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Department of Computer and Information Science |
Please note: as of September, 2005, I switched my desktop platform to Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) so most of the tools on this page are no longer relevant to my daily work life. I still recommend them for Windows users. To see what I use under Mac OS X, click here.
I use several tools during my daily work that I find pretty useful and a few people have asked me about them, so I thought I'd list them here and say a few words. You could say I'm endorsing them, in which case I'd like the respective corporate owners (if applicable) to know that I'm receptive to free copies of their progams. Thanks! By the way, all of these run solely on the Windows platform. I use other operating systems for other things, so this tool list is just my "daily productivity suite" list, if you will.
Note: Of all the products below, only MiKTeX is literally free. All the others require the purchase of a license and registration code.
Note: many of the problems or criticisms I mention below are addressed in Service Pack 1.
OneNote is a great research tool for keeping track of handwritten and typed notes, logs, journal entries, and whatever other text you might generate while conducting research. It supports drag-and-drop of selections or entire web pages (and other formatted content, like Word documents or OpenOffice documents) directly onto your pages. It works well with TabletPCs (so I'm told). I use it to keep notes of my adviser meetings, conference lectures, personal research notes, and various articles and research reports germaine to my work. OneNote also supports something they call "stationery," which is really just a synonym for template, so you can customize the layout of your notes and pages with a decent amount of flexibility. OneNote also does NOT require you to have Microsoft Office. It integrates slightly with Outlook 2003 (if you want to email pages of notes directly from OneNote via Outlook or add to-do task buttons that show up in your Outlook to-do list), but otherwise there's no interdependence. Freedom is good.
Some weaknesses are that it doesn't embed files like, for example, Lotus Notes can. You can create hyperlinks to URLs on the Internet as well as local files, but you can't embed the actual file in your OneNote page. It doesn't support tables; well, not "real" tables. You can simulate a tabular structure with a strange combination of tabs and carriage returns. If you want to copy a table from a web page, for example, you have to go through these awkward steps. OneNote also doesn't support equations in its text flow. Not many programs do, of course. Word, to cite just one, requires you to embed via OLE an equation object that you create elsewhere. OpenOffice does it better, with a BabyTeX-like interface. I wish I could have that in OneNote since equations are part and parcel of my work. OneNote also doesn't have the capability to support more than 9 flags: I have lots of categories of research sub-topics and labeling my notes with them would be very handy (and some data require more than one label), so being restricted to just 9 sucks.
Here's a screenshot from Microsoft of what it looks like (I've customized my interface and notes pretty heavily, so I'm showing this picture to give a basic idea of what it is):
Remember the problem with embedded files I was just talking about in OneNote? Well, this program is how I almost solve it. Onfolio is a file repository-"plus." I used to store my PDFs and text and Word and spreadsheet documents in directory structures in order to keep track of them and have a relatively easy way to find them. Onfolio is much better: it provides a toolbox that integrates with Internet Explorer and Firefox (or runs standalone without the browser) that keeps the folder concept but adds metadata to the files in the repository such as where you got it from, what the URL was (if it detected it, or if not, if you typed it in by hand), and your own comments. It'll store pretty much any kind of file or hyperlink. With each item in the repository you have a choice as to whether to cache a local copy (which is what I do for files) or just store the hyperlink (which is what I normally do for web sites). Within the collection of files, you have the freedom to drag-and-drop files and folders around however you like. Don't like your existing structure? Move things around with a few mouse drags. Done. You can also add text files to the repository from within the Onfolio interface (that is, it opens a mini-editor and you can type a note or a letter or whatever and stick it into the repository without spawning a new process to create your text note). To be honest, I've never used that feature.
A downside is that you store data in "collections," each of which consists of a single file. You probably see where this is going. I have a collection of files that contain my research-related files and it's quite large. It's growing larger by the day. Soon it'll be too many megabytes to easily synchronize with my duplicate file servers (I strongly believe in replicated data). This inevitably means I'll be breaking apart that collection into 2 or more smaller collections, and this process will likely continue. Onfolio only supports viewing items in one collection at a time (you can't, say, open two windows with two collections in them). It can be a pain.
Below is a screen shot from Onfolio that shows the tool integrated in Internet Explorer. The standalone interface looks exactly the same, just without the Internet Explorer surrounding it. As I did with OneNote, I've modified my own interface in Onfolio to include a bit more color and parenthesized counts of the number of documents in each folder for a quick view of how much is in each category without having to descend into it and count.
Do you use LaTeX? I do. But I use it everywhere: Windows, Mac, UNIX, whatever. Under Windows, I've found MiKTeX to be a great program that has very simple installation (well, as far as TeX installations go), easy updating and patching, great performance, and I've never had a problem adding my own style files or templates.
LaTeX (and TeX, too) is not a word processor. No. It is a typesetting language that we can all gratefully thank Don Knuth for creating and Leslie Lamport for extending (to be precise: Don created TeX and Leslie created the LaTeX front end that is mostly a macro-on-top-of-TeX system, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that). See MiKTeX above. Anyway, since LaTeX is a language and not a word processor, how do you create documents in it? Answer: with confusion, many syntax errors, and patience. But have no fear, gentle reader, because there exists WinEdt, which makes many of the annoying tasks you might otherwise do by hand (cross-checking BibTeX references, running the latex command and then trying to scroll back and catch the errors, locate that funny symbol you know exists but can't easily find the command sequence for) much easier. It even integrates with CS-RCS (the RCS program for Windows, which I also use), with an additional free package found at its macro library site.
For snapshots of WinEdt in action, look here.
If you're a Linux/UNIX user, check out Kile.
This is my general-purpose editor. It's a great text editor, but it also edits source code in just about any language, has extensive macro support, you can call compilers within it, it'll search and display function names for you, it's just great. You must have it.
See the screenshots here.
Last updated: 2006-04-10 19:29
