Kicking and screaming, MyHippocampus.com has been pushed out the door. I can't quite express how exciting it is to sit back and watch the hit counter go up, but I promise I'll come to my senses soon and get back to work making things even better.
A MyHippocampus screencast tour is probably the place to start if you're interested in finding out more about the site. We're running on an invite system right now, but if you put your email address in the box on the front page, I should be able to get an invite out to you before too long.
Thanks to everyone who's helped me with this process and thanks for all of the helpful comments I've received. Please keep 'em coming.
-Jeff
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Hippo-lease version 0.3.1.4
The promised look & feel update is here and man does it look (and feel) nice.
Gadgetization
This release has a much more dynamic system for the overlays. What's that mean? It means WYSIWYWTS (What you see is what you wanted to see). This should simplify the look of your topics and stop presenting you with 7 different boxes begging for input.
To make this happened we've introduced the "Gadget Picker" which lives in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click on this to see a list of gadgets that you can add to your topic. The list right now is:
There's still a lot of goodness coming your way wrt Timelines, but for the first time in months it no longer says "blah blah blah" when you click on a Topic in a Timeline. Small victories are still good though, right?
GUI
Pretty? Less ugly? Either way you look at it I'd say it's better.
It's getting close!!
Hide your loved ones. The Hippo-lease approacheth!
The promised look & feel update is here and man does it look (and feel) nice.
Gadgetization
This release has a much more dynamic system for the overlays. What's that mean? It means WYSIWYWTS (What you see is what you wanted to see). This should simplify the look of your topics and stop presenting you with 7 different boxes begging for input.
To make this happened we've introduced the "Gadget Picker" which lives in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click on this to see a list of gadgets that you can add to your topic. The list right now is:
- Connections - This is how you connect topics to each other via a "See Also" link.
- Entries - Add a text description of a topic.
- Files - Upload files for this topic.
- WebLinks - View & Edit weblinks that you created using the plugin.
- Island Properties -Add "Phone Number" to the People island or "Date Seen" to the Movie Island.
There's still a lot of goodness coming your way wrt Timelines, but for the first time in months it no longer says "blah blah blah" when you click on a Topic in a Timeline. Small victories are still good though, right?
GUI
Pretty? Less ugly? Either way you look at it I'd say it's better.
It's getting close!!
Hide your loved ones. The Hippo-lease approacheth!
Friday, February 09, 2007
Hippo-lease version 0.2
Oddly enough this release is best viewed with IE7. Firefox works allright, but sometimes it decides you'd like to select the images that make up an island instead of dragging it and things get a bit crazy. I'd definitely recommend IE for right now.
The interface has undergone a pretty dramatic re-design & I think it's going to be a lot better. Information about your topics now comes up as overlays.
The coolest new thing is certainly the zoom. Wheel those mouse wheels if you've got em, or use the scale tool. Either way I think you'll find it much easier to get a handle on your hippocampus.
The most importan new feature is that there's no more save button (except on the 'Edit an entry popup' where you definitely need to hit the save button to have things save). I think this will clear up some problems people were having with the previous interface where people thought it was losing changes because they didn't realize they needed to hit save.
Expect thing look & feel to get a big overhaul soon, but the widgets themselves to stay in the same places and the functionality to stay about the same.
Besides that, an IE plugin is on the way, and there's also a new version of the Firefox plugin which will copy the selected text into the "notes" field.
Oddly enough this release is best viewed with IE7. Firefox works allright, but sometimes it decides you'd like to select the images that make up an island instead of dragging it and things get a bit crazy. I'd definitely recommend IE for right now.
The interface has undergone a pretty dramatic re-design & I think it's going to be a lot better. Information about your topics now comes up as overlays.
The coolest new thing is certainly the zoom. Wheel those mouse wheels if you've got em, or use the scale tool. Either way I think you'll find it much easier to get a handle on your hippocampus.
The most importan new feature is that there's no more save button (except on the 'Edit an entry popup' where you definitely need to hit the save button to have things save). I think this will clear up some problems people were having with the previous interface where people thought it was losing changes because they didn't realize they needed to hit save.
Expect thing look & feel to get a big overhaul soon, but the widgets themselves to stay in the same places and the functionality to stay about the same.
Besides that, an IE plugin is on the way, and there's also a new version of the Firefox plugin which will copy the selected text into the "notes" field.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Update!
So we just rolled out a great update that's moving us a lot closer to where we want to be.
Here's the highlights:
Email Input!
So you've got an account? Just send a message to account AT hipcamp.com and it will pop up on a new island called "Inbox." Sound good? It get's even better. Attachements to that email will automatically be filed in the MyHippocampus storage cortex.
Timeline
There's still more to come with this feature, but the bare bones are there! You can now see your topics that have date information on a timeline. To do this you'll need to add a "Date" property to an island. Let's see an example.
