Preview’s Annotation Tools

Annotations is a important feature which has turned Preview from a mere PDF viewer to a powerful and complete study application enabling you to take notes, highlights, underscores, cross outs, links and shapes to help you learn, remember and understand the subject of the PDF file. However, you must use these tools efficiently. Today, I am going to go over methods on how you can use annotations in a logical and practical way to increase your level of comprehension on the subject of a PDF document.

Why would you use annotations?
When you are intensely studying from a physical paper book you typically make highlights of important sentences within the book for you to remember. Additionally, you may take down notes within the pages re-explaining statements and ideas to help you to comprehend and remember them. And as you read the book you may circle sections within the book that are text or images to emphasize something.

All of these actions and more describe above can be emulated using Preview’s powerful annotations capabilities and as we move towards a time where paper books will most likely become obsolete it is crucially important that you become use to using these annotation tools. Today, books in PDF form are becoming more common thanks to sites such as Google Book Search and others. While some of the books on Google Book Search you can’t download as PDF files there still remain multitudes of public domain books worth reading such as the writings of Thomas Jefferson and more which can be downloaded.

Furthermore, it doesn’t just have to books either since you can turn any webpage or document into a PDF file on the Mac. Also, if your a developer your can take any of the multitudes of PDF documents Apple has provided on programming and use Preview’s annotations on them. For example, since I’m currently learning the Objective C programming language I have printed out source code from Xcode as a PDF file and I have describe to myself using notes how the program works. Doing so has tremendously helped reassure that I have a firm comprehension on the way the program works and doing this exercise with Preview’s annotations has forced me to more deeply study the programming book I’m learning from and as I continue to study Objective C I look upon these notes that I’ve made using Preview to remind myself how these programs work.

How to make an annotation
Since it is so easy to use annotations I thought it would be more efficient to provide a short video which visually explains how to create and adjust each type of annotation but before you watch the video here are two things to know:

• The Inspector is the window which controls the appearance of selected annotations. It also controls other aspects of the PDF document as well. Hit command-i to bring it up. Click the icon that has the red oval in the Inspector window to bring up the appearance options.
• The annotation sidebar displays a list of every single annotation.

Click here to watch


Efficient Methods on Usage and Organization of Annotations.

Now that you’ve viewed the video I can explain my efficient and practical methods for using annotations.

1. Color Coordination
When your are jotting down your numerous notes in a document and especially if its a book it is important that you devise a method of using notes by color. For example you could devise a system where all blue notes contain your thoughts and opinions on the subject matter while all your yellow notes contain your re-explaniations or analogies of it.

So why would I ever do this?
Let’s say you never created a color scheme for notes and you just finished reading a long book in Preview and you’ve taken dozens possible hundreds of notes and a few weeks later you need to find a few specific notes. Let’s say you know that your looking for notes that only contain your thoughts and ideas and only a few specific ones of that kind. So you open up the annotations sidebar and you are a presented with a barrage of notes and other annotations all using the same color and you end up looking through every single one of those notes only to find a specific few. However if you had devised a color system prior to making these notes you would’ve had to only look through the notes of one color and you would just ignore the rest. Also this method works just as well on other annotations such as highlights and shapes. For example with Highlights or Underlines you could devise a system where yellow is for important quotes and blue is for important statements. By devising a simple color scheme you can save time and increase your comprehension of the subject matter of the PDF.

2. Decide When To Highlight/Underline Something or to Surround it With A Shape
While the Shape tools will be more commonly used to identify objects in an image they can be a great way to mark important paragraphs of text that are too long to highlight or underline. For instance, I took Apple’s list of Leopard’s 300 new features and saved it as a PDF then I opened it in Preview and I took the square shape tool and selected features that I need to investigate and/or use. This keeps your documented clean, uncluttered and easy to read by using Shapes instead of highlighting or underlining in these circumstances.

