As usual at the end of a long project, I suddenly feel an urge to do all the things I haven’t been doing even if many of them also involve sitting at a computer and typing.
In particular, I have just realised that it wouldn’t shouldn’t be too hard to write a plugin that made Ecco files searchable by Google Desktop Search. I already have a library which makes it easy to examine Ecco files in Python. There are at least two python skeletons for interacting with GDS out there.
Even after fifteen years, there is still nothing that quite matches Ecco’s flexibility as a means of organising and arranging information. Its checkmark folders are an early example of tagging, and no tagging system that I have ever seen has mimicked the program’s brilliant use of a grid system for organising tags with — so that instead of a long vertical list of possible tags, running alongside a long vertical list of things-to-be-tagged, the list of possible tags is arranged in a row above the top of columns of information.
I stopped using Ecco because it grew worse and worse at interacting with the outside world. I still have problems with the shooter. But an Ecco<->google link would be completely wonderful. I bet it would be possible to get the calendar information out, too, and synch it with google calendar.
Thank god that I will not actually get around to this, since my system for any kind of remotely complex programming project is to write it out as an outline in Ecco first. This is known as illiterate programming.