I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog showing you what I do with EagleFiler. I guess now would be a good time to tell you the whys. How can such a simple program hold so much in my mind? Answers to these questions after the break.
Ever since I started programming all those thirty years ago I have been searching for what I have called the universal Database. I have studied Databases and the theory behind electronic databases, but those things fell far short of my ideal. What I wanted was something like the library computer in Star Trek: The Next Generation. A database made up of disparate things like my notes, my writings, my research. These kind of things really couldn’t be stored in the Relational Databases.
Then along came the file indexers for Windows and Macintosh. For the first time I found something like what I was looking for. The problem with file indexers is they index too much, and their search facilities were too little. I wasn’t looking for a note taking software, I looking for software that could search through my notes more efficiently, my notes in whatever form they would be in.
When I made this decision, I had been using EagleFiler as a finder replacement; storing my work products, as well as the research. It was when I started to read the manual that I started to see the glimmer of what my holy grail was, and how much EagleFiler could be toward that goal.
EagleFiler does more than store my files in a folder system, and then allows me to find them. It allows me to search for common threads among the articles. It allows me to see connections between several documents that were not even related. It now provides me a way to notate on things that have no commonality, and yet they come together under my queries in new and wonderful ways.
The power of searching through several different kinds of documents gives me power that I don’t have with simple relational databases. My database grows with every report I file inside my EagleFiler library, with every note I take and store in the Library, with every web page I think important enough to press the capture key. Now if Michael Tsai would only fit a voice recognition system so that I could say, “Computer, begin keyword search…”
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