Editing Captured Web Pages?

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J-Mac
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Joined: Thu Apr 26, 2012 6:39 pm

Editing Captured Web Pages?

Post by J-Mac »

Couple of questions:
  1. Can I edit web page captures in MyInfo?
    This should be possible if the capture is truly a stored copy of the page.
  2. Why does the Notes pane disappear for all notes except web captures?
    E.g., if I clip part of another program's window and create a note in which to paste it, the notes pane is nowhere to be found. I realize that I could just type the text directly into the note, but most of the time that will just get lost in there. I would like the Notes pane available to write something about the document.
Thanks for any help with these items.

Jim
Coolrat
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Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2011 9:52 am

Post by Coolrat »

Jim raised a good point.
Sometimes I would like to make a note about a document in a "notes pane" below the main document. I suppose I could use "Comments" for this purpose as a viable work-around.

What I had always hoped to find in note-taking applications like MyInfo is the ablity to add "sticky notes" that would allow me to place a note at a certain point in any document. Adobe Acrobat (as well as LibreOffice) allow the user to insert comments at any point in a document. I believe such a feature would be very useful to students and researchers (and just about everyone perhaps)
Petko
MyInfo Support
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Post by Petko »

Captured whole web pages can't be edited in MyInfo. If you want to edit web pages, you have to copy/paste them from the browser, but this may lose some formatting.

As for the Notes pane - this is actually the note itself. I agree that this is confusing, so probably it will be changed in the next versions.
J-Mac
Posts: 10
Joined: Thu Apr 26, 2012 6:39 pm

Post by J-Mac »

OK. But in the meantime it just means extra steps, which is not a good thing.

I'll capture all pages in Scrapbook where they can be edited and notes can be added. Then I'll have to recapture them again from Scrapbook into MI. Unfortunate.

Is this a feature we can look forward to in the near future by any chance?

Thank you.

Jim
contentgrrrl
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Joined: Mon Feb 04, 2013 11:37 am

Post by contentgrrrl »

New to MYINFO, but adding my vote to Jim's request --maybe the development curve could focus even more on adding functionality around processing web captures. FireFox add-ons seem to set our hopes higher, but the reality is this is how we live and get info. So packing even more web capture handling functions seems like the smartest marketing move.

I'm not interested in the project management functions, and after spending the last week trying out nine different PIM/PKM/NOTES softwares and cloudwares, I suspect many people are using at-the-office cloud-based solutions for this... but it's great to have these capabilities to attract a larger user base for MYINFO.

I'm looking for easy-to-set alarms/reminders like Mozilla's em client THUNDERBIRD's and like a competing but very underfeatured PIM program ALLMYNOTES. I'm going to find that sugg. elsewhere and add my feature vote there.

Thanks for the great program!
--contentgrrrl
Coolrat
Posts: 112
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2011 9:52 am

Post by Coolrat »

Yes, capturing web pages in Scrapbook first, editing them, adding notes, highlighting text etc is something that I do too prior to importing into MyInfo. I don't understand the technical implications of how hard it might be to build an editor for webpage captures with capabilities similar to Scrapbook.

I rely on MyInfo for most of my work and research now. I'm based in Beijing where the internet is extraordinarily slow and unreliable. I avoid all types of "cloud" solutions as much as possible because the "cloud" here is monitored heavily, doesnt' work much of the time and is totally untrustworthy as a place to put my data, or rely on for applications. In fact, much of the world lacks access to the internet at all, let alone a stable, fast connection.

Do sincerely hope that new versions of MyInfo will continue to emphasize computer-based solutions and not 'cloud-based'
wsp
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Location: Washington, DC

Post by wsp »

Coolrat, I understand your uneasiness about the cloud: last summer I was writing in a small French village and panicked when I realized that Evernote was not syncing properly because of the slow Internet service there. (I finally solved the problem by manually syncing much more frequently.) Still, I find myself using my phone more and more for information-gathering on the run, and so far there's no easy way to do that with MyInfo.

In the past, for example, I always carried a laptop with me to libraries for note-taking. (I'm a writer/scholar.) Nowadays I often just stroll into a library empty-handed and photograph pages of books or periodicals; if the passages I'm copying are short, I pop the photos of text directly into Evernote (which are then made searchable by Evernote's OCR service), or if they're longer, I create a PDF file with an app and then read the material and mark it up when I return home.

Of course I still use MyInfo (which I admire very much for its wonderful UI and its organizational capabilities) for many other kinds of things, but I have been forced to turn to Evernote for note-taking in libraries because MyInfo is at the moment limited to one platform.
Bill
wsp
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Location: Washington, DC

Post by wsp »

I should have added to my note above that I continue to do various experiments that might make it possible for me to continue using MyInfo with mobile devices.

Lately I've been playing around with a new iPhone/iPad app -- Documents by Readdle. It is very clever at handling PDF files and files in other formats. One thing I have done is to export a full MyInfo document as an RTF file, then convert that to a PDF, which I shifted to Documents via Dropbox. It sounds complicated, but it takes only a few minutes. At that point I have a full PDF file of all my notes on either my iPhone or iPad, and in both cases they can be marked up in various ways through Documents when I am away from my computer.

Then when I am back home I can easily transfer any new notes to MyInfo on my computer.

It works, more or less -- though it feels rather cumbersome. I suppose I could get used to it.

