Pile of Debris

Hey there dear readers!

As some of you know, I’ve been hammering away in my spare time at a piece of Mac software called Bibliography.  It’s a citation-generation and -management application, kind of like a really streamlined version of Endnote.  I’ve finally gotten the beast into something like a workable beta version, and would be interested if any of y’all would like to do me the huge favor of testing it out for me.

Alas, it only works on OS X Snow Leopard (v.10.6), the latest version of the operating system, so if you’re interested, but aren’t running Snow Leopard, perhaps this is some good incentive to upgrade! (haha…).  Here are some features of the app:

• Looks and works basically like Apple’s Mail application, or iTunes.
• Creates citations out of thin air via drag-and-drop.  Just drag a book’s title from the library to your word processor and poof! your footnote appears.
• Drag a whole folder to drop out a whole paper’s worth of endnotes.
• Smart folders that let you gather together books based on a number of criteria like title, author, notes, or tags.
• Speaking of tags, Tags! You can label a work with any number of descriptive tags to create as complex a system of organization as you like.
• Add citations to a work.  Like notecards, you can take notes on a specific work, adding searchable tags to keep all of your brilliant observations in order
• Create templates to make the creation of new documents easy.
• And maybe even others that I don’t even know are features.

Of course bearing in mind that it’s in a rough draft phase, I absolutely welcome critique, bug reports, suggestions for features, and gushing praise.  If any of these things sound like fun (I  mean, who doesn’t love giving criticism?), let me know and I’ll send a beta copy your way. That said, there are a couple of caveats:

• Right now it only produces citations in Chicago/Turabian style.  This is what I use at the GTU, but I’m planning on adding other formats in the fullness of time.  Let me know what you’d like to see!
• Author names have to be entered in this format: Last, First.  If you don’t do this, the citations won’t form properly, and children weep.

I’m hoping at some point to make this into a salable piece of software, so when the time comes, and I’m funding my church off of Microsoft-like profit streams, you can look on and say, “I helped make that happen!”

I would love your help, and with luck you’ll get a handy piece of software out of it, too!