Parsnips - 1.5.1

I liked it to a point. But it gave me too much info. All I want is an application that will grab the link and save it that is all. There was an application that I had when I had OS 9 called IData. It was perfect. The OS X version is not free soo I am looking for something like that.

Parsnips clips text directly from browsers. That I love. I paid $27 to register it in 2005. Since 2005, It has become old and tired. It seems not to handle any multimedia. Further, there is no ability to tag, and I cannot set up Folders. Many other clipping apps - such as Caboodle, iClip, Savvy Clipboard, Yojimbo - handle multimedia, tag, allow folder building, and costs much less. I am also not sure that Parsnips works with Camino, OmniWeb, Opera, or browsers other Safari or Firefox. It seems the developer may not be actively managing this software. I sent an e-mail to the developer on 03/07/07 but there were delivery problems. With an update, Parsnips could definitely get better ratings and a recommendation: it is stable and easy to use. But presently, Parsnips is sorely outdated.

While I too appreciate the responsiveness of the developers, this is not a discussion forum. Please take the longwinded discussions (complete with quoted passages) to your own site or private email. Just my 2 cents.

jwbaumann ,

I appreciate your thoughtful response. The comments that you added were quite useful. Remember that this is basically a 1.0 release of the product and there are a lot of ways in which it can be enhanced.

I have interspersed my responses below.

> Regarding wastefulness of screen real estate and the limited
> travel of the vertical pane divider - I am running at 1024 X 768.
> Even if I enlarge Parsnips to fill the entire screen, I can
> slide the divider less than a third of the window width, and
> at that window size, Parsnips is definitely hogging screen real
> estate.

I have fixed the problem of the divider not allowing full movement to one side or the other. I also added a quick way of fully collapsing it to the left or right

> Regarding the relevance being purely eye candy - if I create
> an item with a title of "fruit", keyword of "apple", and
> content of "macintosh", save it, then search on "apple",
> the relevance is only 38%. In order to make the relevance 100%, I must change all 3 words (title, keyword, and content) to "apple".
> This is just plain silly.

The "relevance" number is provided by the Lucene search engine upon which Parsnips is based. I really have no control over that. However, it is based on solid principles. In the example cited, if the title, keyword and content did all contain the word "apple", shouldn't the relevance be higher than if only one field did? Sure seems reasonable to me.

> Regarding a "Show All" feature, you are correct in that searching
> for a blank string finds all records. This is completely
> unintuitive yet fully logical and functional (ie. Unixy, not
> Mac-like ; ) But thank you for solving a vexing problem
> I've had using Mulberry, an otherwise excellent e-mail
> program. Nevertheless, I would add a "Show All" button.

With respect to the "Show All" feature request: You must not use Mail, Address Book or any of the other Apple apps that use this metaphor. If nothing is searched for then all items are displayed. When there is a search string, and only a subset of items are shown, there is an "X" to the right of the search string to clear it and re-show all the items. That said, I certainly wouldn't mind adding a menu command to "Show All Items", mainly because I could then attach a keyboard shortcut to it. I will put this on the list.

> Regarding searching for substrings, this is probably more a
> philosophical issue than a technical or interface question.
> If the string "Now is the time for all..." exists in the
> database, and I search on "me fo", I expect to find a match.
> I don't want to even have to think about using wildcards
> and other geeky technical unixy terminology.

> Regarding "stop words" - this would be solved by the above
> suggestion. I was going to say that since the Parsnips database
> presumably contains only my files and info, I don't want to be
> "stopped" by my own stuff, but I see now that Parsnips can be
> used to index very large amounts of data, so this is not
> strictly a fair statement, more an expectations asymmetry.

With respect to searching for substrings: It is just not possible to have it work the way you suggest. Parsnips is designed to hold up to millions of items. Searching can't happen by brute text searching. Like all sophisticated search engines, Parsnips build a reversed index to implement quick searching. Stop words are essential to keep the index to a reasonable size. Likewise, that is the reason for wild-card characters. In a perfect world I agree your way would be preferable, but there are tradeoffs.

