tools for research

Bean: An OS X Word Processor

I wrote my latest essay using Bean, a very able and stripped down word processor. It has pretty much everything I need for a short (undergraduate essay) document - rich text format (with pictures) full screen editing to hide everything else, word count so you know when you can go to bed

Its the right price (free) and remarkable stable and slick.  I’d recommend it to anyone running aon older mac or who hates (like me) too many toolbars, commands, and Things that Get In The Way.

It doesn’t have styles, so any document longer than a few thousand words, or that needs a table of contents is a problem.  Along with TextWrangler for code, its a keeper.

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!

I was thinking about using google documents for my research experiment this semester - using online ‘free’ tools.  ars technica had and interesting article about zoho - an online word-processor that syncs with google gears for off-line (god forbid) use.  As much as a google-head as I am, I’ll give it a whirl - it seems free, there are no ads…  perhaps they are following the same business model as google and charging businesses only.  Without mail though, I don’t see it as particularly compelling for them.  Zoho and Zotero, sounds exotic.

Can you do a university course using open source and free online software? I’m going to try to do an entire semester’s work without touching proprietary applications. The goals are:

• Interoperability - everyone has to be able to read my work at the end
• Cross platform - I should be able to work at a PC _and_ a Mac, though as I’m not working on a linux box ATM I’m not going to test that.

the tools I’ll need are (to begin with);

• An editor
• biblographical software
• notes storage

Any suggestions?