I started to use a text expander on iPad. Initially when I was writing tidlers the difficulty of typing double brackets was severely slowing me down. Then I discovered built text expander.
Instead of square brackets I use 'qq' and 'ww' I also started typing plain text as a first draft, pre wikification tiddler. I realised that I don't need the view template view initially. I like being in edit mode. Sometimes when I finish editing a tiddler and see it rendered, I loose focus on what I am writing. I then end up opening up my style sheet and start tweaking my TiddlyWiki.... Hours pass.... I am guessing now, but I am thinking that TiddlyWiki 5 will be able to take plain texts and magically wrap them up in a TiddlyWiki, links and all. This would be realy good. Recently, thanks to Firefox updating me and an unwise update to mountain lion, I am looking at tiddlyspace again. I liked the tiddlyspace edit space, it provides a specialist editor away from the TiddlyWiki. I also liked Mario's model of Aggregate, structure and refactor for building knowledge. In light of both the above I stared to compose texts in a vanilla text editor, the ones that comes with an ipad. For the last few years I have not written in anything other than TiddlyWiki, but I found myself 'tiddling' but without a TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki has changed the way I write, but not in the way I though it would. In terms of refactoring knowledge, writing plain text knowing that its going to be wikified later makes me think more about how it might be parsed, how structure might be added when refactored in another software environment, TiddlyWiki on a laptop for example. My editor mode text is looking better as I refactor it, and I think I am finding that refactoring the edit helps clarity of though, helps with focus on knowledge without tweaking my UI I also wondered if text expansion could be built into editing mode in TiddlyWiki. A plugin similar to TB's auto link plugin but one which worked at the level of editing mode. For me TiddlyWiki is all about speed, and text expansion is a long and laborious process. But for domain specific TiddlyWikis, a tiddler with shortcuts might be useful. Say you wanted to write about Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow and TiddlyWiki. I could use any uncommon keystrokes as shortcuts - 'cc' as an example. Pressing the same key a number of times is easier than different ones. The keyboard layout is not ergonomic, it's a relic. Taking this a bit further, a set of abriviations could in included, ones used by youths when they send texts for example. Then toddlers could be composed as text messages and parsed into TiddlyWikis, transmogrified into adult, teacher pleasing, text with standard spelling. Refactoring at the level of parsing in the TiddlyWiki seems like an an appropriate place to deal with complexity. We already compose text in numerous contexts, making these editors in a TiddlyWiki system might be useful. This is driven by recent conversations arround saving and TiddlyWiki and WISIWG. Intead of the latter, I think that more wiki sytle markup at the level of editor combined with text expanding might be a good idea. The Firefox update is quite annoying. Although my TiddlyWikis and their data a safe, the means of editing them are not immediately at hand. The mountain lion prole, is perhaps my first scrape with the prospect of spending a lot of time getting data back. It's made me reconcider storage in plain text, something I previously thought was 'taking things a bit too far' Messing about with an ipad keyboard, where the interface has no moving parts is frustrating, but the struggle may lead to a tool more closely integrated with the mind and the way I think Alex Alex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