Firefox Plugin
You can get the firefox plugin from the page that you land on after you login. Since we're currently hosting the plugin on our machine you'll need to "add myhippocampus.com" to your list of trusted update sites. The option to do this should appear in a little bar in your browser when you click on the link.
When Firefox restart you should have a seahorse up near the address bar! Goto a website like The Show with zefrank and when you're their click on the seahorse. Now you can save this link into your hippo. In the box marked tags, type in anything you'd like, hitting enter to add each term. These will become new topics in your hippocampus and they'll have the link you saved!
So we just rolled out a great update that's moving us a lot closer to where we want to be.
Here's the highlights:
Email Input!
So you've got an account? Just send a message to account AT hipcamp.com and it will pop up on a new island called "Inbox." Sound good? It get's even better. Attachements to that email will automatically be filed in the MyHippocampus storage cortex.
Timeline
There's still more to come with this feature, but the bare bones are there! You can now see your topics that have date information on a timeline. To do this you'll need to add a "Date" property to an island. Let's see an example.
- Create a island called "Movies"
- Open up that island
- Click "Add Property"
- Type "Date Seen"
- Choose type "Date"
- Click the property "Save" button
- Now add "Spartacus" to the Movie island
- And you'll see a place to add the date you saw Spartacus!
- Now open up the timeline by clicking on the Hourglass in the dashboard and... voila!
Firefox Plugin
You can get the firefox plugin from the page that you land on after you login. Since we're currently hosting the plugin on our machine you'll need to "add myhippocampus.com" to your list of trusted update sites. The option to do this should appear in a little bar in your browser when you click on the link.
When Firefox restart you should have a seahorse up near the address bar! Goto a website like The Show with zefrank and when you're their click on the seahorse. Now you can save this link into your hippo. In the box marked tags, type in anything you'd like, hitting enter to add each term. These will become new topics in your hippocampus and they'll have the link you saved!
Saturday, November 18, 2006
The second post (in which we indicate our intention for this online journal.)
I'd like share the way we use MyHippocampus and to share a bit of the vision for the site. MyHippocampus focus is a bit broader then some of the other sites out there and it can take more than a first glance to see what we're trying to accomplish here.
MyHippocampus is an organic tool. We don't have lists, milestones, and other artifacts of a standard business architecture. This is because we don't want you to have to conform. It's your hippocampus. You get to do what you want here. While this is really exciting, it can also be a little confusing at first. Let's face it, we all do quite a bit of conforming (or at least I do) and it can be tough to know what to do without out. With MyHippocampus, you're met with a big 'ocean of the mind' & it's your job to fill it up with the things that are important to you. Sadly, these aren't questions that we get to ask ourselves very often and a lot of us are a little out of practice with intellectual self-actualization ;) Happily there's no real rush, and failing is encouraged (and arbitrarily defined) but that still leaves a lot of us wondering? So... what do I put in my ocean?
This blog is going to be a place where we can share different things people are putting in their mental oceans. Of course everything you put in there is for your eyes only, so it will only be things that users tell us about or that we're doing ourselves. If the hippo is changing your life make sure to let us and everybody else know!
I'd like share the way we use MyHippocampus and to share a bit of the vision for the site. MyHippocampus focus is a bit broader then some of the other sites out there and it can take more than a first glance to see what we're trying to accomplish here.
MyHippocampus is an organic tool. We don't have lists, milestones, and other artifacts of a standard business architecture. This is because we don't want you to have to conform. It's your hippocampus. You get to do what you want here. While this is really exciting, it can also be a little confusing at first. Let's face it, we all do quite a bit of conforming (or at least I do) and it can be tough to know what to do without out. With MyHippocampus, you're met with a big 'ocean of the mind' & it's your job to fill it up with the things that are important to you. Sadly, these aren't questions that we get to ask ourselves very often and a lot of us are a little out of practice with intellectual self-actualization ;) Happily there's no real rush, and failing is encouraged (and arbitrarily defined) but that still leaves a lot of us wondering? So... what do I put in my ocean?
This blog is going to be a place where we can share different things people are putting in their mental oceans. Of course everything you put in there is for your eyes only, so it will only be things that users tell us about or that we're doing ourselves. If the hippo is changing your life make sure to let us and everybody else know!
First Post!
Hmm, I imagine that joke is a little tired, though I'm not exactly one who spends enough time trolling the blogosphere to be on the front lines of that particular issue. More to the point, this is the first post of the MyHippocampus blog. To be honest the only user of this site is currently moi, but I had a realization this morning that it's not too early to start the blog if I'm already getting value out of the site and since that's the case, well, here we are.
The developments of the past two weeks have included full-text search, a nailed down version of the firefox plugin and a good way to import my del.icio.us links. Now that that's complete I'm cutting the del.icio.us umbilical cord and going full hippo. And it feels nice.