Is anyone else on this board trying to take notes on a phone or tablet that will later be inserted in MyInfo? I would be curious about what techniques you use.

It seems to me that there are two problems: (1) Taking notes on the device. That part is easy, because there are so many ways of creating short notes on an iPad or iPhone. (2) Creating some kind of file (in my case a PDF) that you can put on your device for reference purposes when you're not near the computer.
Bill
J-Mac
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Joined: Thu Apr 26, 2012 6:39 pm

Post by J-Mac »

Ouch! That's a lot more work than I want to do, Bill! I'll use another app before going through all that.

Thank you.

Jim
Coolrat
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Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2011 9:52 am

Post by Coolrat »

Thanks for your detailed message about your workflow Bill. Its interesting to see how other people organize their work. I think I might adopt a similar approach for photographing books and documents. I'll have to import it from Evernote into MyInfo. I just really do not really like giant corporation's products or rest quietly at night knowing that the my data is on their servers.

So MyInfo will always have customers as long as there is paranoia about the safety of those big players... :D
wsp
Posts: 518
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Location: Washington, DC

Post by wsp »

Jim: That's why I called it an experiment!

Coolrat: I share your uneasiness about Evernote, even though I use it a lot. I much prefer to deal with a small outfit like MyInfo whenever possible. I plan to do some more tests involving MyInfo and PDFs on mobile devices in the next few weeks, and I'll be glad to report here on my conclusions.
Bill
mirceglavni
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Post by mirceglavni »

wsp wrote:I should have added to my note above that I continue to do various experiments that might make it possible for me to continue using MyInfo with mobile devices.

Lately I've been playing around with a new iPhone/iPad app -- Documents by Readdle. It is very clever at handling PDF files and files in other formats. One thing I have done is to export a full MyInfo document as an RTF file, then convert that to a PDF, which I shifted to Documents via Dropbox. It sounds complicated, but it takes only a few minutes. At that point I have a full PDF file of all my notes on either my iPhone or iPad, and in both cases they can be marked up in various ways through Documents when I am away from my computer.

Then when I am back home I can easily transfer any new notes to MyInfo on my computer.

It works, more or less -- though it feels rather cumbersome. I suppose I could get used to it.

Is anyone else on this board trying to take notes on a phone or tablet that will later be inserted in MyInfo? I would be curious about what techniques you use.

It seems to me that there are two problems: (1) Taking notes on the device. That part is easy, because there are so many ways of creating short notes on an iPad or iPhone. (2) Creating some kind of file (in my case a PDF) that you can put on your device for reference purposes when you're not near the computer.

This is an interesting approach wsp, I tried it myself, but I rely heavy on organisation and links between topics / notes, and exporting to rtf and then converting to pdf destroys the links and tree-structure of my database. My approach is to export it as a web-page, transfer it to my ipad and then use GoodReader to browse the database on the ipad (GoodReader allows for "staring" files - I star the index.html from the exported web-page and this way have a easy access to the database). This is good because you have the same tree-menu on the left side, along with icons and all, and the links between the notes are also preserved. However, this approach has three shortcomings:
1) It is "read only", so you cannot add notes to the database and transfer it back to the PC.
2) There is no search option available, but this is a minor obstacle if you have a decent organisation of your notes. The solution would be to make an chm-export option in MyInfo, or to convert the web-page manually to chm.
3) With the introduction of IFRAMES in version 6.13 of MyInfo, the exported web-page (of the database) cannot be read as usual with GoodReader on the ipad (see my other post IFRAME troubles).

On a side note, I am also against those cloud solutions, because I still remember the time when the internet(availability and connection) was unreliable and slow. And you never know with cloud solutions when the provider will close its business or start charging too much.

I am also sceptical that there will ever be ipad or android ports of MyInfo, as this is a "one-man show", and he surely cannot manage to do this all alone.

BTW, I see that there are other people using Scrapbook in their workflow. Anyone used it for sort of file-organiser (ie organising large picture collections?) MyInfo would be great with all the tagging and organising features, however its opening and closing times with large databases make it not acceptable for this purpose.
Petko
MyInfo Support
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Post by Petko »

The next major version of MyInfo will use database for storing topics and documents, so it will open and save much faster with large information. This will be the first step for developing MyInfo for mobile devices, because it will allow to use the same files on any platform.

Of course, not everything is so easy to work on different operating systems, because for example MyInfo uses proprietary text file format, which is available only on Windows, but I am researching our options here.
wsp
Posts: 518
Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 8:54 am
Location: Washington, DC

Post by wsp »

Petko, thanks for this interesting news.

My experience has been that I don't need to do much writing or editing on mobile devices; there are plenty of good little iOS and Android note-taking apps already. What I do badly need is the ability to at least consult my MyInfo notes on my iPhone or iPad. It seems to me that one possible interim solution (and I speak from a position of complete technological ignorance) would be for Milenix to create a password-protected website to which we could upload (if we wished to do so) a read-only copy, in HTML format, of our topics, preferably with the ability to do simple searches. When I'm away from my computer, I just want to be able to quickly consult a copy of my topics for reference purposes. I would be quite willing to continue doing my actual mobile note-taking on other apps -- for the time being anyway.

Others may not agree with me, because we all have various needs. I am just offering my own preferences.
Bill
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