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eftychia at 06:50am on 2003-06-09#include <stdwhine.h>
"Need more RAM. Need more pixels."
Looking at patterns in my browser usage while digging into this research project; noticing that I'm not just chasing links, I'm chasing ideas/memes/terms. That is, I stumble across a term that gets me closer to my goal, and open a new Google window to chase that term, in addition to the windows I open to chase embedded links. Adds up to a lot of pages.
I find myself wishing for the ability to "highlight" passages in such a way that I can bookmark and close the window, and when I open it again later, the highlighted passages will still show as highlighted. Wondering what the best ways to represent the markup in the bookmarks/highlights file would be, and how many other people would find this concept useful.
What I really want is to have is a combination of the best aspects of hypertext and this Wonderful WorldWide Wibrary (search engines and all); and the best aspects of a bedroom floor covered with opened magazines, encyclopaedias, and other books, with Post-It notes and index cards and two colors of highlighter markers. (Highlighting only on magazines and photocopies, not on the Books, of course.)
Need More Pixels. That many open books and magazines eat up
a lot of floorscreen space.
Idea for a tool is starting to gel. Might have to be at the OS / window-manager level instead of the application (browser) level to be really powerful. Hmm. Somebody else must have thought of this. What the Hell would they call it if I want to ask search engines to find it for me?
Need more pixels. Need more RAM.
(no subject)
Would saving the content to disk (with marking info) address your needs? Or do you need to mark live sites? (Magazine articles don't change out from under you the way web sites can.)
Annotations
There were some (non-Web) products like this back in the Windows 3.1 days; software Post-it notes for annotating documents and such. I seem to recall reading that they didn't work all that well, though I suspect the truth may be that they did what they claimed, they just didn't do what people would expect. I'd try searching for "sticky notes" "post-it" and such.
I know it's not your browser of choice, but have you tried Mozilla's tabbed browsing? You can keep related pages in multiple tabs in one window, and control-click on a link to start loading it in a background tab while you continue with the current page, and you can save an entire set of tabs as one bookmark. It doesn't do the highlighting, but it might get you partway. (And if you felt ambitious, you could hack the source to write the highlighting functionality yourself... :-)
(no subject)
We always need more pixels.
What kind of RAM do you need? If I upgrade my computer later this summer (that is a big "if", though), I might change motherboards, and wouldn't be able to use the DIMM/100 RAM sticks I have.