The new version of URL Manager Pro is sweet. The author fixed a bug that was annoying me a lot, a bug that would cause the titles of dragged-in URLs to be lost.  He also got it working with Chimera awhile back, and now it works in Safari too, inasmuch as that’s possible.  Safari doesn’t yet support the Shared Menus protocol, so it’s a hack, but hopefully that’ll change soon.  There’s so much about Safari not to like.  Topping my personal bitch-list are: (1) no tabbed browsing; (2) no bookmarks subscription; (3) no password manager.


I just hate the fact that I have to use so many different tools to get my shit done properly; these things rightfully ought to be functions of the OS itself!  In a better world I wouldn’t even need a tool like URL Manager, I wouldn’t need to open OmniWeb every day just to check my site-subscriptions, I wouldn’t need NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds, I wouldn’t need CDFinder to catalog my media, I wouldn’t need StickyBrain to organize my text documents, and I wouldn’t be out looking for a relational database to catalog my videotapes.  For that matter there would be no difference between Safari and Finder and Sherlock; I want to work with all data through one interface, no matter what type of info it is.  I need a window that’s always accessible via the dock and/or menu bar, that will let me instantly access all this shit and let me organize it however I want.  Bookmarks, subscriptions, addresses, calendar, stickies, music, pictures, movies and all personal data and external tools, always available and organizable.  A knight in brushed-metal armor!  I guess if I really want it, I’d have to make it myself in Project Builder or something.  Which is a bit beyond my reach at this point.  :-|

I spent a long time yesterday learning and playing with FileMaker Pro. It’s not very intuitive, but it is really cool what you can do when you get the hang of it.  Can’t call myself a power-user yet but I have succeed in making a bunch of little databases that all link to each other in various ways. Tables, value lists and numerous relationships between them all: one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many.  Like, I made a list of bands and a list of musicians.  When you view a record in the band file, you see the band name and a list of its members.  When you view a record in the musicians file, you see the musician’s name and a list of all the bands he or she is in.  You can store homepage URLs for both bands and musicians, and the URLs from both of those files are stored together in a separate file.

After that success, I spent awhile making a bunch of little db’s to store info about multimedia recordings of all types.  The master file of all recordings is dividable between ‘video’ and ‘audio’, or ‘haves’ and ‘wants’, or by media type (list all DVDs, list all videotapes), or by movie title, tv show title, performers, etc. etc.  This all involves many-to-many relationships; i.e., a single performer can do many different things on many different recordings, and there can be many different types of performers on a single recording.  When you look at a performer’s record, you see a list of the shows/recordings he or she appears in (and what he did), and likewise when you look at a movie’s record, you see a list of all the castmembers and what each person did.  Pull up a list of TV shows and see a list of all episodes and where they’re located.  Each nugget of info gets typed only once, and it’s automagically pulled in by other files that want to display and/or process the info. It’s pretty sweet, and the interface is pretty nice compared to what I’m used to — the only relational database I ever really learned to use, which is HanDbase for the PalmPilot. The theory is pretty much the same, but the interface is a lot prettier and more powerful.  I do miss HanDbase’s simplicity and ease of use, but oh well.

The question is, do I like FileMaker enough to use it for my own data, and is it indispensible enough that I’d need to buy my own copy??  Well, I don’t have to decide now, and I can always bail out and export my work into text-files if I find something else that’s more elegant or more economical.  I don’t really need this much power; I’d be happy if I could find something a little simpler, like halfway between HanDbase and FileMaker.