MacTech Creates Archive CD

>At 4:40 PM -0800 11/13/06, TidBITS Editors wrote:
>>Clearly, there's something appealing
>> about having so much information in a single place, accessible even
>> without an Internet connection and in an interface that's dedicated
>> for quick browsing and searching. Hmmm... perhaps we'll have to do a
>> CD of the last 16 years of TidBITS content.
>
>Please include an OS X version of Easy View as the viewer (two
>chances, right?)

Yeah, sorry about that... Easy View is long long gone.

>I have a complete collection of TidBITS, all the way back to Issue #1
>of 16 April 1990. I just checked, and Easy View works just fine under
>Classic on 10.3.9. Not much solace for MacIntel users, though.

The viewer on the MacTech CD is pretty simple, and not all that
different from Easy View. It has three panes, but one of them shows
only search results, not article titles, as Easy View did.

Looking into this more...

cheers... -Adam

--
#3 in MDJ Power 25! .............. http://db.tidbits.com/article/8594
Also in MacTech 25! .............. http://db.tidbits.com/article/8603
_____________________________________________________________________
Adam C. Engst: I publish TidBITS, write books, and make sure the
acetidbits.com right people know each other in the Mac industry.
Me: http://www.tidbits.com/adam/ TidBITS: http://www.tidbits.com/

> Please include an OS X version of Easy View as the viewer (two chances, right?)

Yeah, sorry about that... Easy View is long long gone.

In my spare time I've been working on an setext viewer to handle the two publications I receive in that format (TidBITS and MWJ). Unfortunately, the two publications use slightly different dialects of setext, so it's a bit of a challenge supporting them; plus, until recently I didn't have much spare time.

Now I find myself between engagements, so to speak, so I may be able to put more effort into this project. Adam, if you do decide to produce a TidBITS CD-ROM, please contact me first; I'd be happy to do a "TidBITS-optimized" version if that makes sense.



[Thanks for the offer, Russell, but MacTech has a Spotlight-enabled viewer we can use, so we'll stick with that, I think, if we end up producing this CD. Also, we're not longer trying to be strictly setext-compatible, given that setext as a format hasn't exactly taken the world by storm, and there are times when it doesn't do things we want. -Adam]



-- Russell Finn

At 6:38 AM -0800 2006/11/21, rsf wrote:

>[Thanks for the offer, Russell, but MacTech has a Spotlight-enabled
>viewer we can use, so we'll stick with that, I think, if we end up
>producing this CD. Also, we're not longer trying to be strictly
>setext-compatible, given that setext as a format hasn't exactly
>taken the world by storm, and there are times when it doesn't do
>things we want. -Adam]

Adam,

        Wouldn't it be fairly easy to convert all the old pre-HTML
issues to HTML for people who want to read formatted versions?


                                                Chris
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
                             <http://www.reppep.com/weblog/pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>

At 11:18 AM -0800 11/26/06, Chris Pepper wrote:
>At 6:38 AM -0800 2006/11/21, rsf wrote:
>
>>[Thanks for the offer, Russell, but MacTech has a Spotlight-enabled
>>viewer we can use, so we'll stick with that, I think, if we end up
>>producing this CD. Also, we're not longer trying to be strictly
>>setext-compatible, given that setext as a format hasn't exactly
>>taken the world by storm, and there are times when it doesn't do
>>things we want. -Adam]
>
> Wouldn't it be fairly easy to convert all the old pre-HTML
>issues to HTML for people who want to read formatted versions?

All individual articles are already converted to HTML for our Web
archive, and that's what we'd use, rather than trying to go back to
setext-formatted issue files.

cheers... -Adam