Summary Explanation of Savant Carde (aka Pile o' Cards)
Savant Carde (aka Pile o Cards) is designed around the metaphor of cards and stacks of cards.
Cards are containers which hold information.
Stacks are groups of cards with some common purpose or identity. (A stack doesn’t necessarily have to be a single pile, which the name ’stack’ might imply, but can be
spread out in many piles, shifted and sorted by individual cards, and dragged around from pile to pile by the user.)
Each stack is made up of Info Cards, the places where information is stored. Stacks also have several special cards associated with them that define the look, behavior, and format of their Info Cards. They are:
Control Card - This card is the “foundation” of the stack. It is the access point for linking the cards (Design Card, Template Card, Action Card) that control the look, behavior, and formatting.
Design Card - This defines the “look” of the Info Cards in the stack. It may be a background, the way information is placed and displayed, or any other way the Info Cards appear to the user. This can be from a simple square, to complex field-oriented databases, to gallery style displays for images. For the advanced user, interface objects can be added to their stacks and Info Cards.
Template Card - This defines how any information dragged to the stack is filtered and formatted. Perhaps the template is for MLA standard bibliographic data. Anything dragged to that stack is filtered against that particular set of criteria. (Using what I have called AIRE, Automatic Information Recognition Engine. This is perhaps not as complex as it might seem at first glance—It is a matter of building some basic expert systems that identify the way text is formatted.)
There will be supplied a set of these AIRE Template Cards, and the user will have the ability to do create their own.
(There are many filtering possibilities here. Drag a photo, and the photo is placed, with user-selected EXIF data displayed. Or drag a website, and forum information is separated from news items and placed in their user-defined formats.)
Action Card - Each stack can have a Savant Action connected to it that can be applied to the information dragged to it, or to the Info Cards in the stack. See below for more on Action Cards
At its basic level, Savant Carde is a user-designed information storage and retrieval system. Like a database, but allowing the user to interact with the data by shifting, sorting, dragging, and doing all of those things visually using the Info Cards. (I do a lot of writing, and I really like using 3×5 cards, scattering them all over the floor and organizing my thoughts that way. I want to be able to do the same with Savant Carde.)
Savant Carde treats EVERYTHING as information, so that anything that can live on the computer can also be dragged to an Info Cards. Text, pictures, movies, songs, But also scripts, Automator actions, perhaps even applications. This brings me back to Action Cards.
Action Cards are cards which tell stacks or other cards (or parts of cards) to DO something. This might be an Applescript. Drag a stack to an Action Card and it runs an AppleScript that formats all the data into an outline and sends it to a Word or Nova Mind document. It might be an Automator action. Or a combination of things. In order to facilitate this “chaining” of actions, Savant Carde has MetaCards.
MetaCards allow the user to combine the scripts or actions of several (or many) Action Cards into one single card: a MetaCard. (If you are familiar with Reason, this is the same concept as the Combinator module.) A MetaCard is a simple way to process your stacks or cards through a series of complex steps.
Suppose you want to take an entire iPhoto library, resize all of the photos, rename them, collect them into a folder, and burn them to a CD with a list of all their EXIF information. With Savant Card, you build each of these steps with an Action Card, combine them into a MetaCard, and then drag your iPhoto library to it. Soon Toast is asking for a CD and you are watching the list of photos print from your inkjet. (There are a few other examples of what you can do like this on www.savantcarde.com, and in my forum posts. I can’t help but thinking how cool this would be at the center of my media hub.)
Super Advanced User Mode. Most of you reading this have realized that Action Cards are like programming objects, individual chunks of reusable and easy to manage “code.” Combine this with Savant Carde’s user interface capabilities and the ability to attach MetaCards to a UI elements and not just an Info Card or stack, and what you can create like this should be wetting your imagination.
HyperCard. I know some of you are not familiar with this, but many of you are. Imagine HyperCard not limited by a single “pile”—but what if you could take the cards in a stack and visually sort them and create multiple piles and have them scattered all over while you organize them. Imagine HyperCard being able to run ANY kind of script or Action, including things like PhotoShop Actions. Imagine being able to take piles of information, drag them to a card, and it filters, formats and puts it in the right place for you.
If nothing else—imagine being able to build a simple database to hold ANYTHING you want. And then being able to drag that stuff around to sort and re-order it, and do anything you want with it.
Always open for questions, criticism, and suggestions!
Robert
