"I don't like to read ReadMe files -- I just like to open up the application and start playing with it."
Don't do that with Boswell® -- you will only waste your time. Boswell is not an "application" like a word processor, but more of an "environment" like the Finder or a Web browser. A Web browser without an Internet connection is not very useful or interesting; neither is Boswell without a Library. And just as a Web browser is difficult to use and understand if you do not know what a Web page or a URL is, you need to sit still for the definitions of a few new words before you can do anything with Boswell.
We are including the Boswell manual in PDF format with this release. Please read it before installing and using Boswell. This product is not like other Mac applications you are familiar with. You cannot start it up, play with it, and figure it out as you go along. Boswell simply is not like that.
What is "Boswell"?
Somewhat the way a web browser enables you to search and navigate all the information other people have created for you on the Internet, Boswell does the same with your own private information by storing text away permanently and then retrieving it again later, either as an individual item or grouped with others like it. It augments your own memory much as libraries did for civilizations and the early computers did for corporations. The best description for it we have heard so far is "an information managing environment." It is very handy for extracting useful information from old e-mails or organizing research notes when working on a long document.
The metaphors we use are page-like units of text called Entries. These have headers containing information about the Entry's content somewhat like the header on an e-mail message or the way the Finder has information about a file: name, time of creation, and such. There is also have a larger area for the content of the Entry, which is comparable to the contents of a file or the body of a message.
The Entries are created in a special window called the Journal, and later stored on your hard drive in a group of files called the Archive. They are viewed in sortable collections called Notebooks. After being stored away, Entries cannot be changed or erased. Because Entries cannot be removed from the Archive, you never have to clean things up or worry about something important being thrown away. The Archive, all the Notebooks, and the Journal taken together are called the Library.
Notebooks enable users to group together Entries which share some common topic or feature. Using a dialog window we call the Hub, Entries can be added to a Notebook by searching the Archive for all those that match user-specified time, header, or content criteria. Other Notebooks can be searched as well. A Browser window allows any Entry in any Notebook to be viewed with just some scrolling and a few mouse clicks.
In brief, you can stuff all your e-mail into Boswell and later receive a usable response to a request like, "get me everything I sent to Fred (but not Bob) last March about the Harris project deadline where the word 'disaster' is used and sort the results by time."
Boswell's Terminology
Because Boswell does some very new things, we have had to invent some new words to describe them. To let you know that they do not mean what you thought they did, we capitalize them in our documentation. We realize our terms may take some getting used to, so please allow some time for that. Here's a few of the worst offenders.
"Put" means to place an Entry into a single Notebook or into many Notebooks.
"Zap" means to remove an Entry from a Notebook. This does not destroy the Entry -- you can always find it again in the Archive.
"Put-Zap" takes an Entry from Notebook A, Puts it into some other Notebooks, and then Zaps it from Notebook A.
"Clues" are character strings you have associated with specific Notebooks. For example, you might make a person's e-mail address a Clue for a Notebook you have created for that person. A Notebook's name is always considered to be a Clue for its Notebook.
"Sifting for Clues" searches the text in an Entry's Contents and Header for Clues to create a list of Notebooks suggested as Put destinations. Users can accept or modify this list when Putting manually. Sifting is not an action which users explicitly trigger, but happens as part of an explicit Put or Zipping.
"Zip" automatically Puts an Entry into Notebooks without the user having to decide where it will go. It Sifts for Clues, assumes the list of destination Notebooks created were exactly what you want, and does Puts without bothering you with a dialog box.
"The Hub" is a dialog window which is the heart of Boswell. It allows you to copy Entries from Notebook to Notebook using every criterion we could think of. You can also use it to Zap Entries and make other changes to them. The manual covers this in detail. Except for Zapping Entries from the Journal, all the nifty stuff you can do in the Hub is undoable, so feel free to play around with it.
The "Info Strip" is a small area at the top of each Notebook, Browser, and Journal window which shows you how many Entries it contains. There are also popup menus which not only tell you the current format of the window and how the Entries are sorted, but allow you to change these values as well. Another popup allows you to more easily act on the Entries in a single Notebook than you can using the Hub. Note that the actions you take in the Info Strip (like sorting the Entries in a Notebook) are also undoable.
What do I do before I start up Boswell?