My realization of the morning came after looking at my newly discarded copy of "Fooled By Randomness." About a week and a half ago I started using these little red sticky 'flags' in everything I read. You know the type of thing I'm talking about, little colored post-it style markers? They're something I've never really used before because I haven't seen the point. Ok, maybe they help you look up a quote for a paper you're about to write, but when you've let the book lie for a couple months what do your little markers really gain you? You still have no constructive overview of what was in the book. You can't search it. And your memory is just whatever vague, blended, half-fogged, reminiscence your addled mind can come up with.
So how am I going to use the little red flags + MyHippo to change all this? How are they going to help me bridge one of the most serious gaps in the MyHippocampus plan? That gap is of course the fact that I don't like reading a book with a laptop on my knee, ready to index and categorize new information. Clearly I'm not alone, but I've struggled with how to make MyHippocampus, a service that promises to help your retain and reuse this contextual information, but that is bound to the world of laptops, blackberries etc, bridge this gap. Well, it's not all that amazing, but my new plan is to flag things I like, then to go in and enter them into MyHippocampus at my leisure. Not exactly Web 5.0, but here's where it gets unexpectedly good.
The effect on my reading has been fantastic! Now when I chuckle at a little tidbit, discover a new connection etc, I flag it and know that I won't be forced to forget it over the course of time. How many amazing and fantastic little tidbits of information have you read and then immediately relegated to the dustbin of your mind? For me it's essentially everything. Everything that wasn't rigorously tied down by continued exposure, exposition, or use in regular life and I'm not joking when I say that that's really almost everything. What a waste! And the great thing experiencing now that I've got a system to remember all this, is that it's amazing how much more involved I can be in the book. I didn't even know I had it, but I now see that there was a latent sense of futility that has markedly colored my intellectual activities up until this point. Is that too bold? All I mean is that I think a lot of the reason I couldn't concentrate in History 24 "The Irish Diaspora" was that I knew none of it was going to stick. I'm an efficient guy and the knowledge that the work I'm doing is futile is a pretty powerful disincentive.
So yes, taking over the world proceeds. Or at least my world. Can't wait until everybody else gets their own MyHippocampus.
-j
Hmm, I imagine that joke is a little tired, though I'm not exactly one who spends enough time trolling the blogosphere to be on the front lines of that particular issue. More to the point, this is the first post of the MyHippocampus blog. To be honest the only user of this site is currently moi, but I had a realization this morning that it's not too early to start the blog if I'm already getting value out of the site and since that's the case, well, here we are.
The developments of the past two weeks have included full-text search, a nailed down version of the firefox plugin and a good way to import my del.icio.us links. Now that that's complete I'm cutting the del.icio.us umbilical cord and going full hippo. And it feels nice.
My realization of the morning came after looking at my newly discarded copy of "Fooled By Randomness." About a week and a half ago I started using these little red sticky 'flags' in everything I read. You know the type of thing I'm talking about, little colored post-it style markers? They're something I've never really used before because I haven't seen the point. Ok, maybe they help you look up a quote for a paper you're about to write, but when you've let the book lie for a couple months what do your little markers really gain you? You still have no constructive overview of what was in the book. You can't search it. And your memory is just whatever vague, blended, half-fogged, reminiscence your addled mind can come up with.
So how am I going to use the little red flags + MyHippo to change all this? How are they going to help me bridge one of the most serious gaps in the MyHippocampus plan? That gap is of course the fact that I don't like reading a book with a laptop on my knee, ready to index and categorize new information. Clearly I'm not alone, but I've struggled with how to make MyHippocampus, a service that promises to help your retain and reuse this contextual information, but that is bound to the world of laptops, blackberries etc, bridge this gap. Well, it's not all that amazing, but my new plan is to flag things I like, then to go in and enter them into MyHippocampus at my leisure. Not exactly Web 5.0, but here's where it gets unexpectedly good.
The effect on my reading has been fantastic! Now when I chuckle at a little tidbit, discover a new connection etc, I flag it and know that I won't be forced to forget it over the course of time. How many amazing and fantastic little tidbits of information have you read and then immediately relegated to the dustbin of your mind? For me it's essentially everything. Everything that wasn't rigorously tied down by continued exposure, exposition, or use in regular life and I'm not joking when I say that that's really almost everything. What a waste! And the great thing experiencing now that I've got a system to remember all this, is that it's amazing how much more involved I can be in the book. I didn't even know I had it, but I now see that there was a latent sense of futility that has markedly colored my intellectual activities up until this point. Is that too bold? All I mean is that I think a lot of the reason I couldn't concentrate in History 24 "The Irish Diaspora" was that I knew none of it was going to stick. I'm an efficient guy and the knowledge that the work I'm doing is futile is a pretty powerful disincentive.
So yes, taking over the world proceeds. Or at least my world. Can't wait until everybody else gets their own MyHippocampus.
-j
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