Welcome to the IdeaMason Weblog!

Like so many small businesses in this economic recession IdeaMason is officially closing its doors. We would like to thank our customers for their support over the last five years. And thanks especially to all the dedicated members of our staff who have been with us over the years.

INFORMATION FOR REGISTERED USERS:
If you are a registered user of IdeaMason you can still download and reactivate IdeaMason from the link below. By installing this version over your current version of IdeaMason registered users will no longer be required to activate the software using our secured key process.

DOWNLOAD LINK:
Link to the download

SUPPORT:
Naturally, like most businesses who are out of business we will no longer be providing support.

IdeaMason has a symbol chooser built into the text editor on the dashboard window. But if you can’t find the symbol you need you have the option to build your own custom list. All you have to do is copy and paste a symbol, word or catch phrase into the Custom tab of the IdeaMason Symbol chooser. Just open the Symbol chooser, click on the Custom tab, and use the green add key to paste a new item.

USE THE CHARACTER CODE:
If you have having trouble getting a particular symbol into a dashboard try the following approach. Every symbol has what is called a character code. This character code allows for a streamlined transcription of a symbol. All you have to do is type in the character code of the symbol into a dashboard, highlight it and then hit ALT X and the symbol will magically appear. For example, the character code for the EM dash is 2014. Just type 2014, highlight the code, then hit ALT X.

FINDING THE CHARACTER CODE:
Microsoft Word has a full list of standard character codes for all symbols. Just open the Symbol Chooser in Microsoft Word and select a symbol in the list. The character code for that symbol is displayed near the bottom of that dialog box. It is a combination of four letters/numbers. Listed just below the character code is the Shortcut Key. You can use this in place of the character code but the shortcut key requires the use of a number pad on your keyboard for proper entry.

CREATE YOUR OWN CUSTOM LIST OF SYMBOLS:
To create your own custom list of symbols type the desired character code into a dashboard, highlight the code, then hit ALT X. Then just cut and paste the converted symbol into the IdeaMason symbol chooser under the custom tab.

TIP: The replication of some of the stranger looking symbols requires the use of what is know as a “full character font”. For example, Arial is not a full character font. But Calibri is a full character font. So, if you have having trouble with a particular symbol switch to Calibri.

Recently we have noticed a rise in IdeaMason sales among graduate students, not only in number but in overall proportion of our customer base. During the last quarter of 2008 graduate schools across the nation began reporting a spike in applications. In a typical year applications usually go up three or four percent. Not this year! The numbers aren’t just higher, they are staggering. Some schools are looking at an increase of 25 percent in applications. UC Berkley’s graduate division is reporting this year as the biggest spike in 23 years.

What does this mean for products like IdeaMason? Well, I think it means there are some pretty intelligent and goal oriented customers out there who are looking for great products that will help them succeed in their new academic endeavor. Whether you are returning to school or choosing to stay in school in the hopes of riding out this recession, with the goal of increasing your brain worth so that you can later secure a better net worth, we would like to wish you all the best in 2009. Change always offers opportunity and I think there is a lot of promise on the horizon.

There are no hard and fast rules on getting started with IdeaMason. And more importantly, there are no “correct” ways to organize your data. We recommend reviewing the tutorial videos on our webpage for information about the features and tools that are available to you. We also recommend reading a few of the usage tips on this blog for different ideas on getting organized. But once you have done that JUST JUMP RIGHT IN!.

If you have some books to log, start with opening a new Source. If you just want to get started writing, open a new Material and just start typing. As you transition between thoughts, open a new idea or create a new linked the idea directly.

Maybe you just want to jot down some thoughts and link them to online research you are doing. If you have some external files you want to organize, you can do that too.

And it is never too early to start a composition. (more…)

If you are thinking of switching to the new MacBook but concerned about losing IdeaMason - don’t be! The Parallels Desktop for the Mac lets you run Windows applications on the Mac OS X without rebooting. This means Mac users can now run PC based applications like IdeaMason. Here is a link to a useful forum that appears to answer a lot of questions about using parallels on the MacBook Pro.

http://forum.parallels.com/forumdisplay.php?f=53

LINKING: Create a link with a PDF file and an open item in IdeaMason

1. Drag and drop the PDF file onto an open Links pane in a Dashboard window.
2. Identify the link type and add a note in the pop-up options box
3. The link will appear in the list with its “native” icon
4. Just click on the link to open it directly

PDF files are just like any other type of file and will launch the document/PDF file in its native viewer. Take a look at the video “Linking Materials, Files and Web Pages” under the Materials section on our Tutorials page.

CREATING A SOURCE REFERENCE: You can also use our “Source on Web” technology to manage and save PDF files. This will open a PDF file in its native viewer within IdeaMason. The video “Managing Web Research using the Source on Web panel” under the Sources section on the tutorials page is an excellent how to guide on this.