3. Use certain icons to indicate certain meanings with notes

Similar to the color scheme tip it is recommended that you use a specific icon with a note to indicate its meaning. You can change a note’s icon from the inspector as shown in the video above.

Using these tips for annotations will help you in studying any kind of PDF document whether it be an article, newsletter, book, blog post you’ve saved or even sheet music and using these tools logically and neatly will always pay off in the end.

Tip: Creating RSS Widgets in Dashcode

Today, I’m going to show you how to create a widget which displays any RSS feed in Dashcode. Programming knowledge not required. Before proceeding you must have the Developer Tools installed on your Mac. If you don’t have that installed you can install it from your OSX Leopard disk.

What Dashcode is all about
Dashcode was designed for you to quickly and simply produce beautiful and compelling widgets. You can create widgets for yourself, your organization or for distribution on the web. What we are going to focus on today is making widgets for yourself.

Let’s Make Our Widget
We are going to create a widget which retrieves and displays any rss feed. Open Dashcode and click RSS. Presented before you is everything you need to create your widget. In front of you is the widget template. Double click the title “My RSS Feed” and give it the name of the site you will be providing the rss feed from. Next take the rss feed and drag and drop its url on to the part of the widget titled “Drop an RSS Feed URL Here” Now that you’ve set the rss url for the widget click “Widget Attributes” in the sidebar and in the “Widget Identifier” field replace “Untitled” for the name of the widget. Before we send it off to Dashboard we have to double check that it runs correctly. Click Run in the toolbar and if all goes well the widget will appear. Now that you’ve confirmed that it works go to File>Deploy Widget to Dashboard and your new widget will appear in Dashboard. Thats it! Just explore Dashcode and you will find other powerful widget templates you can use such as the Video Podcast template or the Photocast widget. The steps for creating most of these other widgets are almost identical to the steps provided here for an RSS Widget.

Stop Creating Folders

Ever since the advent of Spotlight most uses of folders has been unnecessary. Instead we should use Smart Folders.


What Are Smart Folders?
The name Smart Folders is actually a fancy name for a saved search. Instead of typing the same search terms over and over to find the same kind of file you would simply click a Smart Folder. They are initiated through a Finder search and then they are saved by clicking “Save” in the toolbar. These folders self update too so every time you click the Smart Folder it refreshes so the results are up to date.

Why should I use this over an ordinary folder?
The typical use of ordinary folders is for them to store a specific kind of file such as all your presentations. This is what typically happens when someone uses folders this way(I’ll use presentations as an example but this could happen with any media):

1. Initially they will save all their presentations in a folder titled “Presentations”
2. A few months of this behavior goes by and they look at their “Presentations” folder and in horror realize thats it is a tremendous discombobulated mess with various keynotes bunched up together with no organization whatsoever.
3. They then set forth to organize this mess by grouping the keynotes into kinds such as “Biology” and “History” etc and placing these keynotes relating to those subjects into sub folders
4. Now they have dozens of sub folders with titles such as: history, biology, tech, macs, tutorials etc
5. Then after while those subfolders become disorganized because there are different subjects on biology, and macs etc
6. And then….well…You get the picture

The problem began at stage one because it was completely unnecessary to create a folder only to hold presentations. In other words: to hold a specific kind. If they had created a smart folder which only showed presentations they never would have had to suffer through this dilemma. They would simply open the “Presentations” smart folder and it would display every single presentation automatically on their computer no matter where it is located on the disk. What if they only wanted to see the presentations relating to biology? Well, with the presentations smart folder open they would type into the search box the term “biology” and every presentation that contains any mention of “biology” whether its a mentioned in a keyword or in the presentation itself is displayed. So, with the Smart Folder created the only place you would save your presentation is … well … you can save it anywhere but it would probably be best to save it in the Documents folder. You don’t have to get anymore specific than that.