> Regarding drag and drop - maybe expected too much, but I tried
> the following behaviors and all failed:

> 1) Drag a text file onto the Parsnips icon in the Finder
> 2) Drag a text file onto the Parsnips icon in the dock
> 3) Drag text onto the Parsnips icon in the Finder
> 4) Drag text onto the Parsnips icon in the dock
> 5) Drag a text clipping onto the Parsnips icon in the Finder
> 6) Drag a text clipping onto the Parsnips icon in the dock
> 7) Drag a text file onto the item side of Parsnips when
> not in an editable state
> 8) Drag text onto the item side of Parsnips when not in an
> editable state
> 9) Drag a text clipping onto the item side of Parsnips when
> not in an editable state
> 10) Drag a text file onto the item side of Parsnips when in
> an editable state.

> Dragging must happen onto the list (left) side of the window
> (and yes, this is clearly noted in the documentation, but
> remember, Mac users don't, as a rule, RTFM). But if the
> window is expanded to fill the screen, it is very difficult
> to position things to allow drag and drop to occur. Also,
> the documentation mentions the "Drop Window," but I cannot seem
> to find it.

With respect to your drag and drop issues: This is a Java application and unfortunately Apple doesn't provide any hooks for me to get at anything dropped on the application icon or the doc icon. Sorry, but that is the state of Java on Mac OS X.

With respect to dragging onto the right (Display) side, it works this way because when the item is editable, a drop onto the editable text should insert the text at the insertion point. It should not create a new item with that text. When it is uneditable, I think it would be confusing to have an item created then. The drop should do nothing in this case.

> Another problem is that Parsnips will allow me to import the
> same directory twice, without checking for duplicates and
> warning me, thus bloating the database with duplicates.
> This makes it difficult to keep Parsnips and a directory in sync.

You are right that this is a problem. It will be fixed in the next version that should be out in about a week.

> It also appears that Parsnips will not import subfolders. Perhaps
> a preference, popup dialog, or different target in the Parsnips
> window would allow this functionality.

It used to recursively index subfolders. I disabled this because it was too easy to accidentally try to index something that would take forever (like "/"). I think the suggestion to ask via a popup dialog is the way to go here.

> I see that when I go to a specific item, it is non-editable.
> I can see the benefits for some people, but I would like the
> item to be immediately editable, especially if it is an item
> I manually created inside Parsnips. This would definitely be
> something for a preferences window, as follows:
>
> Make found items immediately editable
> o Always
> o Never
> o Only for items I created in Parsnips

Your suggestion has got me thinking of just always having items be editable. At the very least this could be a preference.

Thanks again for taking the time to provide constructive comments. If you wish to continue perhaps you should just email me bill@otherwise.com

I would like to address some of the comments made by  jwbaumann

> very one of these PIMs I try has the lamest search
> functionality. Parsnips cannot find substrings when
> searching the whole database of records, which is a huge
> shortcoming and an immediate deal killer. It can't do grep.

One of Parsnips greatest strengths is its search feature. If the poster had looked at the online help he would have seen that you can indeed search for substrings. To search for all words starting with "anti" you would search for "anti*". This is standard wildcard completion. You can also have individual character wildcards using "?". Please read the documentation. The search is extreemely powerful.

> It can't find the word "is" (maybe that was a Clinton
> request).

Same as Google. These are called "stop words". Common words are excluded to keep the size of the index down.

> The "relevance" percentage is a silly eye candy
> fiction with no relationship to reality.

Not sure why you say this. Examples?

> The only way I can
> see to do a "show all" is to create a new record and save
> it, but then the list can't be sorted by recent-ness.

So all is the default when there is no search string (same as in Mail). It is automatically sorted by recentness in this case.

> There
> appears to be no way to see a list of only the record
> titles.

This is true. If you would submit an enhancment request I could add this feature.

>The vertical window divider slides left and right by
> such a tiny amount it's sort of pointless.

What resolution are you running at. The slider can be moved to the left or right subject to the limitation that all the "controls" must remain visible. If you are running at 800x600 I could see that you might have problems. At higher resolutions and with a larger window this should not be an issue.

> Exporting
> produces countless tiny files rather than a single large
> block of text.

Exporting is the converse of importing all the files from a directory. It does create a separate file per item. That is what my beta testers requested.

> This app is wasteful of screen real estate.

Examples???

> There are 2 separate "find" features in the same interface,
> with different visual metaphors and completely different
> behaviors, which is confusing.

Searching within an item's text is fundamentally different that seaching for mathing items. That is why the interface is different.

> Drag and drop seems to not
> work at all, but I'm too unimpressed to evaluate more.

It has worked fine for all my users. Could you please contact me with a specific bug? I would be happy to address it.