1. Select and drag the file onto an “OPEN” library folder in IdeaMason
2. Select a source type from the “Chooser Source Type” window
3. Work through the wizard using the help tips on the side to guide you
4. IdeaMason automatically generates a citation, creates a new source in the library, and lets you view the PDF file in its native viewer under the “Source on Web” tab.

Turn an interesting webpage into a real source that you can cite accurately from in your next paper. IdeaMason not only captures the URL and access date necessary for a citation but also captures the webpage in our customized dashboard browser. The best part about this internal browser is that it lets you save a local copy of a webpage.

All you need to do is drag and drop the hyperlink onto an open Library folder on IdeaMason’s homepage. This automatically creates a new source in the IdeaMason library and displays the webpage instantly in our internal browser.

For more information on managing web research in IdeaMason see our videos featured on the Tutorials page on our website. Take a look at “Manage Web Research Using the “Source on Web” Panel” under the Sources section.

QUESTION: A customer recently asked how to quickly copy the contents of a source list/bibliography directly from a composition into a new portfolio. He has several portfolios which contain materials and sources from documents/books which he now wants to use in a new set of papers.

ANSWER: If you want to copy sources from a specific composition, open the Library folder and find the subfolder called “library cited by composition”. This gives you a complete list of the sources in each composition in that portfolio. To copy the entire list of sources or a selection of the sources to a new portfolio hold down the shift key and just click through the list until you have highlighted the sources you want to copy. Then just drag them to the open new portfolio window and drop them on the open Library folder.

If you are dragging the sources into a portfolio that already has sources in that portfolio, the newly added sources might be hard to find, so here is a tip. Tag the sources before you copy them across by simple changing the “status”. Highlight all the sources in the list, right click and change the status to something you can easily recognize like “new chapter”. [You can instantly add a new status by clicking on the green plus sign in the “Status” pop up box]

Once you have dragged the items to the new portfolio/libray folder, click on Status column to sort the list by status type. From there you can simply copy them straight into a new composition to instantly create a new bibliography.

You can use this same process to copy materials (ideas, quotations…) into a new portfolio. Just go to the Material Folder on the homepage and click on the subfolder called “Materials by Composition”. This gives you a complete list of compositions in a portfolio, and in turn, all the Materials (ideas, quotations…) in each composition. You can highlight the entire list or a selected group of materials and drag them over into the Materials folder of the new portfolio. Again, if you want a quick way to find the materials in the new portfolio, just highlight the list and right click to change the “status” of the items before you drag them into the new portfolio.

A huge time saver to remember is that when you drag a Material (idea, quotation…) from one portfolio to another IdeaMason automatically takes the associated sources with it. What this means is that any material in a composition that has associated sources that helped you “automatically” build your bibliography in an old composition, will do the same for you in a new composition.

When you first drag a material(s) with attached sources into a new portfolio, the material(s) will get inserted into the Material Folder and the associated sources will get inserted into the Library folder for general use. If you then drag that material (idea, quotation…) into a new composition, the associated sources will automatically get inserted into the Source List tab within the new composition. This instantly creates your bibliography list without even having to drag those sources independently from the old portfolio to the new portfolio.

We recently got wind of a review posted about IdeaMason on “Becoming a Writer Seriously.com”. Tom Colvin, the author of this blog, states “IdeaMason is truly remarkable”. He gives a fantastic overview of the major features and a review which details IdeaMason’s usefulness in constructing long term term creative and research projects.

Here’s a link to the Review

IdeaMason is lots of things, a library, a citation maker, an idea deposit, a composition builder, a categorizer, and a project organizer. It can be all those things to one person or only a few of those things. It really depends on the nature of your work.

All your work in IdeaMason is organized into portfolio. When you open IdeaMason for the first time, you find yourself working in your first portfolio “My Portfolio”. Think of a portfolio as a file or container of ideas, sources, links, notes. You can create as many portfolios as you like and name them whatever you like just like you would an ordinary file. Tip: Under File/Portfolio properties you can write a brief description to help you outline or describe the work you intend to do in the portfolio.

Use a single portfolio for a large project
If you are starting work on a big project you could create a single portfolio that will contain all the work, ideas, sources and compositions. You can divide your work into a number of different activities within this portfolio. You can also organize your materials and sources within the portfolio into different categories. The work you do in this portfolio might result in the creation of one major composition. Or you might choose to divide your work, chapter by chapter, creating a new composition per chapter. Inevitably, a large project always seems to break off into smaller subsets projects and even subset papers. This is where the advantages of IdeaMason come into play. If all your ideas and sources are in one portfolio, it will be easy to reuse ideas and/or sources, or even expand on a single idea or category of ideas creating a whole new project.

Create a home library
The work in a portfolio doesn’t always have to consist of ideas, sources and the compositions created with these materials. You might want to use a single portfolio focusing on only one of the features. For instance, if you have a home library or read a lot you could use a single portfolio as a library. This portfolio will grow (more…)