AskSam & outliners

[1761358@skytel.com]

askSam is a popular "free-form" information management program.  An askSam "database" consists of a bunch of records of up to a couple of K each, containing essentially free-form ASCII text.

It has indexing capabilities which allow it to find records containing a particular string quite quickly.

And it has "field" capabilities --- a word ending with a [ names a field whose content extends to the next ].  It has data-entry capabilities, using prototype records, and a variety of computational capabilities: find records with "foo" in the "bar" field, set the "total" field to the "quantity" field times the "each" field, etc.  (It has a built-in crude programming language suitable for ad-hoc queries and programming too.)

You can also use any random word to define an "implicit field".

People who use it seem to be crazy about it.  They use it as a sort of flat-file database that lets them keep multiple kinds of records in the same file, that lets them add or omit fields at will, etc.  They use it for spreadsheet things, for text-editing things, for text-corpus-search things, for contact management things --- all kinds of weird stuff.  Some ship systems built on it.

People seem to be similarly nuts about outliners.  They find them to be convenient, quick ways to organize their thoughts.

It would seem that askSam might be even more useful if its information were tree-structured instead of being a flat collection of fixed-length strings.  You have fields inside fields inside fields, and any field can be a record.

What's more, the currently fashionable data format for all kinds of things is XML --- an ordered tree format with labeled arcs.

The intersection of the three really looks like it offers some interesting possibilities.  XPath, XQL, and XML-QL all still excite me, despite the current pathetic performance of anything XML-related.

I wish I could sit with an avid askSam user for a few hours and look at how they use the software.  Unfortunately, I don't know any of them personally.  Likewise for outliners.