Pathway 0.6
It’s been a while since I released 0.5, and I think 0.6 offers enough improvements to justify a release.
I’ve included a lot of usability fixes (better keyboard control, better mouse behaviour,…) and there are a few nice functionality additions, such as a table of contents, multiple wiki support, etc.
I’m not gonna list everything here so go check out the release notes! You can download 0.6 here.
As always, suggestions and remarks are welcome in the comments or by e-mail.
I should be able to release updates more easily thanks to the autoupdating feature (Sparkle) that is now integrated in Pathway.
The translation process proved to be rather time-consuming, so I decided to put 0.6 up with some languages missing. Italian, German and Chinese are underway, and an update will be up when they’re ready.
Dylan Clarke said,
November 25, 2006 @ 2:59 pm
This looks fantastic! Thanks a lot. I wasn’t expecting to see the TOC and the print view so soon. Looks like my money was well spent.
Dylan Clarke said,
November 25, 2006 @ 3:49 pm
After looking a bit closer I am in awe. I hope there was some sarcasm in your first sentence, this could easily be a 1.0 release in my mind. Nearly flawless.
I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.
Dennis said,
November 25, 2006 @ 4:09 pm
I wasn’t being sarcastic! Really
I suppose that to me, differences seem much smaller since I’ve been using incremental development builds over the last two months. Kind of like someone you see every day does not seem to change in appearance.
But I’m holding a safe bet here; it’s hard ever to say an application is finished/done. There’ll always be (hopefully small) bugs and lacks…
Feature-wise I think you could say we’re, indeed, almost at 1.0; Pathway is an app with a limited scope so you can’t just keep thinking features up out of nothing.
I’m thinking of some small things, like adding notes, highlighting and persistent saving of pages with your own mark-up (which isn’t such an easy feat).
On the other hand, I’ve received many requests that go in the direction of information organization apps like Voodoopad etc. I don’t use those apps, but I know their general purpose and usage, and it seems to far-fetched (and beyond my possibilities) to integrate those things into Pathway.
Maybe the solution here is to integrate better with other apps, but I still have to find out how…
But that’s something that users of Pathway can better answer. I’ve had many requests that made me wonder why I didn’t think of them before. That’s why I don’t believe in the “one-infallible-developer” image; I like making great ideas into reality, but great ideas just don’t come out of one brain
Pathway: Wiki Semantic Navigator at Mikele Pasin’s Weblog said,
November 28, 2006 @ 5:32 pm
[...] Just found a very cool app that lets you organize and store the navigation on any mediawiki site, Pathway. It basically represents visually the link’s structure of a wiki-page, all the departing nodes centered around the page of interest. The whole navigation can thus be stored in the form of a a net with nodes and links! Developed in Cocoa, works easily and fast on any mac (intel based as well) running Tiger! I quote the author’s reasons behind the development: My idea for Pathway originated when browsing Wikipedia. I would always start off quite focused on a certain subject. Unfortunately, Wikipedia articles tend to be full of distracting links, just screaming to be clicked on Soon enough, I found myself totally lost in myriads of loosely related pages. I cant count the time I wasted on backtracing them, and if you have a bit of wiki-experience, youve probably encountered it too. What I needed, was an application that could easily archive the path I follow through Wikipedia pages. [...]
Mikele said,
November 28, 2006 @ 7:53 pm
I think it’s a great app, with many features in common with a lot of research in the Semantic Web. Any knowledge about it? It’d be nice to let people import-export pathways in RDF or similar, and maybe start providing support for service at the pathway level… Very nice work, keep going!
Charles said,
December 1, 2006 @ 7:13 pm
Needs a few things.
1) progress bar. I hit Apple-shift-N to start a new topic. I enter a phrase or word or whatever. Nothing seems to happen. Is it my connection? Is it the program? What’s happened? There’s no dialogue.
2) apparently, one must now be precise with a name. I’m trying to look up Hippocratic Oath. Do I type in Hippocratic? I don’t get the Wikipedia search page; just a “multiple or no pages” dialogue. This needs to default a bit more gracefully. But the progress/dialog is the really essential thing. The other new stuff is good, but keeping the user informed should be paramount.
