[Pythoncard-users] diaries and dynamic hypertext

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

Hey Simon,
I just found this
http://simon.kittle.info/diaryxml
on your site.

I haven't looked too closely, but diary stuff is another pet project of
mine. My first commercial failure was a Personal Information Manager (PIM)
called Organizer +. Anyway, the original SearchExplorer which I wrote in VB
and which the searchexplorer sample in PythonCard is based on had a nice
feature geared towards my diary usage. The idea is that if the text in the
search box contained 'word: ' before the search term, where 'word' is
associated with a given search site, then that search site would
automatically be associated with the search. For example, in my diary which
is freeform text I use Book: Movie: TV: Game:. If you have 'Movie: Memento',
then ultimately you're going to get a URL like
http://us.imdb.com/Tsearch?title=Memento

Part of the point of searchexplorer is that it is supposed to keep track of
these relations, so if you had a diary PythonCard app, it should invoke
searchexplorer to do its search. We don't have an app to app messaging
infrastructure, but a hack could be done for purposes of exploring the idea.
You probably saw my post on the xml-rpc list
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xml-rpc/message/3718

An alternative is to put the searchexplorer smarts in the diary and then it
can launch the browser to display results. We'll eventually wrap the wxHTML
control in wxPython, but probably not until 2.3.2 is out. Most sites don't
support getting the data in XML format, so unless you're wanting to do a lot
of screen scraping it is easier to just display an HTML result and the
simplest way to that is via the browser right now.

It would be very easy to have a menu of sites for the major categories you
might use in a diary: Book, Movie, TV, Dictionary, Calendar, Addresses,
Games, generic search (Google), etc. When the menu item is selected, it
would take the currently selected text in the field and launch a browser
window similar to searchexplorer. I have something like this enabled in my
Internet Explorer (IE) browser, but it is invoked via a right-menu click on
text in the browser window and only works in IE.

These type of free form URLs don't have to be limited to searchable web
sites. The original SearchExplorer I did in VB also looked up contacts in
Outlook, but since PythonCard is cross-platform, I pulled that feature out
of the searchexplorer sample. We could define several different ways for
people to search contacts settable via a Preferences dialog (now that we can
do dialogs). Then if you selected say 'Kevin Altis' or 'Altis' or
'al...@se...' in the diary text and chose 'Contact' from the menu
it would jump to the appropriate contact or retrieve and display the info.
Another good item for free form hypertext is hooking up to a local file
search like the findFiles sample.

Anyway, just some ideas. I wouldn't mind working on a diary sample for
PythonCard. It is another good area to explore storage options,
import/export, text searching, and other issues we need to address.

Anyone else on the list interested in the topic of diaries and/or free form
hypertext?

In order to make the UI nicer I would really like to move to using the
wxTE_RICH text style for TextField and TextArea, which means requiring
wxPython 2.3.1 or later. I didn't make the change yet, because some people
are still using 2.3.0 for Boa. I will wait until 2.3.2 is released before
making the change. Once we're using wxTE_RICH we can mix font styles in a
single field.

ka