Dog Blue Software Blog

Some new features released today – bookmark visualisation and the ability to sort your bookmarks by relatedness. And, indexing and finding have been tweaked to be faster and use less memory.

Now with Ask Bluey you can automatically group your bookmarks by semantic relatedness so that you can see the patterns (or clusters) in your bookmark collection. You can visualise these patterns in two ways, firstly by your tags and secondly by the bookmarks themselves.

The first is relatively straightforward. The tags and your tagged bookmarks are shown, including the links between these bookmarks. Bookmarks that share the same tag(s) will be grouped closer together.

The second grouping shows all your bookmarks, including the ones that haven’t been tagged. Groups are created based on the bookmarks themselves. Related bookmarks share the same colour and are placed closer together on the graph.

These two graphs let you navigate your bookmark collection in an entirely new way, looking at the forest, not just the trees, to find the connections between your bookmarks.

Since were now able to find the relatedness between bookmarks, it’s now possible to sort your list of bookmarks by their relatedness to the current bookmark that you are viewing. The current bookmark will appear at the top of the list, and the most similar bookmarks will display at the top of the list.

Ask Bluey Beyond Bookmarks is in beta release and currently available for free download from http://askbluey.com/bookmarks

Updating Your Bookmarks

After you have imported your bookmarks into ABBB, you can edit the title, the description and the tags associated with the bookmark. Your changes are automatically applied and saved when you quit ABBB.

When you have selected a bookmark, ABBB will display the version of the page as it existed when you imported it. Of course, web pages change over time for better and worse. The content that you were originally interested in may be updated or may be removed entirely. For this reason, ABBB does not automatically replace the saved version of the bookmark. Instead, you have the option of refreshing a bookmark by clicking the circular refresh button. This will check if the page has been updated and show you those changes. If you are happy with the changes, click the save button to store the new version of the page.

To import bookmarks that you have recently added to your web browser, go to the Import tab and press Import Bookmarks. This will add any bookmarks that you have added since the last time you imported your bookmarks into ABBB. It will also re-index your entire bookmark collection.

Tagging Your Bookmarks

Rather than displaying bookmarks in a fixed hierarchy of folders, ABBB simply shows all bookmarks in one list and lets you assign multiple tags to a bookmark which you can then filter with.

For example, imagine a page about the weather in Sydney. It contains information about rainfall averages and the current weather forecast. In a traditional bookmark system, you might have created folders called “Sydney” in which you place bookmarks related to Sydney. Perhaps you also created a folder called “weather” that contains weather forecasts for cities that you visit. When you add this page to your bookmarks, you then have to decide which folder to add it to – “Sydney” or “weather”.

Tags solve this classification problem by letting you assign both “sydney” and “weather” to this bookmark. This way, when you filter your bookmark list based on either of these tags, your new bookmark will appear.

To add tags to a bookmark, just select a bookmark and type the tags into the Tags box. Separate each tag with a space. Note that tags cannot themselves contain spaces. To add multi-word tags you might like to use underscores or hyphens. For example “los_angeles” or “los-angeles” or even “losangeles”, not “los angeles” (which will add two tags “los” and “angeles”).

To reuse a tag that you have already added to another bookmark, click the button with the blue arrow to the right of the Tags box. This will show a popup with your current set of tags. You can add and remove tags to the current bookmark just by clicking on the words in the popup.

To filter the list of your bookmarks based on a tag, click the grey index book on the left above the list of bookmarks. This will show a popup with the tags that you have added to your bookmark. Click a tag to filter the list to those bookmarks with the specified tag. Click a highlighted tag to unselect it.

Bookmark full text search

One of the best features of ABBB is the ability to search the full text of each of your bookmarked pages to find the bookmark that you are looking for. This is useful when you have a vague memory of a page that you bookmarked some time ago, but not the website it was from.

Typing a word into the search box filters the list of bookmarks to show only those pages that contain the word. Also, a list of word suggestions will pop up beneath the search box while you are typing. The suggested words come from your bookmark collection, and are ordered by frequency. You can click a word to “complete” the word you are typing. You can also use the up and down arrows to select a word and then press Enter to select it.

If the search box turns green as you are typing then that means that all the words you have typed can be found in your list of bookmarks. If the search box is red, then at least one of the words cannot be found.

The search box might be red while the list still contains bookmarks. This means that at least one word can be found, while at least one other word does not match.

If you search for multiple search terms, ABBB will show pages that match at least one of your search terms, with pages that match more than one word appearing towards the top of the list.

In other words searching for “sydney weather” will show pages that contain “sydney” and pages that contain “weather”. Pages that contains “sydney” and “weather” will appear towards the top of the list.

Once you have selected a bookmark from the list, the current search terms will automatically be highlighted on the page. On the left hand side of the page, the Highlight Bar will show you exactly where on the page the search terms lie.

The Highlight Bar shows the currently visible portion of the page with the blue box. Search term matches on the page are shown in smaller boxes and in different colours. To view each match, you can drag the blue box to each match, just like how you drag the right hand side scrollbar to scroll the page.

