• Archive - a stack stationary from importing/exporting notes
• YANS Externals - a stack that contains all XCMD/XFCN (To save disk space if you use several YANS stacks)
• YANS 4.0b1 - The actual note stack
Installation
You have allready done that !!
What is YANS ?
YANS means Yet-Another-Notes-Stack and is just that; one more notes stack. The functionality is simple; you can insert text notes into the stack, you can assign keywords to each note, you can search for notes and you can print the notes. It's not that difficult, try it.
You can see an index over all notes by selecting "index" from the windows menu, "marked" show you what notes are marked.
Defining keywords
The most complicated thing in YANS is keywords. The keywords are display in an hierarchical order, like this
A (research)
B (books)
B (articles)
B (project)
A (fun)
A (mac)
B (hypercard)
B (nisus)
etc. Now if you from the popup menu select 'research' it will be inserted like this in the keyword field "research", if you select 'project' the following will be inserted "research, project".
Now if you quickly want to find all notes with the keyword "research, project", you press the shiftkey, press the mouse over the keyword field and select 'project'. All notes with the keyword "research, project" are now marked and you can now move between them by either using the "marked" index window and click on the desired title. You can also go to next/previous card by pressing the shift key and clicking on the back and forth arrows.
When defining keywords, you select the "define keywords" command from the "Keywords" menu. You are then presented with a card similar to the notes window. On each card of this type you can define one "group" of keywords, for example
A (research)
B (books)
B (articles)
B (project)
To define this "group" you define 'research' as the title and then 'books', 'articles', 'project' on separate lines in the note field. You can take a look how your newly defined popup menus looks like by selecting the 'try' menu (be patient since there are some collecting to be done before the menu is presented).
I know that this isn't beutiful or easy to use (I think I know a better way of doing this but …) but remember YANS is a hack and free !!!
You can also export/import keywords with the help of the import/export keyword commands
Exporting/Importing
You can export/import text files with the help of the "Import text" and "Export text" commands.
A second way to export/import is to create a simple stack with three fields and then export/import a number of notes to it with the help of the "Import from archive"/"Export to archive" commands. The archive stack stationary is just such a small stack …
Preferences
You can set the following preferences : on startup you can define if you want YANS to show the first note in the stack or the one you were looking at when you closed the stack. Then you can specify if you want one or two column output when printing and if there should be a page break between each note or not.
It's also possible to define the font, size and style of the three fields on each note card. The right column makes it possible to define how the printed notes should look like; if you set "As is" the same style, font and size as on the note card is used.
If you make a word bold in the notes it will be printed in bold.
The "menubar"
The menubar has the following menus and menu items.
Note - New Note : create a new note
Note - Delete Note : delete the note
Note - Import Text : import text from a text file
Note - Export Text : export the note to a text file
Note - Import from Archive : import note title, note text and note keywords from an archive stack.
Note - Export to Archive : export notes to an archive stack.
Note - Print This : print the note you are looking at.
Note - Print Marked : print all marked notes.
Note - Print All : print all notes.
Keywords - Add Keywords : shows a dialog box that allows you to add a keyword to a note. The same thing can be done by clicking on the keyword field and selecting a keyword from the popup menu.
Keywords - Delete Keywords : shows a dialog box that allows you to remove one or more keywords. The same thing can be done by doubleclicking the keyword field
Keywords - Define Keywords : takes you to the cards where you can define new keywords or remove old ones.
Find - Find : shows a dialog box that allows you to specify a text string to search for. The search is done in all three fields.
Find - Find Keyword : shows a dialog box that allows you to specify a keyword to search for. The search is done only in the keyword field. The same thing can be done by pressing down the shift key and clicking on the keyword field.
Find - Unmark All : make all notes unmarked. A single note can be unmarked (or marked) by clicking on the check box on the upper right.
Windows - Index : shows a window that lists the titles of all notes in the stack.
Windows - Marked : shows a window that lists the titles of all marked notes in the stack.
Misc - Preferences : go to the preference card.
Misc - Info : shows some info about YANS.
Misc - Rebuild Indexes : if something happens and the index windows looks strange (this shouldn't happen but …); use this command to rebuild the indexes.
Misc - Clear Stack : clears the stack of all notes and keywords.
Why YANS in the first place ?
The two reasons are simple : First I needed something to do to relax from work and secondly I've get a lot of information from the internet, from papers, memos, books, etc.and I need somewhere to store this information so I easily find them using keywords etc. I've been looking at several program, that is "Real PIMs"; the first one was "ThoughtPattern" which was very nice for its time but lacked a number of features and then the company that made it had to close down. Then there are Arrange and Claris Organizer, I've tried but of them but I don't really like them; Arrange is very flexible and powerful but somehow I don't like the user interface. Still I'm considering to buy Arrange but … while waiting for myself to make up my mind (and for the first beta of another PIM) I decided to create a crude program that satisfied my most urgent needs. YANS is this crude program, version 1.0 was VERY crude and almost useless, hopefully version 4.0 will be better (at least for me 8-))
Why this strange "menubar" ?
What can I say ? You shouldn't do it this way but … OK I shall try to justify my decision to make YANS this way.
First of all I didn't want to make YANS as a standalone because of the simple reason that I got several YANS running at the same time and I don't want to have 3 or 4 hypercard standalones taking up my RAM !! So this means that I had to make YANS in the form of a stack.
Secondly, since HyperCard is quite slow on creating/deleting/restting the menubar I decided against using ordinary menus and use this method instead, it's not "The Way To Do It"™ but I think I have a good reason ( = I can quickly switch between different stacks. If you don't like … don't use YANS). I know that the menus doesn't behave exactly like a real menu bar but …
The XCMD/XFCNs
Most of the XCMD/XFCNs are from Frederic Rinaldis excellent collection. The ones used in this stack are : FullHPop, FullReplace, FullFind, FullSort, Listoid, ReplaceCharSet and FullResList
However there are also some commercial XCMD/XFCN in here also, namely the ones that belongs to PrintReport. PrintReport can be bought from Heizer Software.
Who made this stack ?
To make it short
Jan Erik Moström
Department of Computer Science
University of Luleå
S-971 87 Luleå
Sweden
Email : jem@sm.luth.se or jem@acm.org
WWW: <http://www.sm.luth.se/~jem>
Is it shareware, freeware or … ?
Don't worry it's freeware. You may distribute it wherever you like, but you may not sell it. And … please, only distribute the complete, unchanged package. If you include it on a CD-ROM I would like a free copy of the CD.
One thing I would appriciate : If you ever use this stack please send me an email or a post-card (I just want to see if anyone even bothers to use it !!)
Version history
v4.0b2 + Opps, I forgot to add the ListSelect XFCN to the external stack.
+ The Add keyword command from the menu didn't work, but does now
For those of you who have hacked the stack, change the following handler
in the stack script.
on keywordAdd
put keywordList() into all
put ListSelect("3#", all,"Select keywords to delete",return) into x
repeat with ll = 1 to the number of lines of x
put line (line ll of x) of all & return after fld "Keywords"