First off, make sure you can satisfy Boswell's system requirements: System 7 or higher and 6 meg of RAM; 5 meg of disk space to start. Boswell may need more RAM over time, but this will get you started.
Some preparation before first running Boswell is very wise. Go into the Date & Time control panel (under "Control Panels" in the Apple menu in the upper left corner of your screen) and make sure that the current time and time zone are correctly set. Boswell has no choice but to assume those values are accurate; it will not serve you well if they are not. It must know what time it is and where you are.
It is also a very good idea to use the Memory control panel to verify that the size of the disk cache is adequate for Boswell's needs. Less than 500K will cause problems; anything above that is fine; the more the merrier. The latest systems default to a cache of several megabytes and Boswell is very, very happy with that.
Now you are ready to install Boswell if you have the CD version. Simply drag the folder called "Boswell_Folder" from the CD to your hard drive. That's it. We do not touch your system folder in any way.
The Boswell_Folder contains a copy of the Boswell application as well as a library named "Boswell_Library", this Read_Me document, and a folder of documentation that contains the all-important Boswell manual in PDF format and a copy of the Boswell_Library in the form of a text file which you should be able to open from within most any word processor if you ever want to read it that way.
How do I start up Boswell?
Now you are ready to take Boswell for a spin, but just running the application on its own will be very frustrating. Boswell needs a Library to work with. Instead of creating a new empty one, make a copy of the Boswell_Library Folder so you have a "training wheels" version you can discard later. This way you will not have to worry about messing anything up permanently.
Double-click on the Boswell_Library file you find in the Boswell_Library folder (not one of the folders or any of the numbered Archive files) or drop it onto the Boswell application. This will start Boswell running and give you some data to work with. The data happens to be the detailed Boswell documentation so you can get up to speed on the product while investigating it.
How do I start exploring Boswell?
The Library we provide already contains more than a hundred Entries which explain the details of Boswell itself. The Journal and a few Notebooks like "__Boswell Overview" and "__Boswell Glossary" should be open when you begin. These will introduce you to Boswell's terminology and concepts.
If you ever feel a little lost about what you are doing, choose "Show Balloons" in the Help menu. This will cause little help balloons to pop up as you investigate Boswell. They may become annoying after a while, but contain a great deal of information for you.
We think it would be wiser for you to simply add to this Library we have provided rather than start with an empty Library you have created yourself, because that way you will always have the documentation with you when you are using Boswell. With that in mind, we have prefixed our Notebook names with "__" to distinguish them from the ones you will create later and to make them sort to the end in all the lists of Notebooks you will encounter.
Every Notebook window except the Journal window can be viewed in either of two layouts which are named for the window types they resemble: Journal and Browser. The Journal Layout has Entries scrolling by like pages in a word processing document so you can compare several Entries at once; the Browser Layout has a grid of Entry headers and displays a single full Entry which is handy for quickly looking at individual Entries.
We have used the popup menu in that narrow Info Strip area at the top of the window to set the "__Boswell Overview" window's Layout to Journal and so you read sequentially through its Entries much as though it were a word processing document. We put the "__Boswell Glossary" Notebook window in Browser layout so you could refer to it for unfamiliar terms.
Open a Browser window so you can easily check out anything else that catches your fancy. It allows you to look at any Entry in any Notebook with just a couple of clicks and some scrolling. The "__Scenarios" Notebook is the best place for further exploring: it is our attempt to show how people would use Boswell in real-world situations. We tried to have a Notebook for every feature of Boswell so you could use them to investigate the product itself.
If you are interested in a topic and there is no Notebook for it, we suggest you try creating a new one and using the Hub to Put into it all Entries in the Archive which contain the topic as a phrase so you can browse the results. Except for Zapping Entries from the Journal, all the nifty stuff you can do in the Hub is undoable, so feel free to play around with it. Any Entries that you feel do not belong in your new Notebook can be Zapped.
We suggest you experiment with some dummy data until you gain some confidence in your understanding of Boswell. Don't worry -- it shouldn't take long.
You can use "New Entry" to manipulate some information for yourself. We have included a small "__Boswell Experiments" Notebook to give you some ideas for tasks you might want to attempt. The empty "RESULTS" Notebook is a handy place to view search results. There's also a "TEMPLATES" Notebook containing Entries you might want to play around with using Cloning.
How do I start adding information to my own Library?