Here’s How
I’ve created a movie which shows several examples of Smart Folders in action. At the end of the movie you will be shown an example of Spotlight Comments. Spotlight comments are similar to keywords. You could put whole complete sentences as spotlight comments but I recommend that you use them like keywords with each keyword being separated by a comma. Also for one of the examples I used Spotlight Attributes(AND, OR, etc) which you can learn more about from this earlier post of mine.

Click here to watch movie

While there still are some legitimate reasons for using ordinary folders, a folder who’s only purpose is to hold a kind of file use a Smart Folder instead. You won’t regret it.

DEVONnote Basics

Through a freebie on MacHeist, I obtained a copy of a handy application called DEVONnote. DEVONnote serves to organize notes, research materials and webpages. It provides a completely self contained environment to manage notes with groups, keywords, Wiki-style links, complex searching, comments, highlighting and other advanced features.

Today we are going to cover its fundamental features: Groups, Labels, Notes, Links, Webpages. Oh and its complete with a short video afterwards.

Who is it for?
Its for the person who needs a powerful tool to organize multitudes of thoughts, ideas, reference material and notes.

Well…um…Doesn’t Mail do that?
Mail’s notes features is about as limited although stylish as they come. Its main purpose is for simple notes such as your grocery list.

And why can’t I just use the Finder for notes?
Although you can use the finder with a combination of TextEdit, it would eventually become cluttered and confusing. Also, the Finder doesn’t contain many of the convenient and powerful organizational features which were specifically designed for handling notes that DEVONnote provides.

Interface
DEVONnote’s interface is made up two important elements: the sidebar and the viewer. The sidebar which is your main organizer displays every single file, group and webpage inside DEVONnote. Also, if you notice, these items have green icons besides them. What are these peculiar icons? These icons indicate the status of the item. For instance, if I have an important note which I must read I would click its icon to change it to red to indicate that. Furthermore, you can set it to other colors such as blue or yellow indicating other status such as “Important” or “Private” Here’s how:

1. select a note
2. click the gear icon in the tool bar
3. go to label
4. and set a label

Groups are actually folders you create to store items and other groups of a specific type. For example, I have a group titled “Blog Research” and within that group I have placed sub groups such as the current one “DEVONnote”. Within the sub group “DEVONnote” I have placed reference material pertaining to this post from several different sources.

Taking a Note
In reality, DEVONnote’s note editor is almost identical to TextEdit’s. If you click “format” in the menu bar you will see a long list of text editing features. Within that menu go to the sub menu “Ruler” and click “Show Ruler.” Now you will see a tool bar which conveniently provides most if not all of the features that are in the “Format” menu. In in this toolbar you will discover features such as:

• Tables
• Lists
• Spacing

Creating Links
Within the text editor of DEVONnote you can create links that can take you to webpages and other notes. To create a link to an existing note you select some text in a note, then right click and go to the “Link To” menu and select the appropriate note. Now, imagine that your writing a note and you want create a link to another note that doesn’t exist. You simply select some text. Right click and click “Make Link.” Notice that it created a link even though you haven’t yet defined what note you wanted to link to. This is because it creates the note once you click on the link. Click it and it will create a note with the same title as the link.

What if you wanted to create a link to a webpage? Just like before, you select some text, right click and click “Make Link” but this time instead of clicking the link you are going to right click on the new link and click edit link and a sheet will roll out asking you to fill out the url.

Viewing and Saving a Webpage
One of the numerous advanced features within DEVONnote is its ability to view and save webpages. This is great if you have a site that you need to repeatedly read for reference and study. Click Data, then go to New then click Site. As a result, a new item is added to the side bar and now you type in a url as its name and DEVONnote will automatically open the webpage.

Video
I created a short video demoing these topics mentioned:
DEVONnote Basics Video

As you can see, DEVONnote provides a convenient and logically organized environment for you to work in. Today we covered the basic fundamental features but I believe that the more advanced features you will able over time to discover and comprehend. You can find DEVONnote here from DEVON Technologies.
PS
Oh, and what did you think of the video? Should I use videos over screenshots?