On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 5:27 AM, Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 20 Feb 2009, at 6:45 AM, Douglas Stebila wrote: > >> On 2009-Feb-19, at 1:20 AM, Christiaan Hofman wrote: >> >>> Are you aware of the Web Group? >> >> >> The Web Group is nice, but (a) does not fit naturally into many >> people's workflow, and (b) does not allow for adding importers without >> altering the BibDesk source code. >> >> On 2009-Feb-19, at 9:49 AM, Maxwell, Adam R wrote: >> >>> The short answer is no. A few sites are supported in the Web group >>> that >>> Christiaan mentioned, but there's no way for users to write plugins >>> that tie >>> into that group. >> >> It seems to me the natural way to do this right would be to have any >> easy way of plugins that can be used either in the web group or can be >> accessed by AppleScript, which then allows for easy scripts to be >> written for Safari or Firefox or your web browser of choice. >> > > But indeed, BD does not live "inside" your browser. And I don't think > BD should somehow go inside. The best I could think of would be some > scripting support to tell BD to import from some URL. > > It's not completely clear to me what part of the process you'd want BD > to perform. > >>> If you're using Firefox, you might be interested in this: >>> http://www.mackerron.com/. It uses Zotero's scrapers to push >>> references to >>> BibDesk. >> >> I was not aware of Citeulike or Zotero. Since a lot of work has been >> done by people in developing importers for Zotero it would be nice if >> those importers could be adapted for more generic use outside of the >> Zotero framework, but, after perusing the code, that seems unlikely. >> It would be great if there was a standardized importer framework so >> that importers could be written once and used in lots of programs -- >> Zotero, BibDesk, etc. -- but that may be beyond the scope of what is >> reasonable to do at this point. >> > > I don't know too much about it, but the language that these importers > use is very different from anything BD supports, so it would be very > difficult / a lot of work to implement it. I never considered it very > likely. > >> If someone more familiar with the BibDesk source code is interested in >> this and willing to work with me on this, I am willing to put some >> time into developing this. But I don't want to just go off and write >> it without knowing that it fits within the vision the core developers >> have for BibDesk. >> >> Douglas > > We've had some talk about writing importers in the past. At first Mike > didn't think it was a good idea, because it's more manageable to write > directly in BD code. However I think that was based on the assumption > of a Obj-C plugin. I think it would be worthwhile to have a plugin > mechanism for more general (scripting) languages, but only if it is > well thought through beforehand (otherwise it will be a real PITA to > work with it in the long run) and well designed. Moreover, I think > also only if it supports various common languages, I'd say at least > python. And I think here comes the pain, because communicating with > any language other than AppleScript is still far from trivial from > Cocoa. I wouldn't know how to do it. But for sure if someone does and > wants to com in, I'd be happy to assist form the BD side.
Integrating Zotero might be getting easier - here is a bridge between javascript and objc: http://code.google.com/p/jsxobjc/ Also, adding support for python (actually pyobjc) plugins might be easier than it sounds. I understand code talks and I'm just writing emails here, but I actually think that Applescript is no longer any easier to support (and may actually be harder) than some more popular languages. I'm going to try to spend a little time this weekend putting PyObjC into BibDesk. We'll see how it goes. -mike > Christiaan > >> >>> On 18 Feb 2009, at 6:29 PM, Douglas Stebila wrote: >>> >>>> Is there a standard, simple way to write and install methods for >>>> BibDesk to import citations from Safari/Firefox? >>>> >>>> Here's the scenario I'm thinking of. Users are browsing the web in >>>> Safari or Firefox and they come across a paper on a major site >>>> (arXiv, >>>> Springer, IEEE, etc.) for which they'd like to import the citation >>>> into BibDesk. It would be great if they could access an AppleScript >>>> in Safari/Firefox, or switch to BibDesk and click a single button, >>>> and >>>> have BibDesk parse the website, pull out the right bibliographic >>>> data, >>>> and create a new citation. >>>> >>>> Now, obviously having BibDesk parse all the data and figure it out >>>> automatically is too hard. But one could write parsers for >>>> individual >>>> websites that know the idiosyncracies of various websites. Indeed, >>>> this is what a lot of the importer AppleScripts on the BibDesk wiki >>>> do: >>>> >>>> http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/bibdesk/index.php?title=BibDesk_Applescripts >>>> >>>> But this results in a lot of duplication of work and work being done >>>> in a non-standard way. I think there should be (and perhaps there >>>> is >>>> and I just don't know about it) a standard way of adding importers >>>> of >>>> this form into BibDesk at runtime, and moreover that these importers >>>> should be able to be written in scripting languages (AppleScript, >>>> shell script, etc.) as opposed to having to be written in >>>> Objective-C >>>> in the main BibDesk source tree. This would allow users to easily >>>> add >>>> importers for their favourite websites without needing to know >>>> Objective-C. >>>> >>>> I've actually written such an extensible framework entirely in >>>> AppleScript that has importer scripts for websites that I use >>>> (arXiv, >>>> IEEE, ACM, Springer), so if you want to see what I mean a temporary >>>> version is available for download at >>>> http://www.douglas.stebila.ca/files/code/bibdesk/ >>>> Importers-0.9.2.zip >>>> I'd be happy to contribute to developing part of this if people >>>> think >>>> it should be added to BibDesk, but I'm not a very good Objective-C >>>> coder. >>>> >>>> But I think this is functionality that lots of people will want and >>>> so >>>> there should be one way to do it, not lots of people writing random >>>> scripts and posting them in random locations. >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> Douglas >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>>> Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San >>>> Francisco, CA >>>> -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the >>>> Enterprise >>>> -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source >>>> participation >>>> -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source >>>> code: SFAD >>>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Bibdesk-users mailing list >>>> [email protected] >>>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users >>> >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San >>> Francisco, CA >>> -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the >>> Enterprise >>> -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source >>> participation >>> -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source >>> code: SFAD >>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Bibdesk-users mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San >> Francisco, CA >> -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the >> Enterprise >> -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source >> participation >> -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source >> code: SFAD >> http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H >> _______________________________________________ >> Bibdesk-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _______________________________________________ > Bibdesk-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users > -- Michael McCracken UCSD CSE PhD Candidate research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/ misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
