OWL

Phil Jones Wiki And Outlining project, hoping to support Off-Line/private NoteBook. https://github.com/interstar/OWL

Trying it out on my laptop

• it uses a little WebPy server so it can save files
• you don't have a choice of the place to save your files (but it's Open Source, so that's easy to fix)
• it doesn't do Automatic Linking of Smashed Together Words - you click on any chunk of text and hit the Link button, and it creates a link for a page named to match that text. It doesn't distinguish working links (to already-existing pages) from not-existing (yet) pages.
• each page is an OPML file - <outline text="This is the <a href="#FrontPage">FrontPage</a> of <a href="#BillSeitz">BillSeitz</a>"/> - with an .opml file extension

Android app version to save pages as OPML files to the SD Card of your Android device. https://github.com/interstar/OWLdroid

• Phil sent me an apk file
• I had to manually make an OWL directory
• Now it works.
• Can't drag/drop lines to re-arrange, have to select a line then use menu to Move Up, etc. (which isn't bad if just moving 1 position, but not great to significantly re-arrange a To-Do List) (this behavior comes from Concord/Fargo).

Concerns

• this doesn't feel great to make as a writing UI on either platform, but maybe just need some practice
• nervous about committing to OPML

Next steps - done Jan13'2014

• make OWL folder in Drop Box via laptop - done
• use Drop Sync on Android to sync the Drop Box OWL folder to the OWL folder hard-coded into the Android app - done
• make sure synching works - done
• tweak source on laptop to us a folder within Drop Box - was having some problems getting started because notes I'd tweaked before were generating an invalid XML error inside Chrome, but eventually got a fresh start
  • use this for some side-notes to get a better feel for it - copied/pasted a few pages in (did nice job of indenting bullet lists that I pasted in, though left the bullet chars in place)
  • need a RecentChanges!
• re-synch with Drop Sync (hmm, smells a bit slow, will have to test more in future)
  • re-synch after changes on Android - 1 new page, 6 pages changed: 37sec!
• re-launch on Android Tablet - yes those pages are available now!

Update: having done some writing in this now, my conclusion for the moment is that the UI is annoying enough to be a distraction - e.g. issues with clicking at the end of a line to add more text, splitting a node into 2 nodes (you have to cut/paste, vs just hit Return and add bullet), etc.

also an ontology language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language