tools for research

I tried to use only free and online tools for a semester - a combination of google docs, zotero and some other things. It hasn’t been a success for me, but that doesn’t in any way reflect the quality of the tools, just the way I wanted to use them.

Zotero: to get zotero to work on the multiple computers I use during the day I had it installed on a portable firefox installation on a USB key. Its slow to start up, slow enough that when I have the 10 minutes in my working day (I work full time, and study a paper a semester) it got in the way. Hopefully the upcoming zotero server will help with that, and I look forward to commenting on that in the future. The paper I’m studying doesn’t demand much in the way of research either (there is no essay writing) so zotero was a bit redundant anyway.

Google Docs: these are wonderful, but demand that I’m online - and I sometimes prefer not to be to reduce distraction. Especially when I’m writing! I don’t ask much from a word processor (I use text edit on the mac by choice: pretty much wordpad for the mac) but I just find the google doc interface… clunky. Not pretty enough. Sad but true. Its damn handy for sharing documents you’ve written though!

So for me the experiment hasn’t worked too well, though I’d be keen to repeat it at some point - perhaps when I start some proper research papers next semester, as well as with the release of the zotero server.

Soon: reviews of the ASUS eeePC, Skim and my favourite Text Edit!