Misadventures in a world of bits

Software that has frustrated me

When I started to write the press column for the Church Times, some time around 1996, I think, I walked every morning to the newsagents’ and bought four broadsheets and the Daily Mail, and then stood at the breakfast table cutting out with kitchen scissors the stories I might use. Once everything moved to the web I had to find a replacement for scissors, the corkboard, and the drawing pins.

From 1993 onwards I had organised my social and digital life in a program called Ecco Pro, which cost about £300 to civilians but nothing to computer journalists. In some ways it has never been surpassed. It had the first implementation of a web clipper — in fact a general clipper — that I ever saw, something called the Shooter; it also had an extremely flexible way of displaying elements either in a list or in a sort of spreadsheet. I remember being able easily to make grids of contacts in rows, with columns to determine their status (people to call; awaiting call back; have spoken — and that last one would lead straight into the notes I kept.) But I also kept a commonplace book I still miss, and I used Ecco to plan and organise radio programmes in a way that took me hours of hacking around to imitate in other software. In fact much of my thought and work was kept in Ecco, and then Microsoft started to bundle Outlook for “free” with Office; Ecco was sold to another company and the new owners discovered no one would pay for it. So they let it die, and some time after that my main data file got corrupted, with all my notes from the mid to late 90s irretrievably lost inside it.

The next thing I tried was Evernote, which started off as a kind of intelligent dustbin. It was originally a windows program into which you typed notes, or clipped them from web sites, tagged them, and then had all this information and all these thoughts legible and in one place. With version 2, it was possible, if a little hacky, to keep two copies, one on the laptop and one on the desktop, and in those days that was as far as a private cloud could go. There were no smartphones then. The interface was a little quirky — influenced, perhaps, by blogs – there was a long ticker tape which contained all the notes you had ever made in chronological order. I found that useless. But I could tag notes and clip them, which was all that mattered.

Evernote from the beginning promised that you could always export its data in a semi-legible subset of HTML. This was vital after the catastrophic loss of my Ecco file.

Version 3 of Evernote broke my little private cloud arrangement. Everything would from now on be stored in the company's cloud. On the other hand, version 4, or 5 (I can't remember) had an excellent mobile client. It would capture and scan documents, and OCR them, but only in the cloud, so that they could be searched within Evernote, but not any other way, nor easily exported. It’s now up to version 10, and each successive upgrade has made it less useful and more expensive. I gave up long ago. And nothing else really worked as well.

I tried Microsoft OneNote for a while, but I just couldn't get on with the metaphor of notebooks and pages. I did love the simultaneous recording of audio in interviews, though. Evernote ran something like the same trick, but the audio was crappy.

For a long time I took notes at conferences in a mindmapping application, mainly because they were stored in plain text, but this was an awkward compromise. It may be something in my brain, but I don't get on with mindmaps — they lend an altogether misleading segmentation and clarity to the cloudy shadows and illuminations of my real thought. Logical connections are better expressed in words; connections of association are usually too sprawling and indistinct to be captured by a few connecting lines. This isn't always true: when I am editing on paper I use a lot of arrows and scribblings to connect different parts of a long narrative but screens aren't big enough for that.

I did eventually manage to refine my use of Freeplane, the mindmap I used, to the point where it helped me to write newspaper articles, at least. I could start by writing down thoughts in the kind of semi-random sputterings, like the castings of exploding porridge, in which they first appear to me when I turn my attention to a fertile subject. Then I could develop some quick ideas and let the sentences unroll, using particular formats to distinguish usable text from notes and in this way develop different segments of an argument almost simultaneously, which is how they appear to me. Finally, I would select only those segments of the map that were formatted as "Printable" and copy them into a conventional word processor to be joined and whittled into an article. It was an excellent way to keep raw materials on one side of a screen and finished ones on the other.

But Freeplane was written in a dialect of Java, which made it lumbering and slow to fire up; it was difficult to script and had no way to communicate easily with the outside world or to store and organise web clips. There was no mobile client. I could not use it when I was working at the Guardian, where the Macs were tragically locked down. In the end I stopped for anything but taking notes at conferences where it was supplemented with unindexed audio recordings of varying degrees of crappiness.

The best research compiler I found was Zotero, which handles PDFs wonderfully and many newspaper sites competently. So for a while I did my press column clipping into Zotero. I even wrote a couple of translators for the newspapers I used most often. But Zotero in those days was written as a Firefox extension. This made it unusable at the Guardian, which – as a result of hotdesking — would download a fresh copy of your browser and all its extensions to the workstation every time you logged in. My Zotero database was, and is, substantial. It could take anything up to half an hour from the time I logged in to the time I could actually work. So I gave up that kind of research.

For some years I made do with a variety of bookmarking sites – chiefly Pinboard – and a scruffy collection of mindmaps and odd scraps, all kept as plain text files so they could be read anywhere. Then I came across an open source program called Joplin that organised notes in Markdown, which means they can be searched as plain text as quickly as your hard disk will allow. (I write this against a background of noise like rain on a distant roof as an ancient hard disk is searched for a file from 1988 that might contain the record of an interview with Alasdair MacIntyre. It has been searching for five minutes now).

Joplin was almost right, but like most open-source programs required skills I don’t have to make it fit me completely. So I moved over to Obsidian, which is free (though I pay for it) and uses only markdown files, which are plain text with twiddles. That stuff if going to be legible for as long as there are computers that work and it can be searched with simple command line tools if nothing else. All of which is a very long way round to explaining why I spent the better part of three days last week writing and tuning a python script to convert Ami Pro files into legible markdown – only to find that the piece I wanted wasn’t among them.