There are so many great ideas bubbling to the surface for Surfulater it is making it a little difficult to ensure I remain focused and true. If you do decide to hop on board you’ll see this in our Surfulater Customer Forums.

The biggest issue with Syncing is where the PC’s are at different locations, for example @home & @work, or when people are traveling. In these situations you don’t want to be sending large files around in order to sync up. My goal therefore is to only send the changes around. This is a fairly complex area which requires techniques like conflict resolution.

The next release, out shortly includes bookmark support, with import capabilities from various other products.

Sharing and collaboration are both areas of real interest. Static sharing is reasonably simple and we’ll see more of this capability before much longer.

Collaboration is considerably more complex, as I’m sure you appreciate. Syncing may pave the way for this. We’ll have to wait and see.

To add an image to an existing article right click on it and select Copy, then flip over to Surfulater and use: Append Clipboard to Field or switch into edit mode and use Paste.

The ability to reference Surfulater articles directly from other applications is on the todo list and something I’m personally very much looking forward to.

Surfulater is already quite open and folks are doing some interesting things.

One of our new users Perry Mowbray, is currently writing macro add-ins for Word, Excell etc. to add enable content to be added directly into Surfulater from these applications. This is accomplished using a simple and open XML protocol. You’ll see more on this in our Forums, where you will also see plenty of Perry.

Also note that most of your Surfulater content is stored in industry standard XML files, which makes it readily accessible by humans and other applications. And article templates are plain open HTML!

Thanks again for your post. Hope to see you join us and help Surfulater evolve.

* With regards to the inter PC Syncing: I use several desktops and notebooks serially (and sometimes in parallel) and I regularly face the sync demon. To date I’ve only been using SmartSync pro and a bunch of standard profiles along with a regulated file structure that allows some sanity to prevail. I hope that SUL will lend itself to allowing KB libraries to be placed in alternate locations and that those locations can be set a default.

* Another thought to sync’ing is utilizing WEBDAV and a serverside conduit to a database. I can visualize something like the Apache WebDAV connecting to a mySQL backend with SSL encrypted tunnels from client to server and posting clippings into that backend. Searching and indexing could use the Lucene project.

* This same process lends itself to posting shared bookmarks also. I’ve used an aging project named Bookmarks4U to accomplish this but addition of new links is just via JS facilitated posts. The ability to export or sync to a facility would be beneficial in group/collaboration efforts.

* That leads me to contention issues in a shared environment… My take is that all posts should be self contained (transaction based) and edits to prior posts be limited and if done also transaction based (al a diff) to allow for auditability.

* The other (likely easier to accomplish) wish would be the ability to right click on an image on a page and have just that image added to an article and not necessarily created as an article itself.

* The last thing I shall suggest is a published API that could allow SUL to integrate with other research tools like MindManager. If there was a way to create links from KB stored articles that can be attached to Mindmaps, that would help in establishing a reference tree for concepting and then in the documentation phase the ability to print and reference the materials.

Thanks for the great work. I figure that I’ll likely buy the product before my trial period is up but I want to give it a good shake down before I shell out the hard earned bucks.

“Copy articles between Knowledge Bases” is high up on the todo list.

The need to access and sync up knowledge base files from different PC’s is one I am very keen to address. This would make Surfulater an even more valuable tool. My plans for this capability are slowly formulating, suffice to say it is reasonably complex to do.

* Content markup (highlighting).
* Create new articles from Clipboard content.
* Copy articles between knowledge bases.
* Content tagging (keywords etc.).
* Filtered tree views.
* Advanced Search.
* Easy creation of new article templates.
* Template extensions.
* Automated content categorization.
* Knowledge Base synchronization across PC’s.
* Shared and collaborative use.
* Access over the Web.

The V1.93, B0.0 enhancements are super! – JML

The “Overview” page http://www.surfulater.com/overview.html also has some screen shots.

Maybe you meant I should have included some screen shots in this article. If so I never thought of that!

I thoroughly enjoyed your article, and thank you for the mention. Sometimes it’s enjoyable to see your name in print.

As a user one does not always know whom they are dealing with when buying into a program, and rarely does the average user converse directly with the author. Your article offered insights that should be helpful to all. I understand now that you DO have a grasp of what and where you want to go, both from your emails and from the article.

Later,
KenA

>What that product came across as was a combination of “Word”, “Notebook” and “FrontPage”.

I must say I’d never thought of Surfulater quite in this way, but as far as those products go that is a reasonable picture to paint.

Surfulater does so much more though. For example saving information from the Web is a snap, organizing it, searching it, adding notes, editing, linking related information together, e-mailing it to your friends etc. These and other capabilties make it an ideal tool to let you permanently save anything you see on the web into your own digital library.

FYI I’m an “information junkie” as well, which is precisely why I wrote Surfulater.

Please do get in touch and let me know how you two are getting on. And if you have any questions or suggestions don’t hesitate to ask.

I come from a “strange perspective” though, I have never tried your product, haven’t seen it yet and the only thing I know of it is what I could gleen from your above article.

I don’t have any software design background, no website ownership to speak of, but I was piqued by the idea of how many times I have wanted to “surf something I was checking out later” but like you said, “…just adding to favorites wasn’t enough”. Our thought train at the moment we discover something DEMANDS that we some how interject what we WANTED from the article or post or whatever.

Without knowing what your product is, requires me to come up with my own idea of what it might look like, work like, etc. What that product came across as was a combination of “Word”, “Notebook” and “FrontPage”. Many times I have found a site through various “backdoors” not that I am a hacker or a cracker, I just am sort of a “information junkie”. Anyway I have in the past grabbed a complete web page and copied it with FrontPage and interjected any thoughts I had about it, either in the title of the file “saved as” or through a link to my thoughts written in Word or Notebook.

I am going now to go check out what your “product” really is… Will I be pleased? Surprised? Or is your product nothing like what my finite mind could comprehend?

Mike Feddersen