- What is NoteWorthy?
- What are the
system requirements?
- What does
NoteWorthy do that I can't do with other software?
- How
long can notes and quotes be?
- How much word-processing and
formatting can I do in NoteWorthy?
- How does NoteWorthy compare with
bibliographic programs like ProCite and EndNote?
- Is it worth the money?
- Why should individual students and
teachers buy this software when we're already part of a
university with a big software budget?
- Is a desktop application really the best
solution? Isn't the Net the future?
- What are the size limits?
- Can I scan my physical 3x5"
notecards into NoteWorthy?
- Where did the idea for NoteWorthy come
from ?
- I don't
understand how to.....
- Why doesn't
it.... ?
NoteWorthy is a cross-platform database for keeping
academic notes and quotes. It is intended primarily
for students and professors in higher education, but would
also be useful for anyone who has reason to keep a supply of
textual notes, linked with a bibliography, and enhanced by
the power to search at computer speed both the main text and
user-defined keywords.
NoteWorthy is available for both Macintosh and Windows
platforms, and data can be transported between the two
versions of NoteWorthy. The Macintosh version requires
a Power Macintosh processor-based machine. The Windows
version requires a Pentium machine running Windows 95 or
later.
It is suggested that you allocate at least 16mB of memory
for NoteWorthy.
The application files are approximately 8mB in size, so
they are too big to transport on a floppy, though they will
easily fit on a SuperDrive or Zip disk. Your data
files will, of course, grow as you add records.
If you're keeping your notes in a word-processing program
like WordPerfect* or Word*, you are using the wrong tool for
the job! Word-processing programs are designed
primarily for extended blocks of text like papers, and do
not have the database-linking capabilities of NoteWorthy.
With NoteWorthy, each note you take is an individual
record. If you do a search on a keyword, like
"Plato", or for text in the note or quote (like
"The Republic") or for a page range, NoteWorthy
will find all of the records that meet these criteria and
display just those records for you. Try doing that in
a word-processor!
Bibliography programs like EndNote* and ProCite* are useful
tools for maintaining bibliographic records with a limited
ability to add comments to bibliographic entries. In
technical terms, these are "flat-file" database
programs -- they have one basic kind of information
(bibliographic records). NoteWorthy is a
"relational database" program, meaning that its
bibliographic records can be linked with any number of
different kinds of records, such as notes and quotes, and
records on people. Moreover, if you are just jotting
down your own ideas, you can just create a note without any
corresponding bibliographic record.
Long. Really long. You may be used to
database programs having text fields that are limited to
32,000 characters -- which would be enough for a short note,
but not enough to contain, say, a draft of a long
paper. NoteWorthy's word-processing areas, by
contrast, can contain documents hundreds of pages in
length. (The founder of the company, who is also a
professional scholar, put a copy of his first book -- about
700 manuscript pages -- into a single record, just to try it
out!)
A lot! The word processing areas in NoteWorthy do
not have all of the features of dedicated word-processing
programs -- but then, how many of those features do you
actually use? You can do things like
You can, in fact, write a whole paper in NoteWorthy, or
cut and paste from notes into a new word processing area.
And for those working with text in languages that require
two-byte non-Roman fonts, no problem! If your computer
is equipped with the language kit for Chinese, Greek,
Hebrew, or any other character set, you can just switch to
the non-Roman font you want inside a word-processing
area. There are also special bibliographic formats for
works that require non-Roman source listings supplemented by
transliteration and translation! (Note: NoteWorthy's
non-Roman implementation is not Unicode-compliant.)
And, if you need additional features, you can take your
notes and transport them to a dedicated word-processing
program either through cut and paste, or by saving your
NoteWorthy note as a document in Rich Text Format (RTF),
which can be opened by any commercial word processor.
Like apples compare with oranges.
Or better, like
fruit salad compares with oranges.
Really, these are
different products. Bibliographic programs do one
thing very thoroughly. NoteWorthy Version 1 does not
do all of the things that they do (e.g., direct imports from
online bibliographic databases). But that is not its
main functionality, which is to keep a database of notes and
quotes -- something that bibliographic programs do not
do. Using a bibliographic program to try to keep an
extensive database of quotes and notes is like making orange
juice out of an apple.
If you already use the full range of features in a
bibliographic program, you should think of NoteWorthy as a
complementary tool, not as a competitor in the same
niche. NoteWorthy can import and
export records in EndNote and ProCite formats, and so
you can also convert existing databases to NoteWorthy, or
use downloads in ProCite or EndNote format as source files
for NoteWorthy.
