09.54, Monday 25 Dec 2000

Intriguing. Boswell is a (Mac only) application to store and retrieve text. Each piece of text (like an email, an article, or a phone number) is an entry; entries are collected into notebooks; each entry can be in one or more notebooks. Brilliantly, notebooks are not hierarchic, so no outliners here. From what I can make out, you have to enter entries yourself (so that's copying and pasting from other applications then), but notebooks can be either manually or automatically created. An app whose time has not yet come, I'd say, but for over $100 I'm not about to try it out. Now, if only there was a www version...

This reminds me of an email application (again for the Mac) that didn't store your email in traditional folders but rather as "views". Each view (manually or automatically created) was basically a simple or complex search result, but without the waiting time (or a cross-section through email storage space, if you prefer to think of it like that). Of course this means that email can exist in more than one folder/view, but then again why not? A great idea, but I can't remember the name of the application. Balls.