On Windows, the application I used to handle this was the awesome MyInfo by Milenix. When I switched to the Mac, I looked at all the information managers and settled on Mori. Mori does what I need (a nice hierarchical folder structure of notes), but the new developer has let the application sit idle and now it feels slow and behind the times. Not good for the application you depend on to manage your most crucial data.

Enter Scrivener 2.0 by Literature and Latte. This is my favorite writing application but with the 2.0 release about to come out (there’s a preview available from their blog … and a Windows version coming out as well) this application becomes so feature-packed that I’m going to switch over to it for my main note-keeping axe. Here are some of the cool things Scrivener 2.0 offers that relate to a developer:

• A really slick outliner mode. Sure the documents and folders are a nice navigation mechanism, but the outliner mode gives you the ability to show/hide columns. This lets you, for instance, see the tags on each document – or the modification date so you can tell when you made a settings change to something.
• Document notes and inline comments. Really handy for note-taking (duh!) but the inline comments are good for jotting down those special instructions you often forget. Oh … there are also project notes too.
• Linkage. Notes and comments are just the start – you can also attach links to web addresses as well as to other documents in the project to any document. Oh – you can also add a URL as a document too – great for keeping track of sites which have resources you use a lot – or keeping track of the sites that have templates/plugins you use on a project.
• Snapshots. Scrivener does backups which is great. But snapshots let you keep versions of your document around. This is invaluable when you’re doing things like updating a site from one system or version to another. Your new settings may change but you’d like to be able to see the old ones in case something blows up. Now you can keep it all together. I haven’t tried it yet, but there is also a sync function to folders and a couple of conduits.
• Customization. You can save window layouts and project templates which is pretty slick. But now you can also have document templates. So, imagine a template for client contact information. A template for WordPress configuration settings. A template for domain setup on a server. The tree view now allows you to set the icon for any document or folder.
• Collections. Kind of like “smart folders” but better. These can be assembled via search or by manual placement. So you could have a collection of all your WordPress deployments by searching for the “wordpress” tag on a document. Or you could have a collection of documents that you want to export and give to a client for their reference – you’d hand-assemble that collection.

There are more features than just these and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Scrivener 2.0 can do. Obviously if you’re a writer, this is going to quickly become your tool of choice. But for people in technical fields this is a tool to consider for keeping project documentation together. The price for Scrivener 2.0 is only $45 – which is dirt cheap considering how much other information managers (which don’t do a fraction of what Scrivener does) cost. Scrivener 2.0 is due to release on November 1st, 2010.

Each site was augmented with various jQuery effects and add-ons to bring motion and styling to the sites. jQuery is pretty tough to beat for providing quick and easy integration of very whizzy functionality.

The sites are:

The Madison Real Estate Group

Fred Leeds Property Management

FLAG Property Management

Security Advisory for Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat

The summary is as follows:

A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix.

Now, the timing of this is mighty nice for Steve Jobs who’s under fire for not supporting Flash on the iPhone and iPad. But as someone who has to (try to) develop for Flash I can say I’m not surprised. Not by the security advisory nor by Jobs’ and Apple’s position. Flash player always crashes on me and it cranks up my CPU meters more than anything other than video conversion.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Adobe products – Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat – I don’t go through a day without them. There was a time when Flash was also one of my main axes. But no more. JavaScript libraries like jQuery can do many (if not most) of the things Flash has been used for up til now. Flash is a nightmare to develop in and lacks the immediacy of a true scripted environment (you have to compile the movie to see if it works).

Should Jobs have allowed Flash onto Apple’s mobile devices? From a pure market-share perspective: yes. But I can see where he’s coming from and being able to see some Flash-based sites at the cost of having your mobile device crash or lock-up isn’t a trade-off I’d really want to make for people.

Google added something new and slick recently – the ability to embed non-standard fonts in web pages as a web service called the Google Font API. It’s pretty easy to tweak a CSS file and your page headers to use this and there are about 15 or 16 font families to choose from ranging from fancy cursives to old-English style text. I added the following to my headers on my GonZoville site:

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    <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=IM+Fell+English'
        rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

and then changed the CSS for the various headers to include:

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    font-family: 'IM Fell English', arial, serif;

and voila, I have nice old-world style text in my article and sidebar headers. Awesome. For headers and the like this is a great way to do something fancy and/or unique without relying on a Flash-based plugin or off-screen rendering techniques.

I settled on Carbonfin Outliner as it did everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t.

For starters, the outliner works great. It has all the standard means of moving things around. Items can be just an outline bullet or have a check-box on them, to mark off tasks as they get completed. Even cooler on the check-boxes is that the parent item turns into a disc which gets more complete as you check things off. I’ve seen outliners that have the checkboxes, but you always have to expand a parent task to see how far along you are.

There are niceties like a “small fonts” mode, so you can see more text. You can store unlimited outlines on the app and the home screen allows the list of outlines to be reordered. Again, many outliners force you into sorted view, but Carbonfin gives you total control.

What I love most though is that there is a web-based app that’s a companion to the iPhone app – and the two auto-sync. The web-based app is almost identical in function to what you find on the iPhone, save for it’s mouse-and-keyboard driven and even more minimalist since your primary interface is, after all, the iPhone.