Eduardo Mauro, the developer of Connected Text, has released version 5.0. Connected Text is 
billed as a “Personal Wiki,” and it’s certainly that, but that description barely does it justice, given its rich internal and add-on features. I’ve been using it intermittently for about two years, but cannot claim to have mastered all of its features. However, spend a little time browsing the user forums and you’ll get a sense of how sharp the user population is, and the sorts of challenging intellectual problems to which Connected Text is applied.
ConnectedText personal wiki releases version 5.0
ConnectedText: wiki-ish personal knowledge manager
Have just started using ConnectedText, a brilliant piece of software which is hard to categorize. More on this as we get further into it. One thing that makes a strong impression is that ConnectedText has a user community that’s enthusiastic and smart, and have generated quite a number of plugins and scripts which add functionality.
A quick tour through the Connected Text forum suggests that a lot of the functionality which has been added in successive iterations has come from the user community.
Three of those users are people who’ve thought and wrote a lot about knowledge management, and their blogs and websites are really worth a look (that is, three that I found without looking very hard – as I read through the forums and evaluate ConnectedText, I’m sure I’ll find others):
Taking Note is the blog of Manfred Kuehn, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, and the author of a well-regarded 2001 biography of Immanuel Kant. Link to Professor Kuehn’s posts about ConnectedText. Professor Kuehn has also written AutoHotkey and other scripts to support Connected Text.
Here’s one user, Cal Jacobson, a software developer, and his opinion of Connected Text as one of his two choices in wiki software, the other being Wikimedia. Jacobson also maintains a script library for Connected Text.
I’ll continue to use ConnectedText — it has quite a few unique features that I like, such as Python and Ruby scripting and the ability to export everything in a self-contained Microsoft Help file. I’d love for there to be a portable version, but due to prior problems with Chinese hackers stealing his software, Eduardo Mauro (developer of ConnectedText) has had to tie his software to a particular processor ID. I encourage anybody interested in having a wiki for their personal use to at least give CT a shot if they can afford the $30 (US) fee 1 ; Eduardo’s support for his product has been stellar and there are certainly fewer things that can break compared to a MediaWiki + WOS solution.
NB: since that entry was written, a USB stick version has been developed, and I’m using it.
Link to Mr. Jacobson’s posts in the category “Connected Text.”
For Linux users, Mr. Jacobson also has a post explaining the WINE workaround to allow use of ConnectedText in Linux.
Third, Glenn J. Coulthard, a professor of at Okanagan College, British Columbia, and a doctoral candidate at Purdue. His post Academic Research using ConnectedText has a 10-minute tutorial.
ConnectedText may have a (relatively) small userbase compared, say, to WordPress. But realizing the intensity and intelligence of users actively supporting the application was enough to get me to pay $79 USD2 and for the USB version. Which I’m now testing on some research I’m doing now, and will shortly test on some existing datasets from older matters. Hope to have a useful post about this promising program, and some screen shots, in the near future.
- The current single-computer license fee is $40 [↩]
- The ConnectedText pricing structure ranges from single-computer ($39.95), to single-user/multiple computers ($69.95), USB stick, i.e. take-it-anywhere, or to any machine (79.95) and $119.95 for the combination of USB-stick and multiple computer licenses. None of these restrictions, so far as I can tell, limit your right to make backup copies. [↩]
