Yes, I’m going talk more about Sqwee. I think it’s mostly because I’m excited about writing software with real version numbers… just kidding.

I’m still working on a good description of it. It’s incredibly simple stuff, but kind of hard to explain. It’s like a wiki, without lots of revisions and multiple users. So it’s like a personal wiki. But it is oriented towards being quick to install and quick to use, while retaining the flexibility for people to use it as they like. That’s why I sort of have the ‘prepackaged’ and ‘no frills’ versions, for running on a desktop and a shared server, respectively.

Anyways, enough blabbing about that stuff. I have been using Sqwee to take notes for a couple weeks now, and it actually works pretty well. But I noticed a couple of things that bugged me quite a bit:

First, if you are editing a page (taking notes) and you want to save it, but keep editing, you have to click ‘save’ and then ‘edit’ again. So I added the ‘quick save’ feature which will save the page but keep you in editing mode.

But then…how do you know it has really saved it and there wasn’t some problem? Or maybe it takes a long time to save or load a page…it would be nice to know when that kind of thing is “working on it” and when it has failed. So what I do now is have the button you press “gray out” while it is work in, then come back when it is complete. It works well when things are slow, but isn’t annoying when they are fast.

Anyhow, the point is that version 0.2.1 is out and I’m excited about the changes. Which, I forgot to mention, include the ability to search.

But I just realized that the three main computers I use (home desktop, laptop, lab desktop) all have different layouts. I use Xfce for my window manager, which (by default) has two panels: one is sort of a taskbar/system tray (like MS Windows) and the other is a launcher bar (like OS X).

At home, I have the launcher bar on the left, with auto hide, and the task bar across the top (and gkrellm on the top right). But on my laptop, there is a lot less screen space, so I only have the taskbar, which is stretched across the bottom and auto hides. In the lab, I have a bigger screen, but I basicly only use three applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, and a terminal. So I just have the taskbar across the top with a few buttons for launching programs. I don’t have any menus set up, because I pretty much launch all programs (besides those mentioned above) with Alt-F2 (run program) or from a terminal. If I get desparate, Xfce let’s me access a menu from right-clicking the desktop. And that’s it…

On a totally different note, I decided to start taking notes on my laptop this quarter to make them easier to study and search later. So, I went looking for a good note-taking program. The good news is that other people have gone on the same search. I looked at a few (Basket is really cool) before remembering that I have Sqwee and I specifically mention in the description that it can be used for note taking…oops. So I tried it out…it works pretty well, actually. Nice and simple. But I did find a problem with ‘special’ characters. I wanted to add in some ∩ and ⊆ kind of stuff, which you can do (fairly) easily by just using HTML. Strangely, that works fine, until you edit and then re-save the page. When you edit it (at least in Firefox) the characters are no longer displayed as HTML entities (∩) but as the actual characters (∩). That’s pretty cool, but then when you save the page the get manged into ASCII or something. Kind of annoying…I guess I should fix that.

I don’t know why anyone would need to know the preceding, but I felt like sharing.