Parsnips

If you are like most people, you constantly come across useful bits of information throughout the day while using your computer. It may come from a web site, e-mail, chat sessions, usenet news articles, or just files that you have been sent. Parsnips now gives you a place to store all these bits of useful text and easily find them later. Parsnips is a new breed of Personal Information Manager (PIM)

Using a drag and drop interface, you select the text you want to save and drag it into Parsnips. Parsnips automatically creates an "item" for the information, and saves it away for later retrieval. You can also give the item a title, an associated URL, or assign keywords to it. Later, when you want to find that information again, you can search for it using Parsnips powerful search mechanism. With Parsnips you can:

* find all items containing specific words or boolean combinations of words in either the title or the main body of text.
* find items containing one or more keywords you have attached to them.
* find all items created in the past day, week, month, year, or any arbitrary range of dates.

Parsnips' search mechanism is similar to the popular Google® search engine. However in this case you are searching your personally relevant information rather than the web at large.

The text for an item doesn't have to come from a pre-existing source. You can create initially blank items and type or paste into it whatever text you wish. In this way Parsnips can serve as a free-form database.

Parsnips can keep track of more than text. If you drag and drop any sort of file into Parsnips, it will create an item for it and record the file's location on your computer. You can add keywords for the item or add comments about it. Later you can easily locate and open the non-text file by searching in the keywords or comments.

- Improved the HTML parser that is used for extracting text from web pages. Now captured web pages no longer show javascript or style sheet information in the text. Also improved error handling so you don't get extraneous ">" characters in the text.
- Implemented Services on Mac OS X. You can now use the Services menu in another application to send the application's selection to Parsnips.
- Added "Tip Windows" that are shown before executing certain non-obvious commands. These tips explain a bit about what the command does. Each tip window had a checkbox to prevent it from being shown again.
- Better "Quick Start" information is now displayed in the Results Pane when there are no items in the database.
- New preference for setting the main window's background color. By default Parsnips now has a non-standard background coloe. You can turn this off in the Preferences.
- In previous versions, if you had an item you were editing then and did an operation that diplayed a new item, you would be shown a dialog with choices to Cancel or Discard Changes. in the new version you are also given the option of saving the changes before proceeding.
- In previous versions, many operations such as saving or deleting an item would revert you to showing all items. Now we try to keep the current search parameters and just upate the changed item.
- You can now Command-click a file:// URL in the text of the Display Pane to have it opened by the application that natively handles that file type. Previously his only worked for http:// based URLs.
- When requesting web pages, the user-agent is now set to "Parsnips".
- Changed the wording and button order in the License dialog to be more clear.
- If you had an unsaved change to an item and then clicked a different item (or did a search), you are to there are unsaved changes. If you cancel and then save the changes, you will get two copies of the item, one before the save and one afterwards. This bug has been fixed.
- Fixed problem where non-html files referenced via HTTP always had the "text" extracted from them even if they were binary files.
- Eliminated some screen flashing that occured when paging up and down through the results list.
- When running under Mac OS X 10.2.x, fixed a problem where a "phantom window" was shown when the main windows was closed.
- When running under Mac OS X 10.2.x, we no longer use a "Brushed Metal" main window type.