2. Unzip the RAR file using your desktop’s unzippling utility. Remember where you unzip the archive. There will be three sub-folders in the “Sample Icons” directory: Documents, Folders, Mixed. Each of those sub-folders will have *.ico files.

3. Open up AML Pages. Remember the following:

4. Open the Category Editor that you find on the toolbar

5. Click on “Create Category” and give it a name or highlight the default Category that you wish to change.

6. Highlight your newly created category, then click on “Show Icon” and navigate to the folder you have unzipped; select a sub-folder. The Category Editor will display the icons in that folder you picked.

7. Select your icon and then click “OK”. You may add new categories while the Category editor is open.

That’s it!

Icon Downloads

Sample Icons Download (Note that this sample icons pack is collected from the websites below.)

More Icons Here

• Raindrop Memory
• PS Style Icons
• Yellow Pipe
• Icon Archive

Biblioscape: What is it?

Biblioscape is a research information manager. It is designed

• for researchers working in different fields
• to take in notes of different kinds
• to facilitate gathering data through the web or from traditional sources (e.g. the library)
• to help organize those notes through categories, links
• to help the researcher retrieve those notes
• to process the data like a word processor (given the type of license one has purchased)

Features I Like about Biblioscape

1. It is easy to use. It just took me a few minutes to figure out how to use it and afterwards produced a 1,000 word article with it.
2. Associating notes to categories and linking one note to another.
3. The Rich Text Format (RTF) note editor.
4. The possibility of browsing the web using Biblioscape’s native browser and capturing data from a webpage for automatic inclusion in one’s notes.
5. The possibility of creating different kinds of notes: whether text notes and reference notes which one can then associate with one another.
6. In the professional edition, to collect notes into an outline and export it or print it out.
7. The interface icons that makes the classification of notes easy.
8. The ability to take in graphics that are pasted onto a note.
9. Outline creation and one-click draft generation
10. Quick search and retrieval of data.

How I’ve Managed Three Articles with Biblioscape

To date, I have already created two articles from Biblioscape which I installed in my computer about five days ago. It is not the first notes manager I’ve come across. What makes Biblioscape different from other index-card-like note managers is its ability to integrate in one user interface all its features. Biblioscape is not difficult to learn. If one has worked with index cards and notebooks while doing research, the software makes research doubly easy: first, it compresses the work area into a small space. Second, it makes the retrieval of data very quick. I don’t have to explain how Biblioscape makes the workspace small. After all one needs only a laptop that covers a few square inch of space to use the software. The retrieval system of Biblioscape is a combination of both traditional and contemporary methods. The contemporary method is through the use of a search engine. Biblioscape has a very fast search engine that makes a list of data depending on a keyword. The traditional means is something that the software allows through “Collections” and “Categories”.

One begins note-taking through a “Collection” within a “Container”. A “Container” is like a mega–folder that can contain another “Container”, “Notes”, “Task Lists”, and “References” and others. A “Notes Collection” is like a smaller folder that would contain the notes for a particular topic or subject. This is your basic index cards collection. In Biblioscape, it can contain a variety of content: a quotation, a paraphrase, a summary, a claim, an evidence for a claim, etc. A “Task Collection” would be the researcher’s notes for following-up certain ideas. The “Reference Collection” would be for the books, magazines or documents that one makes use of in one’s paper.

When one creates a note, one begins from a particular collection. Biblioscape automatically creates a link between Collection and individual note. Once the note is saved, it will appear each time the Collection from which it was created is clicked.

Biblioscape also allows the association of this note to a “Category” that one creates. Categories (or Taxonomy) can be colorcoded so that one can easily see a note with more than one category associations. Thus a card I created about “Food Restrictions” in Acts 15 can be linked to a category I created under “Apologetics” and another one under “NT (New Testament)”. This would make manual retrieval easier later on.

Biblioscape and Word Processing

Unfortunately, the word processing functionality is available only for the Librarian and Professional edition. After one has gathered enough notes and is now ready to put together a paper, one need only to go to “Compositon”, pick up the notes from the “Categories” to which to the notes are associated, create an outline and click “Generate Draft.” From there, one can continue to edit one’s work on the interface of Biblioscape or export the draft into an RTF file for editing in another more powerful Word Processor like MS Office Word or Open Office.

Personal Evaluation and Rating

Biblioscape is one real research information manager. It is designed to work with a lot of data and intended to be used for serious work. Still however, it has room for a lot of improvements.

1. Although one can create charts through it, one cannot create graphic files with it. It would be a great help Biblioscape has a graphic editor — even if it were as simple as WinPaint — so that one can associate notes with sketches or drawings.
2. Word processing is only possible through the Librarian and Professional editions which are quite expensive.
3. Customization is very limited. One cannot add more colors nor icons to the Categories, nor can one add to the Note-types.
4. It is still buggy at some points. Sometimes, an item under one category appears in another as if it were linked to it. When one tries to remove the link, Biblioscape gives an error message saying in effect that one can remove links only in linked items.

Given these limitations, I would give Biblioscape a rating of 7 out of a possible 10.

Check out Biblioscape at its website.

We are here in Nicosia, Cyprus. the numbers of Filipino we have just here in Nicosia is around 2thousand unfortunately just few (500) of us are in the community, overall Cyprus about 10 thousand. We started 16 years ago, I was assign to do the transparencies for the readings in tagalog for the Filipino community mass, unfortunately I couldn’t make the prayer of the faithful in tagalog over 16 years cause I don’t have idea from where or which book I can take it, it’s just happened somebody told me regarding your web page, so I tried.

Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean that is shaped like a hand with a finger pointing somewhere between Turkey and Syria. It is one of the Bible lands from the New Testament [see this page about Cyprus in the New Testament]. Click on the thumbnail to your left for a bigger picture.

I was glad to know that there are quite a number of Filipinos there who come together to hear the Mass in Tagalog there.  So what I did was to scan a Sambuhay Missalette for the 24^th Sunday into PDF and had it posted on the web for download.  Bernadette got it just a few days ago.  So this Sunday, I’ll be helping 500 Filipino nationals in Nicosia Cyprus hear Mass and pray for the Church in Tagalog.  Now I think that is one other reason why it is worth doing this web ministry.

After PortableApps, now we have the Lupo Pensuite, a large collection of Pendrive (USB Drive) applications in one packaged software.  This collection of portable software contains many of those found in PortableApps, plus a lot more. 

The Lupo Pensuite can be downloaded in either Full or Lite packs. The complete suite (Full) is 290 MB in size and has been optimized to work in a 512 MB flash drive.  The download version (EXE) is 190 MB in size.  The Lite pack is 40MB when installed but 20MB for download.  The Suite also comes in different languages.

The interface of the Lupo Pensuite is enhanced by skins and can be personalized with the insertion of one’s photo or avatar (like Vista’s menu).  Applications can be activated through a menu that is categorized.  The Full install has seven top categories which includes Games and Multimedia players.  The Suite also opens to online tools( e.g. Zoho.COM). 

You can download the Lupo Pensuite here:  http://www.lupopensuite.com/download.htm

For the moment, only those registered as Beta users can use Evernote 3.  It is still in Beta so the desktop features are minimal compared to that of Evernote 2.  But seeing how the guys at Evernote have been improving their software over the months (yes, months, not years!) we can be sure that when Evernote 3 is released, it is going to be excellent.

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For regular visitors of Biblista.NET, I have prepared a tutorial for accessing and making use of the IntraText version of the New American Bible. This is in connection with the reading guides I post every week on the Sunday readings. One visitor after having read one of these guides (written in Tagalog) asked me where a concordance can be found. I told him that there is at the moment no concordance in Tagalog but there are a lot in English. There is even one online at www.vatican.va. That answer should have been enough for a geek. But the guy I was talking to is not a web geek. He had difficulties finding the link to the concordance. So I thought, if he is having difficulties with it, others may be having problems with my explanation too. So I came up with a brief tutorial for accessing the Intratext Concordance for the NAB at the Vatican website. It is found here.

The official site of the New American Bible is of course found at the website of the Catholic Bishops of the US. The concordance to it, however, is found only at the Vatican website.

AceText is a clipboard extender that does other things besides.  I have featured AccelClip which can keep both text and image clippings.  YankeeClipper and its commercial counterpart also can keep both text and images.  JGSoft’s AceText works only with text clippings but can perform other tasks that AccelClip and YankeeClipper were not designed to perform.

The first feature that is unique to AceText is that it integrates with EditPad Pro, JGSoft’s powerful text editor.  I recently upgraded my EditPad Lite to Pro and use it for working with the MySQL databases of Otium Sanctum.  EditPad Pro works with really large files (my Otium Sanctum database is almost 90 MB in size) and so it is the ideal text editor for continuous text files, like webpages and SQL data. 

When working with webpages, I often make use of copy-paste operations for often used tags.  AceText comes in handy since it can be used for creating a collection of clips of the HTML tags I often use (they are called snippets).  Since it integrates with EditPad Pro through this latter’s Clips Explorer, I just select the clips I want for pasting and these appear on the page being edited.

Since AceText clips function like a Personal Information Manager, I type them under different categories (or folders) and use them later on for other applications.  Usernames and passwords for webmail clients, for example, can be typed into AceText and later one can just click on these for pasting into Windows Clipboard and from there to a webform.  Clip collections containing sensitive data can be locked thanks to AceText’s security feature.

 AceText doesn’t work with images.  But for one who works with a lot of text clippings, it can be a very useful addition to one’s desktop applications.

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is in other words a document that one can read on any computer provided that one has the proper viewer. It is an Adobe creation that now has become a web standard. It may have been originally created for business purposes, but the same for-business features are the same features that now make it useful for any purpose. Not only businessmen use PDF; academicians too use PDF not only for office digital documents but also for lectures and resource materials for students.

So why do I use the PDF for documents meant for distribution on the web? Here are my reasons:

1. Unlike a document like Microsoft Word, the PDF document cannot be infected by virus.

2. It can be read on any computer using Adobe’s free Adobe PDF Reader.
3. The document once opened cannot be edited. (This is an important feature, for obvious reasons

   .)

4. Although not editable, it can be commented on.
5. It works well with a browser. Current versions of the PDF now allow its reader to make it a launchpad for the web.
6. The current state of software development makes it easy to create PDF documents. One can create an RTF document and convert it into PDF using conversion utilities available on the web for free. There is even a free RTF editor (called Tomahawk PDF Plus) that directly saves into PDF (this is called “native PDF” as opposed to “scanned PDF”).
7. It can be used for computer presentations.
8. It is the standard for “porting” documents.

There are a lot of articles about the Portable Document Format. There is one at WikiPedia. There are a bunch of articles from Adobe. Apart from these, I found two articles from sources unrelated to Adobe.COM that say in a few words why one should use PDF: one is a pitch for a text to PDF conversion utility, while another one is made by an academician.

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