Archive for the ‘wiki’ Tag
The Offlineable Personal Wiki
Filed under: Ruminations | Tags: dropbox, evernote, idea, mobile, offline, synchrony, wiki
Leave a Comment Some of us are mobile, and have smartphones, and want to take notes of things. Some of us use Evernote, but are a little bit dissatisfied because it’s a bit on the slow side, and a little nervous about giving EvernoteCorp all our data. Some of us like the idea of a wiki, but want to be able to use it on our smartphones when we’re out of range.
Enter the Offlineable Personal Wiki Which Doesn’t Have A Cool Name Yet (OPWWDHACNY). Markdown editing, text file storage, easy mobile app for editing and searching, uses Dropbox or something similar to sync with a webserver for access to other devices. Dropbox allows syncing of any filetype including photos, audio recordings etc, so there’s no technical text-only limitations.
“What about editing collisions,” I hear you cry. Well, that’s the limitation. This is a single-user affair, folks, so editing collisions aren’t a problem.
That’s what some of us want, and I suspect there’s already a few candidates on the way out there. What’s missing is the Offlineable bit.
Go forth. Develop. Profit from my brainwave.
EDIT: Added link to Evernote.
Why a wiki would make a terrible address book
Filed under: Ruminations, Uncategorized | Tags: address book, semantic, usability, wiki
Comments (3) This is a companion post to the one I wrote yesterday. If you haven’t read that yet, it might be worth a look.
So I thought a bit more about wikis and how wonderful they are, and thought, this sounds too good to be true. What are some of the things that are going to piss me off if I use a wiki for my address book?
Come on, there’s got to be something!
Aha!
There are no standard formats. Because everything in a wiki is plain text or HTML, it’s up to the user (i.e. me) to make sure that each phone number has the required number of digits. It’s impossible to validate stuff like that, because the data you enter really has no idea what it’s supposed to be. This is very different from normal address books, where every piece of data you enter knows exactly what it’s meant to be, by virtue of where you entered it.
Useful semantic features are staggeringly difficult to implement. Following on from the point above: if we can’t identify a phone number, how are we supposed to make it actionable (e.g. “click to call”)? Conventional address book software has it easy here – it knows each and every time it encounters a phone number. Our wiki doesn’t have that luxury – it’s got to be smart instead.
The usability problems with programatically recognising particular patterns are as follows:
- False positives annoy our user.
- False negatives annoy our user.
- Asking for confirmation annoys our user.
In summary: unless it’s perfect, it’s annoying. Possibly far less annoying than not having it, but annoying all the same.
I can hear some of you out there crying, “what about if I specify where the phone numbers are?” Well, here’s my answer: unless you’re a Semantic Markup NutTM, specifying stuff like that manually is more annoying than all the above points combined. Obviously, this is a really long way from being a solved problem.
You have to define your own structure. One of the easy things about a run-of-the-mill address book is that it gieves you structure for free. You don’t have to think about how to put in a phone number. You just whack it in the “Phone no.” box, and Hey Presto! Your program knows it’s a phone number.
If you want your wiki to recognise phone numbers, you’re going to have to tell it where they are. And that ain’t easy with free-form text.
A useful wiki’s lack of predefined structure must be balanced out by cleverness. Your cleverness. You can do this in two ways: you can make your wiki clever, which is Really Hard, or you can give it a structure that you define, which is easy, and then maintiain it, which is Very Hard. Unless you find an easily maintainable structure, which is also Very Hard. Besides which, enforcing lots of structure is one of the things from which a wiki tries to free you.
But hey, very few things are both easy and worthwhile.
So my title for this post is a bit of a misnomer. Sorry for misleading you. You really could use a wiki to make a really great address book. But it would be Really Hard, and it would also suck a lot until you got it right. Which, incidentally, might never happen.
But it could be done. You’d just need to be very patient and very clever.
Why a wiki would make an awesome address book
Filed under: Ruminations | Tags: address book, ideas, software, wiki
Comments (1) I’ve been thinking a bit about wikis recently, from how I’d use one for a particular project, right through to how I’d implement one. Something hit me recently which may have been obvious to everyone else, but came to me in a flash of light: wikis are so flexible, you can use them for anything. Really. Absolutely anything.
I’m going to assume you already know what a wiki is. If you don’t, take a look at this explanation by CommonCraft, then come back. I’ll wait here.
So. Just to prove how great wikis are, I’m going to show you why you could use a wiki to make a truly awesome address book. In fact, I reckon this address book would be better than some examples of dedicated address book software.
What does a wiki have over a normal, database-backed address book?
It’s free-form. A wiki can contain any information you want to store (and are able to encode). It’s not restricted by strict formats or sets of fields, meaning you make your own structure. Why is this useful? Well, I have a mate named Jamie, who has 11 email addresses. That’s right. Eleven. Most address books will only let me put in 2 or 3. See my problem? Well, because wiki pages are free-form text documents, I can put in as many email addresses as I want, in whatever way I want to lay them out.
It’s freely editable. Normally only one user can see any given address book. If not, it’s probably run by a business or organisation, and that will mean that only an admin can edit it. Either way, changes go through one person, and one person only. Because that person has much better things to do with his/her time, we get problems with out-of-date information, typos, etc, that take forever to get fixed (better things, remember?). Wikifying my address book does not allieviate these problems on its own, but it does provide an opportunity to fix it, which a normal address book does not.
It’s extensible. I’ve got several groups of friends, and all my friends have many interests and things in common with each other. They’re human, so this is inherent in their nature. But a normal address book doesn’t let me document these associations usefully. I can apply some pretty broad category-type groupings, but mostly it’s very hard to identify relationships between people. The closest I’ve seen is the “Spouse” field in the Windows Mobile 5 Contacts app, and even that is just a text field – I can’t even link to another person!
With a wiki, not only can I link to (or from!) other people within my address book, I can also link to outside resources, for example a group or association website, or just my Christmas card list, or other (as yet unimagined) parts of my wiki.
It’s searchable. When you search your address book in Windows Mobile, you’d better be searching for a name or a phone number. If you’re searching for anything else, forget it. Email? Nope. Category or group? Better off eyeballing the list (and that’s assuming you’ve maintained your categories diligently, and who has time for that?).
Wiki? It’ll index everything, from the mystery phone number to the birthday present ideas (regifts, anyone?). That’s what I want.
It’s version controlled. Everyone makes mistakes, so you’d be foolish not to allow for them. Most apps have an “undo” button, but address books don’t, in the main. Not once you’ve saved your update, anyway. So say I overwrite an important phone number with another important phone number. A wiki (a good one, anyway) will let me go back to the old version. I don’t know of any address book that does that.
Its functionality is limited only by your imagination (and programming skills). Most wikis have some kind of plugin/macro architecture. At least the self-hosted ones do. That means that if I have the programming nous, I can make it do whatever the hell I want. Ain’t no address book in the world that will do that (except maybe Thunderbird, and possibly Gmail with Greasemonkey).
UPDATE: I’ve written a “devil’s advocate” to this piece: Why a wiki would make a terrible address book
