Better support for file attachments...

I've copied these comments from another entry that was a duplicate of this entry. They were submitted by BMEguy.

I also use Mori for keeping notes about numerous pdf's.

To open an external file, you can make a link and type in the file's path on your local system.

Just they way I use it:

1. Make a file entry with the bibliographic tag (e.g. Smith2004; I use Bibtex)
2. add any keywords to the note of this entry, and cut and paste the abstract.
this way the entry will show up in spotlight for a search of the keywords
3. add a sub-entry titled "paper" or "text" or "source"
4. type "paper"
5. select it and choose Text->Make link...
6. drag the pdf into the text field (which should paste the path to the file)

if you type in the path name (e.g. file:///Users/userName/Desktop/example.pdf) you won't have any problems, but if you drag in the file (as I suggest) you'll have to go back and edit the link from "http://" to "file://" otherwise it will attempt to open the file with your default browser.

7. click ok
8. drag the pdf file to the note field and then press the control key before releasing the drop
this adds a scrollable version of the paper to the note, but does not copy the entire paper to the notebook attachments (because the control key makes an alias)
9. Take notes in subsequent sub-entries.

I put the whole workflow here to help people who wanted to open embedded attachments (albeit by creating a secondary link).
I'm hoping we can have more in depth discussions of work flows and usage strategies in the Mori forum.

This is ridiculously complicated. How about a short-and-easy (for us, not for Jesse) method?

Re: Workflow...

This is an interesting way to organize your PDFs, abstract, citations, etc. Could you post a sample Mori notebook and accompanying PDF for us to see?

kcat:

Yes, if you look at the whole workflow for dealing with references it's a lot. But the "short and easy" version of adding links to external files is:

To open an external file, you can make a link and type in the file's path on your local system.

Just two steps:

1. select some text and choose Text->make link
2. enter the path to the file

[you can do #2 in a number of ways: type the path by hand, drag the file into the field and edit it, or use a utiltity to cut and paste it (I use one called FileUtilsCM)]

joewiz:

I'm still refining the workflow, but I'd be happy to have a more complete discussion of workflows and usage scenarios in the Mori forum. I'd really be interested in getting feedback and ideas from everyone.

I look forward to the dialog! I'd be happy to give ideas based on a sample file if you'd be willing to share it here.

Under the topic of linking to files, it would also be nice to be able to have relative links to files.

At the very least, the ability of the file path to include "~" to indicate current user directory, so that changing over a user account to a different name wouldn't break all the links.

Another possibility would be the option to make links relative to the Mori doc, so that files could be separate but included (and linked) with a Mori doc in the same folder.

OK, I'm figuring out the mechanics of file attachments now. I can now store the note part on the coredata database and store the file attachments externally. With this working it means that Mori can now support file attachments like TextEdit does.

1. Drag file to text view.
2. File icon embedded. (file can be embedded in Mori, or just embed an alias and leave the original file in place).
3. Double click icon to open file again.

That gives us attachments, a great step forward! Next question is can we do better then TextEdit. I think OmniOutliners attachment GUI is particularly nice. It allows you to expand or collapse an attachment preview if one exists. But I would be interested to see some other implementations. Does anyone have a favorite attachment implementation that we can learn from?

I don't know why I like this, but I do: Process. I think the whole app has a lovely UI (yet another Unified app): too bad it's slow and kludgy. Too much mousing, too much waiting, but it sure *looks* good.

And I like how I can associate multiple external files for a single item, and how it does not care what the item is. It's just a fancy link, but it's an attractive fancy link.

You asked for implementations that were cool, and here's one that's cool. You'll do cooler, I'm sure, but this is a unique (and, to a degree, effective) example from which to draw your inspiration.

I also very much like how Omni Outliner handles file attachments. It gives the option of displaying the file (usually some graphic) inline or collapsing it to a mini-thumbnail. Another option that would be helpful is graphic resizing. Ideally, I would like to cntl-click a file/graphic and choose between: display icon, display thumbnail, display full file image. That would be a step above Omni.
I mention this because I recently had a problem with it while using OO3, I needed to keep a high res graphic for later sending to a journal, but when printing a draft of the outline the graphic took up 2 pages. Therefore, I had to collapse the graphic and wasn't able to display anything in the draft.

I've been meaning to take a look a Process. Some of it's UI elements seem intriging.

Hi Jesse --

Three more file attachment issues:

1. One of the beauties of DEVONthink is the option of _indexing_ the text resources and metadata of attached files of several types (PDF, .doc, various image formats). Do you see this as something Mori could do, particularly for PDFs?

2. There ought to be an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for linking, with modifier keys for various of attachment (import vs. external attachment, absolute vs. relative link, or whatever), and user-settable defaults for the actions of modifier keys.

3. In the current version, when you drag a folder from the Finder desktop to Mori's outline pane, it appears to ignore all files except those that Mori can import as text files and all subdirectory branches except those that terminate in such files. It would seem to make more sense to preserve the Finders folder hierarchy, either creating a new type of "alias" file in Mori, pointing to the appropriate external file or generating empty Mori text files containing an "alias" link (with appropriate icon) to the external file.

Best,
Dz

Dragging and dropping images, PDF's, etc. into Mori's Notes field is nice and simple, as it should be. However, when I double click or right-click on the image, I should be given the option to just open the original file with an application of my choice. Instead I'm prompted to save the thing somewhere - I don't want to save it anywhere, it's already stored on my disk! Resizing boxes would be nice too, so I can end up with essentially thumbnails.

Mori 1.2 now adds better support for file attachments, you can double click on an attachment to save it outside of Mori. This is a vast improvement by not ideal. I've added a new feature request for opening an attachment without requiring a save. If that's important to you please vote on it here:

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/node/950

Id really like to use Mori to organize PDF's as if they were Notes themselves. Would need some basic Controls like Preview for zooming and ability to open externally.

This would be best facilitated by actually storing imported DATA files as individual files inside the Mori file. So PDF's for example would be kept as seperate data files, makes no sense to store RAW data inside the note database IMO, especially as RAW Data can be quite large if user has imported a lot of Images, PDF's or whatnot