Hello, I would like to write an information manager/organizer type of app but first I'd like to ask if there is something like that already existing. I asked on yahoo questions but did not get a response. I also searched freshmeat but even though they have plenty of projects that are tangentially related, I was unable to find anything close enough.
What I'm thinking about is this: a database with an interface that stores records by tags and allows filtering and sorting by these tags. When I enter a new record, I enter a title and any number of tags. Interface would have a filter by: pull down menu separated in two sections, favorite tags and recent tags. To the right of that would be a button to add another filter, which would create a new pull down menu to filter current results further. Then there would be a search field where you'd type in a word and it would show a list of all matching tags; then you would click on one of the tags to add it to last filter menu's 'recent' list. Interface would be two-pane with an option to switch to single pane, where one pane is a list of matching records and the other is current record. List of matching records would be sortable by clicking on column titles. Going into the record would bring up a screen with title and body text of the record, if the record is a file it'd show title, list of tags and a button that opens that file. (unless it's a text file that can be viewed and edited there). The idea is to have a central hub of all information, that is very easy to search and locate not only the exact document you're looking for but also a specific subset of documents, including all of the ones you do need and excluding ones that you do not, which allows you to work with them as a set without the need to specifically select each and every one you need. For the first version it'd be enough to have plain text body field. Later I'd like to have a rich document format, probably html. Later I'd also like to add an option for matching synonymous words to tags. If you search for certainty, it would match assurance tag if the option is on. For instance, if I wanted to find this message, I'd search for Usenet posts, tag, my name (as author). I would know that I only made one Usenet post about tags. If I made unrelated posts about html tags, for instance, I'd filter by 'information manager', and then I'd find this post and more posts that I might make about this. If I wanted to include possible replies, I'd remove my name from filters. Then I could sort by date to see latest posts. The reason for this idea is that right now I keep my information, or at least most of it, in an outliner program called treepad. It's a tree-like view program where you make a hierarchical structure similar to file system, where each 'file' is a text entry field. This is reasonably useful but is limited to only one possible subset, i.e. you could put all posts under 'Usenet posts/info manager/a, b, c' but it's impossible to filter it further or to combine it with some subset of a different topic. Many chunks of information belong to multiple topics and you can't always remember if you filed under one or the other. Therefore I think this tag-based approach would be much more flexible. I have experience with doing a few simple apps in Tkinter and also a db driven site in TurboGears. I'm not sure what framework I should use for this. I generally would prefer gtk because of responsiveness and nice looks, but it may be a bit tough since I never did any gtk development at all. Should I prototype in Tkinter? Would Django be better suited for this or TurboGears? Of course there isn't any need to do anything if there is already an app that does this. Please tell me if it does, or if there is something very close that could have this set of features added easily. I was thinking about wikis, in fact. I might be best off starting with a wiki done in TurboGears and going from there. I'd get html markup pages right away, with links, nice formatting.. TG has many components that could be useful for this app. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
