the metadata, as you said. But the simple fact that iTunes can import PDFs into its framework is a start.

By: Rex

Rex — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:20:51 +0000

u rawk!