I'm excited to announce another web application tool, and this one was a lot of fun to develop.
It is an educational tool, something I wish I would have had earlier in life, something that you could achieve by a number of additional steps in the process.
The task that I wanted to achieve was the ability to be reading text on a screen and when you use the mouse cursor to select whatever you find interesting, not only does it then highlight what had just selected without any additional steps, like clicking on a color to use or clicking on a button that would highlight it, but just the act of selecting it instantly or automatically highlights it.
Additionally, what this tool does is that it takes the text that you highlight and without having to take the steps of copying that text to a clipboard or copying it to another document, copying it into the clipboard of a desktop environment from the browser window, and then into another document then giving it a number and adding comments. If you wanna embellish what you selected and copied and paste it and give some extra commentary on it, I made it possible.
It automatically, or semi automatically, if you will, takes what's been selected, and then it copies that. The automatic part is that whatever you select, it copies it into a running list beneath the text that you are reading from, so that you have what looks like footnotes. If you're reading a book, the footnotes would be referencing numbers within the text that you would reference for further citation and further reference in a section of footnotes at the bottom of the page, or in notes at the end of the chapter or book, or however they have it organized.
This is similar to that format or that concept but again, instead of it being for that purpose, the similar format is for the purpose of, if you're reading technical material, e.g., computer programming language material, you may be kind of skimming through the narrative bits of it. And if you know exactly what you're looking for, in terms of once you're there, that's what you were trying to get, maybe a snippet of code, or maybe an explanation for how something works, something to reference later...
This tool makes it easy to get the text that you can read from, you just copy and paste that text into a text area, or just a box that gives you a prompt and tells you to enter the text from wherever you want.
So that could be an entire PDF or an entire article, or if you're savvy with modern browsers, they tend to have a reader mode where it strips out thankfully all the ads and, it strips out all the kind of extraneous tags of the code so that you basically just get what looks like a plain word document or a plain text document with some formatting. But it allows you to read it in a much cleaner way.
So if you're reading an article online and you want you switch to that mode within your browser, and you're like, I really wanna reference this material, I really wanna study it, or maybe you're being assigned to study it, then you copy and paste it over in the tools I just created.
Then, as you read it whatever you select, it highlights it, it copies it automatically into a numbered list of notes.
Then beside each note that you take, you have an optional field to enter in your own commentary. That's what the margins of books are marked up with.
Back in my day, you would have a highlighter pen, you would have a book, then if you had something to add to whatever you highlight, you might draw a line to it.
Then in the margin of the page of the book, you might write why that was relevant, or what that relates to, or how you wanna follow up on that.
In whatever project you're doing, whether it's a research paper or you're preparing a speech or whatever.
I was a straight-a student, in my college career, which is a story unto itself, but
I was very diligent about techniques of study, and I would prepare very seriously for exams. I would impress the hell out of the teachers, the instructors and their assistants and luckily they never accused me of cheating which I never did.
It wasn't necessarily talent. It was just out of respect for the material, out of respect for the money that it was costing. I was respectful of the process.
I would make word documents whether or not there was an official course exam study guide, which would kind of give you, almost like, a practice test with what you should make sure you know how to answer the questions.
I would take whatever they gave us for their study guide, and ad lib where I would create sentences and questions and whatnot, and I would just remove the key words and remove the dates or the names or whatever it was. Then I'd have a study guide of my own, and I would read and even verbalize those ad libs so that it would just be another way to drill on the material and be that much more prepared.
That was just one of the things I would do, I took copious notes, of course, in class, and was diligent and prompt with the readings.
I did not have computer programming skills back then, but the fact is I created a tool. Now I do a lot of reading and research on a daily basis. So the personal utility outside of academia is gonna mean a lot to me just to reduce the number of steps it takes.
When you paste in the whatever text it is that you're gonna be studying automatically, there is a numbering of the lines of the text.
What that is useful for is that, most books and most most reading, whether it's technical or just fiction, whatever...Most books don't have numbering of the lines. and the only ones that I'm aware of are biblical texts or other spiritual texts that want you to be able to easily reference the different the points in it.
It's rare that you would see that. But as a programmer, as a developer, you're constantly referencing the lines of code by the number.