Dennis said,
December 1, 2006 @ 11:08 pm
Mikele: thanks! RDF is an option I’d like to think about. But currently, I don’t have any experience with it, so I’ll have to catch up.
Charles: you’re absolutely right about the default page, and I’ll change that soon. However, you can type in whatever you want and if the wiki doesn’t have it, Pathway will open its search page so you can still get your desired subject. However, just displaying an empty box is indeed intimidating and I’ll try to make Pathway suggest subjects based on search results for your query. I’ll also include featured links on the main page and such.
But I don’t get your first point. There’s a (primitive) progress bar and status text when Pathway is loading something. That should be enough for the ~2 secs it takes to load. If you don’t see anything, that could be due to Wikipedia servers experiencing downtime, or the fact that you don’t have a network connection. In that case, most progress displaying methods won’t work. What I could do is include a timeout message, or detect if an internet connection is available.
Thanks for your remarks. Responsiveness/informativeness is an important part of a user-friendly app.
Charles said,
December 3, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
Um, I don’t see any primitive progress bar. And how long it takes to load will depend very much on the speed of your connection and your machine – don’t think bcs it takes 2s on your superhighspeed new machine that it does on others. Wikipedia has to serve the page, the connection has to pipe it over, WebKit has to lay it out. Which is why browsers offer all that chat in the bottom left… “looking up… connecting… waiting for..” It tells us, rather than leaving us in the dark.
I’d have to say this is, for me, the #1 usability issue right now. Getting the pages, all that, is great. It’s the times when you don’t have a page which are most important, though.
Geoff said,
December 4, 2006 @ 2:49 pm
Looks great! I’m SO happy to see this app mature. If I could offer one suggestion: a “command-click” option, like in firefox, where cmd-click will open a link in a new tab, but not switch to it. Likewise, I think that would be a very handy feature for Pathway, where it would open a new node for a link you’re curious about, but lets you finish reading the page you’re currently on.
Cheers!
Geoff
Geoff said,
December 4, 2006 @ 3:05 pm
A couple more things:
1. I’m not sure how hard this would be to implement, but an intelligent “cleap-up” feature would be nice, ie, move closely linked pages together, tighter spacing, etc. My pathways tend to be big, and they get jumbled, and manually rearranging them is a pain.
2. What about indicating directionality in links (either with arrow heads, or maybe different types of lines)? This would help show whether a page was more of a “hub” or a “spoke”. This could also help with the “clean-up” thing, ie, pages that reciprocally link are more closely related than one-way links.
Geoff said,
December 4, 2006 @ 3:30 pm
Ok, so I see that the clean-up is already implemented as “Layout Page Web”. I should have realized that, but I have an excuse: I found a bug!
Pathway seems to choke on certain pages, for example, “Alcatel-Lucent”. It loads fine, but it breaks “Layout Page Web”, and more seriously, prevents saving with the error message “Too few items in node.” This only seems to occur if the page is added manually (or is the first node)– if you get there from a link, its fine.
-Geoff
Charles said,
December 5, 2006 @ 12:31 am
…OK, worked it out. I wasn’t seeing the “progress circle” because I had a search entered in the search field. The pages were being fetched, but no matching text was found in that page, so nothing was displayed except “multiple or no page selected”, which is confusing. *Plus* all the page history on the LHS vanishes when there’s no match.
=usability bug. Search field should be cleared when fetching new page.
Feature/preference suggestion: cache pages? When you’re offline (sometimes some of us are) it would be nice to have the page cached. Perhaps a time limit on how long the cache lasts – or update it when you reattach to a network?
Charles said,
December 5, 2006 @ 1:28 pm
Absent an email for you.. here’s a crash report
–
……
Dennis said,
December 5, 2006 @ 2:01 pm
Charles:
I agree about clearing the search predicate when adding a page, so I’ll change that. And I’m working on a friendlier opening screen (when no page has been added yet)
Caching is something I’ve been wanting to do for some time but it isn’t that easy to implement, so I’m still thinking of the best way to do it.
I took away your crash report because it kinda screws up the layout of the comments. But I’ll look into it. Could you please tell me the page you were trying to load when that occured?