In fact you can treat the Highlight Bar as just another scrollbar, albeit one that shows you where to scroll to.

You can also hold down Ctrl or Shift and click directly on a search term match. This will scroll the match into view on the page.

Importing Bookmarks into Ask Bluey – Beyond Bookmarks

You can import your bookmarks from your browser (Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer). You can also import them from your delicious.com account if you have added your account details via the Online Accounts tab.

When you click Import Bookmarks on the Import tab ABBB will import bookmarks from the selected sources. Note that if Firefox is running then its bookmarks cannot be imported.

After importing, ABBB will store the unique list of bookmarks and index the text of each page for full text page searching.

You can also save your imported bookmark list as an html file. You can use this file to import your ABBB bookmark list into a browser on your current or another computer. You can also use the file to backup your bookmarks, or even to post them to your website.

Chrome Bookmarks Extension

Ask Bluey – Beyond Bookmarks is now available as a Chrome extension to bring a superior bookmark experience to Chrome. You can instantly sort, search and filter your bookmarks from within Chrome.

One of the things Chrome has lacked until now is a useful way to browse your entire bookmark collection. Now with Ask Bluey, you can quickly add full text search and tags to your Chrome bookmarks.

Ask Bluey - Beyond Bookmarks

Ask Bluey - Beyond Bookmarks is software for Windows that archives and instantly searches the content within your bookmark collection.

Since this is a beta software release, you can currently download Ask Bluey - Beyond Bookmarks for free.

Ask Bluey - The Modern Reference

Today marks the beta release of Ask Bluey a free search and reference website.

Ask Bluey combines a dictionary with Wikipedia and web search. Looking for something? Ask Bluey.

Ask Bluey is also available as a search extension for your browser.

Yowks! Beta 3

Because Yowks! uses Internet Explorer internally, IE8 caused some problems for Beta 2 users. These have now been addressed. Also, the entire interface has been streamlined, the natural language processing has been improved, and only a few bugs remain.

Download your free copy today.

Product Showcase: Yowks!

Yowks! is an exclamation of amazement as in, "Yowks! This jungle sure has a lot of tigers in it..."

Which is exactly the type of reaction you might get when you use semantic search for the first time. Or maybe not.

The idea behind semantic search is that there are lots of words that mean more or less the same thing, so if someone searches for "oil prices" then it would be great if "gas prices" or "petrol prices" were matched too. Search engines do this to some extent, but once you need to find something in your web browser (text search) then you are back to the 1980's to start playing the old guessing game of typing multiple random words without really being sure if they exist on the page or not.

Well, happily, Yowks! is a web browser that can "read" a page of English (in the best kind of way a computer can anyway) and it indexes the meaning on a page rather than its text. So if you search for "oil prices" and there is a match for "gasoline price information" then Yowks! will tell you about it, along with "the cheapest gas prices", "the best fuel prices", etc.

In other words, the guessing game is now gone when you want to find stuff on web pages.

Even better than that, Yowks! understands that concepts lie within a hierarchy (or ontology) so that if you search for "European countries" and the page happens to contain text on "Germany", "France", etc then those countries will get hilighted and "China", "Japan", etc will remain unhilighted. This is because Yowks! knows that "Germany" is part of "Europe" and that "Japan" is not.

Yowks! is currently considered an experimental, beta release. Download it here and tell us what you think about Yowks! and semantic search.

How to Build a Better Dictionary

Dog Blue Software has released Wordnet 3.0 Search, a free online dictionary.

There is an obvious paradox to the concept of a dictionary - single words can have multiple meanings and dictionaries use words to define the definition of other words. For example, the humble word "word" has at least ten definitions:

1. a unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made"; "he hardly said ten words all morning"
2. a brief statement; "he didn't say a word about it"
3. new information about specific and timely events; "they awaited news of the outcome"
4. the divine word of God; the second person in the Trinity (incarnate in Jesus)
5. a promise; "he gave his word"
6. a secret word or phrase known only to a restricted group; "he forgot the password"
7. an exchange of views on some topic; "we had a good discussion"; "we had a word or two about it"
8. the sacred writings of the Christian religions; "he went to carry the Word to the heathen"
9. a verbal command for action; "when I give the word, charge!"
10. a word is a string of bits stored in computer memory; "large computers use words up to 64 bits long"

It is only through context that we can understand these definitions, a contextual awareness that has taken years and years for all of us to develop and that depends on everyone reaching more or less the same set of contextual word meanings.

From the perspective of a computer or a non-native speaker, this web of associations can seem arbitary and not immediately apparent. But today arrives a solution!

Wordnet 3.0, combined with the Princeton Wordnet Gloss Corpus has created an exact mapping between each word in the dictionary's definition with the exact semantic definition of the word used in that context.

Try it out and decide for yourself if this free, ad-free dictionary is better than the other dictionaries out there.

Dog Blue Software's Blog

Ask Bluey - Beyond Bookmarks Release