Journalist using Mac OSX? You want Voodoopad
Yeah, it’s true. If you have lots of articles on the go and you keep cutting stuff or want to refer to research materials or want to search what you’ve written.. you want Voodoopad (which comes in Lite - ie free - and Pro versions too).
Voodoopad is a sorta-wiki-like thing, but that doesn’t quite get the power of it, and it did take me a while to understand it myself.
Here’s what happens (or at least, what I do).
* Create a document.
* Create a page within the document. (Documents are like websites - they can have multiple interlinked pages.)
* Type your story. Too long? Create a link in your story (it’s a keyboard shortcut) and put the cuts in there.
* Got an interview? Create a page, type it up. Just leave it there. Or create another new page and start doing your work in it. You can have lots of tabs open so you can flick back and forth between the notes, transcripts and drafts.
Can’t remember who referred to Voodoopad? Do a search. This feature gets more powerful the larger you make your document. Though as Gus Mueller advised me, “back up repeatedly”.
Nice things about VP (as users call it):
- you can export what you’re working on direct to Word, RTF or HTML, or just text
- you can search across all the things you’ve written within a document. So you could write 50 articles, or type in 50 interviews from which you write 100 articles (efficiency!) and if you need to search it to find how often you’ve mentioned “antivirus”, you can, and you’ll get links
- you can embed PDFs and Word documents (and pretty much any sort of text) in a document, and it becomes searchable via the search tool *or* Spotlight.
All in all, it’s very nifty, and highly recommended.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Gus Mueller on watching the money not come in (11 January 2006; score: 64.03%)
- Mac apps are going through a boring stage: all flash, no insight (22 November 2006; score: 30.8%)
- Oh, screw it, I'm going to have to reinstall Tiger. Sod it, sod it, sod it (19 June 2006; score: 23.06%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
September 28th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
ah. This is what Wendy needs, for her technobile thing. Maybe. I Use ecco, myself, for something like that. Or one might want to make a master document in OpenOffice. That, with a little practice and maybe a few macros would do all this. But Voodopad sounds slicker.
September 28th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Either that, or OneNote, which does many of the same things, without the linking, but with tagging. I could really get into onenote if I had a graphics tablet as well.
September 28th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Lovely bit of software, definitely, and all credit to Gus Mueller - but not a lot of help for those of us poor schmucks who have to spend an uncomfortable portion of our (dayjob) lives in a Windows environment.
An interesting alternative, I find, is Tiddlywiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com) or - hosted online and password protectable - http://www.tiddlyspot.com. Won’t go into much detail here, not least ‘cos I’m sure lots of people have heard about it - but have a play. Definitely worth a look. Can’t do all the embedding mojo, of course, but still pretty tasty - a self-contained wiki, uploadable and downloadable for online/offline happiness, and with all sorts of clever tagging/editing/etc stuff available to the inquiring mind.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
I meant to respond to Wendy’s technobile with the observation that what she really needs is printer. The answers in this week’s Tech section were just plain silly. Get an OU degree?
The scenario she described is sorted by printing the article, editing by hand, and then transferring the edits to the screen version.
It is all too easy to see articles that went from author to reader without ever seeing paper before the final stage.
September 29th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
There is also this software Writeroom which works pretty neat. It’s free.
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom
October 4th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Well: I tried OneNote and hated it, don’t know why.
Printer: yes, I print stuff out, edit it by hand, and type in the edits *all the time*. Which works great when I’m at home, but often not when I’m on the road (sometimes there isn’t even a machine I could, say, fax to). Jack suggested hand-writing each paragraph on an index card.
The article in question was the satellite codes piece, and in the end I had to print it out, mark it up, and then retype the whole thing from scratch. It worked, but it’s not really technically elegant.
I only read the letters Charles forwarded, so I missed the advice to get an OU degree. I would, but my Cornell degree would bully it mercilessly, so it doesn’t seem fair.
wg
October 4th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
oh, yeah, and Andrew has *me* to thank for ecco. Which I still use, but not article (re)writing.
wg