It is time to ditch the training wheels. Quit Boswell and drag that Library you have been playing around with to the trash; there is no point in preserving these first experiments with Boswell. Move the original Boswell_Library folder wherever is most convenient on your system. Make an alias to the library file it contains and put that alias in your startup folder so you will always have it available in future along with all the Boswell documentation it contains.
You had best prepare by creating some Notebooks and some Clues for them. People are always a good place to start. A friend with an uncommon name like "Walter Guttersnoop" can have a Notebook called exactly that devoted to him with an e-mail address like "walter@guttersnoop.com" as a Clue for it.
A Notebook's name is considered a clue for that Notebook. If you have a Notebook for all the people you know, calling it "People" will cause every Entry with a sentence starting with that word to be Zipped to it whether it contains any information about the people you know or not. It is better to add a distinguishing suffix to the Notebook's name to prevent that. We would call it "People_NB" but you might be more comfortable with something else.
Clues present a similar problem. A Clue like "walter@guttersnoop.com" is most unlikely to be found in any Entry that has nothing to do with your oddly named friend. We think of it as an "automatic" Clue whose presence practically guarantees accurate Zipping. A Clue for People_NB is more likely to be "manual" -- it will probably never occur in ordinary text and will instead be dragged from the Journal's list of Clues to an Entry's Comments. We would use a prefix in this case: "*people". We like the asterisk because it causes these manual Clues to sort to the start of the list where they are always handy for dragging.
After you have some Notebooks and Clues set up, you probably want to create some Entries of your own. Notice the default titles, sources, and tags the entries have. If these are not to your liking, you can always change them using the preferences dialog. You could do some Entries for a few of your friends and their personal information. Drag the "*people" Clue over to their Comments and do a Put on one of them. The list of suggested destination Notebooks you get in the dialog box shows you where they would have been Zipped.
Try a Zip-Zap on another one. Use the Browser window to see where it went.
How do I get my old e-mail into Boswell?
Basically, you Import a bunch of text files into your Journal and then Zip-Zap the new Entries. There is a catch, however. This is a very infrequent use of Boswell and can exceed its rather modest memory requirements. If you import masses of old e-mail, Boswell could drown in all that data You will need to fiddle with memory settings in the Finder before and after you do this or risk a crash and a damaged Library. This is covered in detail in the manual.
You will also need to create those text files from your e-mail messages in the first place. Please check our web site for free tools we are providing to help you with this task.
How do I get my new e-mail into Boswell?
Just after you read an incoming message and just before you send an outgoing one, do a "Save As" in your e-mail application to a special folder you reserve for use as a Boswell "In Box." When you are using Boswell, you can regularly Import all the files in that folder into your Journal with a single menu command. Once the messages are safely inside Boswell, it is a good idea to switch to the Finder to put those files in the trash so they will not be Imported twice. You can then Zip-Zap the new Entries immediately or tweak their Comments with some dragged Clues first.
Making Backups
No software is bug-free. We urge you to make frequent backups of the Boswell_Library folder to be used in the event of data corruption.
Selecting your Library folder and hitting command-D in the Finder should do it. It would be a good idea to make text backups of your data as well. Using the Hub regularly to Put all Entries Frozen since your last backup into a re-used backups Notebook and then Exporting that Notebook will create a series of files which preserve your data.
Bugs
If you encounter any bugs, please let us know about it right away so we can start fixing them. We have included a bug report template that you can e-mail to bugs@copernican-tech.com.
WARNING
The Macintosh operating system has proven to be surprisingly sensitive to the naming and location of Boswell's files. If you want to re-name your Boswell library file or move it to a different folder, please create a file alias in the Finder (Command-M will do it) and use the alias instead. If you do this sort of thing with the library file itself or the logs files, it may result in an irreversible corruption of your data. Please do not take these kind of chances with your library -- use an alias instead.
Version History
1.0: First shipping release. All features implemented and all known bugs fixed. 0011-04
1.0.1: First bug fix release. A memory leak in notebook searching corrected and a very infrequent text field bug fixed. 0102-04
1.0.2: Second bug fix release. Made Finder interaction more robust and expanded error alerts. 0102-14
Freebies
We are working on free tools to make the life of the Boswell user easier. Please check out our web site for the latest releases.
Happy Boswelling!
Copyright 2001 by Copernican Technologies, Inc.
Boswell ® is a registered trademark of Copernican Technologies, Inc.