When you're doing what's called debugging, and you're trying to find out what is broken in your code if you didn't put the right bracket or the right quotation mark, or whatever it is, and the code's not working as intended or not working at all, then the bug reporting tools that we use, they will tell you as best as they can what line it is out of however many lines, it'll tell you exactly where to find it.
So it's an important reference and navigation technique, but for study and for non computer programming environment type tasks where you're dealing with text, I think it's a real missed opportunity to add value there.
Because if I read something and I wanna be able to retrieve where it is in a book you could dog ear the page, I remember dog earing pages, folding over the corner so that you could remember that was important, that you highlighted something on that page, otherwise it's just lost in the abyss of pages.
How many bookmarks can you reasonably put in there? Usually it's just one to keep track of where you are in the book.
So the idea of being able to put any text that you would ever care to be reading and studying and notating, essentially, you copy and paste it in the page, and boom it splits it up into lines, something like 80 or or a hundred characters. It splits the text into lines of that length, and then it gives you that index.
Another cool feature that I built in is that between the numbers of each line of text, between the text and the numbers of the lines of text is a little bar area that, when you select a few words or sentence or whatever you want out of whatever line, not only do you highlight that text so that you can look back on it and find the places you highlighted, also the number of the note is created.
Once you highlight it, that number appears and remains in that little bar between the line number and the text. So you have multiple cross reference features. If you're going through the material, as fast as I go through material, especially if I'm on a mission, I'm trying to find something, then the context of a note, If I read the note later, and am like, what was that? What was that about? What was I thinking? Okay, it's note number five. And I can, in the ocean of text, and then the islands of highlighted text. What was note number five? Okay, there's that little bar.
Then if I logically go up from the largest number to the bottom the text, all the way up to the top of the text, okay, right there. And whatever paragraph within maybe second paragraph or whatever, oh, there's number five. I see the five in that little bar.
And now I can see the highlighted text again, I can reference that context again if I needed to.
I'm very much a big fan of the dark mode or the night mode for being easier on the eyes for reading text on screens and I'm really glad that paradigm shift has occurred because it saves my eyes.
What's great about this intuitive function on the browser, I don't even have to code what I thought I had to code, which would be a way to invert the dark mode, so that when you print it, you're not obviously wasting ink and having a black background in gray or white text.
The browser intuitively knows that when you go to print it, you don't wanna waste all your ink on a black background. It reverses everything so that you get a white background and black text.
Luckily it preserves the highlighting, and it preserves the numbering and whatnot.
Permaculture is not just about growing food and the raw ecological systems that we that we piece together. It's also about organization. Is also about design and the workflow that you do as a professional or as an individual or team.
It's very information intensive, permaculture design. It's so interdisciplinary, so you're constantly learning, and you're constantly engaging with new technical material, new reports. You could be reading soil, geological reports for a site.
There's all kinds of documentation you can get from the state or the county.
There's all kinds of offices. They're gonna have all kinds of information about every site that is a property for sale. It's the granularity of information that you can get that's available, sometimes freely, it is pretty amazing.
For me to be able to make this process more efficient, I don't think anybody is in so much of a rush that they couldn't do just as well with those few extra steps.
But, hey, why not have a more efficient experience, if you can.
This was an exercise of implementing a useful application involving the possibilities that are granted to developers who understand and put to use the different magic properties that happen when, when selection occurs on a page. There are interesting things that can be done with that power.
There are more obscure and nuanced features that you may not encounter in applications on a daily basis, but they're there.
The potential to do very interesting things is there. For me, it was the first thing that came to mind. Okay, wow, you can do interesting things when people select text.
Normally, if I was gonna select text, I would be selecting exactly what I needed to pull from the text in order to reference it later for some purpose.
If I can do that faster, with less steps involved and just get in the zone, and not worry, if I accidentally close a different window, I lost all my notes. It's one app, one tab, one streamlined experience.
If you become an avid user of this semiautomatic note selector tool, then by all means, I am always open for additional feature requests, and certainly any issues or bugs that come up because I'm not at a point where it's life or death stakes to for me to test these apps in every possible operating system and browser and whatever configuration.
It's pretty much just following the basic guidelines and getting it up and running, getting it working. So appreciate any feedback. And I hope you enjoy it and happy studying, and hope you get good, solid, straight-A's and you respect your professors and your teacher assistants.