Of course, if you don't care about
keeping notes and quotes, and just like to keep a long list
of books for the sake of keeping a long list of books, you
don't really need NoteWorthy at all....
On the other hand, if you know you want a database for
your notes and quotes, and don't know how sophisticated you
want to get with bibliography, NoteWorthy is the place for
you to start!
Only you can be the judge of that. That's why we
let you try out a Demo or Trial copy of NoteWorthy for
absolutely free before you make your decision. You can
pass these out to your friends and families. (Heck,
pass 'em out to your enemies, for all we care!)
Yeah,
we're hoping that you'll find it so valuable that you'll put
up the bucks when (or even before!) the trial period runs
out! But if this happens, everybody wins, because you will
have something that we think will make your academic life
immeasurably more tractable.
We also try to keep our prices reasonable. We've
set the price at a level where most people in higher
education we know are willing to take a chance on.
Good question! To be quite honest, we think you
probably shouldn't! We aren't encouraging software
piracy mind you! (See section on piracy.) Rather, we
think that this is such a useful product that your
university should buy a site license, which allows everyone
in the university community (see licensing agreement) to use
the software on either platform, either at home or at
school.
The fact is that you are probably in a better position
than we are to know who the best people to contact are at
your institution to talk about site licensing. And
frankly, they'll respond better to your demand for software
support than they will to our friendly emails or phone
calls. So please, save yourself some money, by all
means, and get your institution to buy a site license!
(See the Site Licensing section for details.)
Well...the future of what?
The net is a great place
for storing and disseminating information that you want lots
of people to have access to from a wide variety of
locations. But is that really how you intend to use
your notes and quotes?
Our experience is that students
and teachers are more likely to keep their own notes and
quotes on their own computers, and care more about being
able to transport their notes and be assured of their
security from tampering and prying eyes. A desktop
application is still the best way of doing this, as it
requires no encryption or password protection, and does not
require that you have a hookup to the internet every time
you want to see your own data!
The relational database platform on which NoteWorthy is
built is extremely fast, dependable and
scaleable. Theoretically, it should work smoothly with
up to six million separate notes and datafiles up to a gigabyte in
size. (Not that we expect your datafile to mushroom to
those proportions in the forseeable future.)
Unfortunately, no. Future versions may incorporate
scanning and OCR capabilities, but the fact is that human
handwriting is still very hard for computers to make much
sense of, and so that aspect of bridging the
analog-to-digital gap is one that will probably have to be
addressed through human labor.
(For professors, who are likely
the people most likely to face this as a real problem
involving thousands of existing handwritten notes, we
would make the suggestion that employing a student worker
to do this would spread much good around: it would save
you time, it would get the notes into NoteWorthy, it would
help a student pay his or her bills, and s/he might even
learn something from your notes!)
The founder writes:
"In the late 1980's, while I was in graduate
school, a friend of mine showed me these big index cards
that had holes around the edges -- maybe 40 or so of
them. She would assign each hole to a keyword --
say, hole 27 was for notes on Plato's Republic --
and she could indicate that a card was about this topic by
removing the cardboard between the hole and the edge of
the card. The cards sat in a box or a stack, and the
holes around the edges stuck out so that she could stick a
knitting needle through a hole--say, hole 27-- and pull
out all the cards having to do with (ex hypothesi)
the Republic.
At the time, I was supporting myself teaching computer
courses while doing my dissertation, and had recently
discovered HyperCard. So the epiphany I had might be
summed up in the reaction: 'Great idea, awkward
implementation.'
It immediately occurred to me that the very useful, but
cumbersome things that my friend was doing with big paper
cards would be a natural for a computer database. I
initially worked on a HyperCard version of this project in
the late 80's, but it did not have the relationality I
needed, and so I kept on the lookout for a number of years
for a software environment that would enable me to do what
I wanted, and eventually, almost a decade later, it came
along."
You can download a manual for NoteWorthy in .pdf
(Acrobat) format from our Downloads
area.
(This manual will also be in process during the Beta
testing period.)
If there are problems that are not answered there, go to
the Support area.
If there's something you'd like to see this program do
that it doesn't already do, we'd like to know about it!
If you submit an idea to us, it's likely that it is
something that somebody else would like to see too, so we'll
make every effort to find a way to incorporate into the next
edition of NoteWorthy. So please send us your ideas!
(Please understand, though, that software development is
a lengthy and involved process, and that we have a lot of
irons in the fire, so it may be a while before even the best
and most pressing new features are implemented!)
* "WordPerfect" is a trademark of
Corel. "Microsoft Word" is a copyright of
Microsoft Corporation. "ProCite" and "EndNote"
are trademarks of ISR ResearchSoft.
