Links to Useful Programs and Sites

I've culled these links from my personal collection or from mentions on the Nota Bene list over the last few years. It's still very much a work in progress, so if you have any you think would enhance the computing life of a Notabenieri, please send it my way and I'll add it to the list.

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Jukka-Pekka Takala (J-P's site has a number of XPL programs, written by him and James Ernest, for NB 4.xx. These include several that are essential for anyone who uses the DOS versions of Ibid(em): Ibidiag and IGET.)

Gerald W. Schlabach (Some more XPL programs for NB 4.xx, including the very useful Markwell, which translates NB to html and html to NB.)

Guido Milanese (If you work with NB and LaTeX, this site has a utility that will convert NB files to LaTeX format. Also has a utility that searches out duplicate entries in an Ibid(em) database.)

XyWWWeb (Carl Distefano's and Robert Holmgren's repository of XyWrite Apps, Add-ons, and Info. Some of the programs here work with NBWin too.)

Note Tab Pro (Much of this site was created or tweaked with this editor. Its clean interface, low overhead, and rich Clip libraries make mucking about with html code a lot easier.)

UltraEdit (Text Editor - HEX Editor - HTML Editor - Programmers Editor. Geared to programmers. I'm not a programmer, so I haven't used it, but others on the List recommend it.)

TextPad (Like UltraEdit, another "full-featured text editor for MS Windows" some List members have recommended.)

Classical Text Editor (Designed especially for critical editions. Mentioned on the List by Gerald Schlabach.)

StorySpace (A hypertext writing environment. I tried a demo several years back and got no further than demo-ing. I wanted it to do things it couldn't do, like link to specific locations inside external files, not just to the file as a whole. Maybe NB could work on this.)

Bookwhere (Search multiple online library catalogues and download records into one's favorite bibliography manager. For those who remember the Biblio days of connecting one library database at a time--and not being able to access Ibid while doing so--it seems like a miracle. One of the few 3rd party products to even acknowledge the existence of NB and Ibidem.)

Citation (A competitor to Ibidem. Integrates with recent versions of MS Word and Corel Wordperfect. Somehow affiliated with the Nota Bene company but don't ask me how.)

Corel WordPerfect (The DOS version drove me bananas--monkeys spitting fruit at a wall chart must have assigned its keyboard functions--but the Windows version behaves like, well, just about every other Windows word processor. It's still a standard in the legal world, probably because users can "reveal codes." Therein lie secrets of the universe.)

Lotus Word Pro (Now sold only as a part of SmartSuite. Word Pro is the successor to the first word processing program I ever bought and loved--Samna Word III. I didn't know anything about NB in 1985, honest.)

Microsoft Word (I use it. I have to--Agency policy. Created for the steno pool, not writers.)

Dreamweaver (The most powerful and flexible WYSIWYG webpage development program. I created the Keyboard Tables in Dreamweaver--the "Sort Table" feature alone is almost worth the price of the software, the academic price anyway.)

HomeSite (A text-based webpage creation and site-management program. The most recent versions [4.5x] have been resource hogs and buggy, but in general they offer some nice enhancements over a "simple" text editor like NoteTab Pro.)

CSE HTML Validator (Validates html code on webpages. Thorough and fast--I would go bug-eyed trying to hunt down errors this program finds effortlessly.)

TopStyle (The gold standard for editing Cascading Style Sheets [CSS], programmed by the original creator of Homesite, Nick Bradbury. Not surprisingly, it features tight integration with HomeSite.)

Scribbler (A JavaScript, VBScript, and DHTML Editor with library of over 60 ready to use scripts. You still have to know code to be able to use this program effectively, but it does make composing it easier.)

Fireworks (Macromedia's graphics companion to Dreamweaver. Designed from the ground up for web output, unlike the print-world's graphic king, Photoshop.)

PaintShop Pro (The financially sane person's alternative to Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady. Does both print and web graphics.)

Mindmanager (A visual brainstormer and idea organizer. What can I say? I like seeing colored lines, arrows, and circles shepherding my ideas.)

Zoot (The creator, Tom Davis, calls his program "a custom personal information processor." Zoot was one of the first to feature "capturing" online information from email and webpages in addition to copying, pasting, organizing, and indexing traditional text-based materials. The latest version adds some traditional PIM functionality--calender and contacts--but the result strikes me as a wary and uneasy marriage.)

MaxThink (An oldy but goody. One of the premiere DOS outline/idea processors. I've always found it easier to use than NB's native outlining capability, and fortunately, someone wrote an XPL program that translates its files to and from NB. It's buried somewhere on my harddisk.)

PowerDesk (Ontrack's PR department calls Powerdesk "The World's Best File Manager," and for once the flaks might be right!)

ClipMate (What a clipboard should be. Microsoft's enhancements to clipping in Office 2000 still don't come anywhere close to Clipmate's functionality.)

QuickView Plus (If you need to view the contents of a file and don't have the application, this utility will do it for you.)

Partition Magic (And magic it is: it slices, dices, and massages your harddrive into smaller, moveable partitions without destroying data and requiring you to start over from scratch--or backup tapes. I can hear Mervyn now--"You do have backups, don't you???")

Tucows (May be the "Ultimate Directory" for shareware. One of the first stops I make when looking for a program.)