SlipBox 0.9.1

A slipbox is really just this: a loose collection of slips stuffed into a box. Each time you have an idea that seems worth remembering you scribble down a note on an (electronic) slip and put it into the box. Then you forget about it.
When the time comes that you need the ideas stores in SlipBox, the functionality of the application helps you to quickly find relevant slips and, what is more, relations and links between different slips.
SlipBox is a small but powerful program that helps you in this task and offers the obvious advantages of an electronic solution over a paper-and-pencil one: easier and faster access, easy searchability and reusability of the stored knowledge. In particular, the associative searches allow unexpected reuse of the available information.
Sure, there are bigger programs that let you do cool stuff for collecting knowledge, but they have a serious conceptual flaw: they require that you categorise your ideas and store them in a rigid format.
However, at the time when you set out to work on a problem (perhaps even over a period of years or decades) you do not know which categories will be adequate for your knowledge base at the time when you will use the knowledge.
Slip-boxes take the opposite approach. Take a frequent case: you have to write a term paper and dont know yet what you will write about. You read a lot of literature and talk to people.
You dont want to forget all those great ideas you have in this process, especially as you are not yet able to tell the good ideas from the bad ones (or the relevant from the merely interesting ones).
Your slip-box accompanies and supports this process after all, the concept was developed with such applications in mind.
It differs from other tools in that it not only does not require a hierarchical categorisation of the knowledge but also in that it is not centred around the idea of literature excerpts which is usually done in programs similar to SlipBox.
Instead, its core idea are the connections between the thoughts you find interesting and would like to remember. (SlipBox does not manage literature; you will need another program for that, but it can interact with such programs.)
So, the concept underlying a slip-box is extremely simple. Scribble a note and some keywords describing the content on an (electronic) piece of paper a slip. You put it in a box and forget it.
This is a process that extends over some time: weeks, months, years, decades. When you work on something (like writing this term paper) the SlipBox program does two things for you.
Associative searches: By browsing through the box in an associative search it helps you find new connections between the ideas you collected. The keywords you specified will help you make these connections, and the program makes it easy to go from one idea to the next.
Raw searches: When you need to retrieve some specific piece of information contained in the box, the keywords as well as the programs other search mechanisms make the search easy.
Associative searches are a bit like following hyperlinks on the web except that these links are not created manually. The connections between the slips and between the keywords are called scents, corresponding to the idea of information scents.
The slip-box has no hierarchical structure; it is self-organising. The keywords structure the box. So, to make the best use of your slip-box (and the SlipBox program) dont try to categorise your keywords, just write down, what seems important when you create a slip. You can always change the keywords later on.

Enhancements
New features:
- QuickLook plug-in for Spotlight cache files
- Sparkle Framework for updates
- Garbage collection for improved stability (requires OS X 10.5)
- Inspector to contain old Keywords Drawer and Slip Info (also contains Saved Searches)
- Zooming of the text in the Slip Text; zoom factor stored in the file
- Slip Text view remembers selections and saves them in the file
- New options for export & print
- page break after each slip
- export each slip to a single file
- Menu items
- editing hyperlinks
- opening the table panel
- floating the main window (useful when reading PDFs)
- Maintenance functions
- finding slips without keywords or slip scents ("orphaned" slips)
- replacing a keyword in the whole box
- finding orphaned slip links
- finding singleton keywords
- URLs entered in a slips Source are exported as hyperlinks
- Tooltips in Slip Scent Table show the Title and shared Keywords of the associated slip
- Playing system sounds for removing slip and emptying trash
- Input from Make Slip Service is scanned for BibTeX commands and offers to move the label to the source field
- Splitting of slips
- Merging of slips
- Saving of searches
- < June 7, 2009 19:28 ID Auto-completion for the Source field including option in preferences
- Option to redirect tab to activate the next key view from Slip Text view; tabs can be added to the text with alt-tab
- Option to terminate application when last window is closed (preferences)
Changes & Improvements:
- Improved design of the main window
- Increased minimum size of Box window and Slip Scent sidebar to preserve better interface
- Slip scent table is displayed as sidebar
- Removed the Labels of the fields in Slip View
- Improved tracking of the mouse above the snap back button in the Source Field
- Slip link dialogue can create slip links with titles other than slip IDs
- Inserting a slip link with dialogue uses the font to the left of the current position
- "x-bdsk://" is a known linking prefix for the source (interacting with BibDesk)
- The bottom bar in the Search View also displays the number of selected search results
- Button for showing duplicates in keyword scent path is now two `filter buttons
- Improved efficiency of searching
- Support for "Check Grammar With Spelling"
- "Substitutions" submenu
- Context menu for Slip Text view is the applications Edit menu
- Keywords Field is a token field and automatically adjusts to a size so that all keyword tokens are visible
- Window title displays current view
- Current Slip is indicated in Box window title; slip ID field is gone
- Window title of Extra Slip Window uses n-dash instead of brackets for document title
- Import from tab-delimited or comma-delimited file also takes the 0x0a (line feed) newline character for starting a new slip
- Flags in the Results Table have better offset from the baseline
- Extra slip windows fields dont have titles any more
- "Show title column in search results" preference option does not require reopening the box
- Modified key bindings and order of menu items
- Changed New Slip shortcut to cmd-N and Remove Slip to cmd-delete; new file is now shift-cmd-N
- Updated Format menu to current OS standard
- Renamed default button on Import dialogue to "Import"
- Better accuracy in counting words for Slip Info and Box Statistics
- Changed the default creation/modification date of Slip (if not specified by the Slip) to 1/1/2001
- Bookends plug-in now opens bookends:// link with command if that is specified in source field
- Removed the help button from the parameters window of Graphviz, which did not find the entry in the help book
- Spotlight
- Text field to set Spotlight generation interval uses number formatter
- Time interval for Spotlight timers can be changed while documents are open
- Removed "Generate Spotlight files" option from preferences
- Spotlight files are generated if a Spotlight plug-in is loaded; only one Spotlight plug-in can be loaded
- Progress panel is only displayed if more than 10 cache files must be written
- Only if something changed when storing a Slip, the Spotlight module is called
- Slip Template menu item moved to Windows menu
- Progress indicator of Progress Window uses spinning progress indicator style when terminating application
- Font Preferences panel looks more like preferences in Mail.app
Bugfixes:
- Window was sometimes only half vivisble when opened
- Application became sometimes unresponsive
- When opening a slip-box, the first slip was sometimes not added to the slip history
- Box window correctly becomes key window after progress panel for generating Spotlight files is closed (this prevented proper focussing of the application if SlipBox was not the key application during the process)
- Pressing Cancel in Export dialogue correctly does nothing
- Initial window position is correctly placed on the screen
- After document was loaded the Go Back button was selectable
- Selected search results stay selected when Search View is left and selected again
- SimpleSpotlight plug-in restores the old key window after progress panel is closed
- Two subsequent slips in the slip history cannot be identical any more (this cause the Go Back button to be available on application launch)
- After changing the fixed width font in the Preferences the display in the corresponding Box is updated correctly
- If the document is already open when a Spotlight cache file is opened, the window is made key window
- Saving documents does not change the current view
- Correct undoing of dropping a link on the Source field: The undo did not switch back to the affected slip first
- Undo of changing slip author
- Removed the close button form the Slip Template window, because program becomes unavailable if closed this way
- Deleting the redos when the current slip is changed after a save, which is less annoying than having the document marked as changed after saving and changing the current slip.