Reviews
Review: wikidPad
- By Mike Gunderloy
- February 10, 2004
wikidPad 1.06
$12
www.jhorman.org
Depending on how much Web surfing you've done lately, and how in touch
you are with the whole "agile methodologies" thing, you might never have
run across a wiki. A wiki is a website that's written by its visitors;
every page can be edited directly (and easily) in the web browser by
anyone who can view it. You might think this would lead to an avalanche
of spam and pornography, but wikis keep track of the history of each
page, and successful public wikis tend to breed a community of people
dedicated to keeping things well organized. Two good examples are the
original WikiWikiWeb and the open-source
Wikipedia encyclopedia. Wikis tend to be
powerful rather than flashy; among other nice features, it's easy to
create new pages. You just enter a "wikiWord" (any word with an internal
capital letter), and that becomes the name of a new page; all references
are automatically linked to that page.
wikidPad brings the wiki idea to your desktop as a free-form organizer
of information. The same general principle applies: type in whatever
information you like, and type a wikiWord any time you want to create
and link a new page. The results are automatically hyperlinked and saved
by wikidPad, giving you a place to store birthdays, books you intend to
read, to-do lists, computer part numbers, or any of the other
miscellaneous information that clutters up your life.
wikidPad offers a lot of nice little features for formatting and
organizing your information. These include:
- Document indexing via attributes, which lets you file any page in
multiple categories, accessible through views
- Text and font formatting, including easy colors and icons for pages in
the wiki
- A treeview for quick access to any piece of information
- Easy searching, including saved searches
- AutoCompletion
- Export to HTML or XML
- Scriptability via Python
Overall, wikidPad offers a very nice way to store gobs of miscellaneous
information. Its user interface is certainly not as pretty as, say,
Microsoft OneNote (and there's no ink support in wikidPad, either). But
the automatic linking functionality is so useful that it makes up for a
lot of bells and whistles that you might now use anyhow. You can
download a 30-day evaluation copy if you don't want to risk the measly
12 bucks.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.