Geoff: The Alcatel-Lucent error is due to the fact that that page has a link to itself. I didn’t calculate the fact that some pages would have that (believe me, they’re very rare as it’s kind of redundant to link to the page you’re on). Anyway, I’ve added a simple (and missing) check so it won’t happen anymore. Look for it soon in 0.6.2.
I like the idea of directional connections. Also, I’ve been busy adding a “open but don’t select” feature, but there’s something that triggers the page to temporarily (0,3 sec) deselect itself which is very annoying.
Charles said,
December 5, 2006 @ 6:48 pm
I was trying to open “MMR”.
I think that a suitable opening screen would be just the front of Wikipedia, or Citizendium (is it open yet?) or whatever the user has chosen as their top wiki link in prefs. You could explain in the prefs that changing that would change the opening page people would see.
Ryan said,
December 6, 2006 @ 7:13 am
Hi, first of all, I love this app, and i’ve been following it for a while and was really excited to see an update today.
I’d like to make a few suggestions, if you don’t mind
First: The search bar. When you click on the magnifying glass icon i think there should be an option to search the page titles you already have open (currently the only available options), an option to search within the currently selected page (some wikipedia pages are huge, and i might be looking for a reference to one specific thing) and lastly searching wikipedia itself (countless times i’ve typed something up there expecting it to search wikipedia for me only to realize it doesn’t do that)
Second: very similar to the first, a cmd+f search feature, similar to firefox and safari.
Third: a way to open new pages in the background, perhaps by clicking with the mousewheel like in firefox and safari. Often the way i browse wikipedia is to read an article and click many links as i read it and open them in background tabs to browse later. however in pathway links open in the foreground causing me to lose my place on the page i was reading.
Thank you for the great app. As far as i’m concerned if these suggestions are implemented you’d be ready for a 1.0 release.
Keep up the awesome work!
Zac White said,
December 11, 2006 @ 2:13 am
I too would like to say how cool this app is. I was going to write something similar, but didn’t get very far because I got distracted. One thing I would suggest, that I would have put in my version, is the ability to cache the pages. It would be awesome to be able to quickly go through and add a bunch of pages and then save that document to be viewed later when I was not online. It would be great for research purposes and would really make this app useful for me. Keep up the good work!
alej744 said,
December 31, 2006 @ 6:48 am
Yay! You fixed the toolbar customization crashing problem! Hooray I love Pathway!
^_^
tryingflow said,
January 14, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
hmmm – I got a question:
the drawing of the nodes, I don’t see how it works.
- sometimes it picks up the links from one page to another, most of the time it doesn’t.
- if I later add a page it doesn’t add the links to already existing pages – isn’t it supposed to do right this?
I tried all the different settings in the preferences, but it doesn’t seem to work…
Oh – and yeah, this is an awesome app, it’s great help to sort of mindmap the first research on wikipedia…
cheers
Dennis said,
January 18, 2007 @ 11:40 am
tryingflow:
Well, Wikipedia’s layout is not consistent in the sense that it is regularly changed by temporary additions to the top of the page. The algorithm that finds the links in that page, isn’t influenced by most, but some combinations cause trouble. I’ve found it to be a very small percentage of the pages, though…Anyhow, I’ll take a look at it and see what I can improve.
Links to existing pages are automatically drawn as connections. However, some links are immediately redirected to other pages (misspellings, unified articles etc…), so you can’t determine from the link if the linked page is in your document. Detecting that is something the algorithm isn’t designed for. Making it do so would require Pathway to actually load every page that is linked, and see if it redirects to a known page. But then you’re just wasting bandwidth and time…
Steven said,
January 20, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
Know any software to assist wikipedia content manageemnt? There are things for windows but not macintosh… for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AWB – there are some javascript things but their a bit cumbersome….
Hanury.NET » Blog Archive » Pathway 0.6 said,
January 31, 2007 @ 9:59 am
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Navigare in Wikipedia « Compos Mentis said,
February 23, 2007 @ 10:22 am
[...] Per questo avviso gli utenti mac che esiste un programma, Pathway , che risolve il problema. [...]