About SCAN

“… the abundance of information will be such that either you have reached such a level of maturity that you are able to be your own filter, or you will desperately need a filter… some professional filter.”
Umberto Eco: A Conversation on Information
(an interview by Patrick Coppock, February, 1995)

SCAN is aiming for a solution of major problems of content organization and findability in information overload era.

SCAN aggregates content from different sources into a single documents collection. This repository may keep records on thousands of documents independently of their original locations and formats. Every document record contains a number of metadata properties (such as title, description, author, creation date, etc) which can be either set automatically or edited manually.

Adding documents to the repository is an automated operation. A user only need to point SCAN to a location and the application will find and add every document from there. Added document locations will be monitored for changes (new, modified or deleted documents) to keep the repository up-to-date.

The documents content is indexed for search and text analysis. You can search the documents either by simple text queries, or by using special forms to make complex queries for searching on document text and properties. The queries can be saved for repeatable use.

The documents collection is structured with a system of tags, similar to the services like del.icio.us or Flickr. Tags are keywords or labels attached to the items to identify them for quick navigation and finding. All tags together form a taxonomy representing the semantics of the documents collection. The taxonomy can be viewed as a “tags cloud” for navigating through the documents repository.

SCAN text analysis mechanism simplifies the process of tagging. It analyzes a document content and suggests the most relevant words as to-be tags. It makes manual tagging as simple as selecting the tags from the proposed candidates. It also can undertake the whole manual process of tagging, either by automated assigning the tags to the documents, or by finding the documents, relevant to a specific tag. Another text analysis application is searching the documents similar to a specific one (search by pattern).

SCAN is a component-based software using a number of plugins for specific features. The basic SCAN platform can be easily extended with plugins for new document formats, document locations (RSS feeds, web-sites, e-mail, etc) and language analyzers. Whole new areas of functionality can be added with user interface extensions. An example of such extensions is the plugin to browse the repository with a calendar (grouping the documents by their creation dates).

SCAN is a Java application, so it works on any Java-enabled platform. SCAN is a free open source software, distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0

See also:

• List of current features
• Download SCAN
• How to obtain SCAN sources from SVN repository
• User’s Manual

I expected that Firefox would can update itself via built-in updating mechanism, but it was not so. The latest version which the updater
could find was 1.5.0.7. So, it was needed to download and unpack a tar.gz distributive from GetFirefox. I thought it was even better way to install, because the previous working installation was left untouched and I could roll back safely if something were go wrong with 2.0 version.

Luckily, nothing bad was happened. Installation (which is just the first Firefox launching) has gone smoothly and without any problem. Firefox transparently imported all my settings, bookmarks, toolbars and history, so nothing had been lost from my previous installation. It also checked the installed extensions for compatibility with 2.0 version and offered to install newest versions of outdated (incompatible) add-ons. The most important ones (such as del.icio.us, Adblock, FlashGot etc) already had 2.0-compatible updates so there were no problems with them. In fact, there was only one add-on which caused the problems – a custom extension by my ISP for displaying my account balance in Firefox statusbar. It was very helpful and I didn’t want to lose it even until an updated release. Fortunately, two-minutes-long research and a little hack made it 2.0-compatible :-) – I just changed maxVersion parameter in its install.rdf manifest file.

So, besides the smooth and easy installation, there is a lot of improvements I liked:

• Session support is a great new feature – you can close the browser with a heap of tabs opened, turn your machine off and go to bed. The next time you started Firefox, you will get the same set of tabs with the same web-sites and start to continue your work immediately.
• New tabs are more usable – now they have the closing buttons and site icons. When it is too much of the tabs opened, they can be scrolled. It seems that the developers have been inspired by Eclipse tabs – there is exactly the same user experience.
• Built-in spellchecker is awesome. Actually, it already helps me when I’m typing this article.
• New add-ons manager now combines both extensions and themes management and updating.
• It is possible to set a custom application to handle RSS links. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me, as Akregator (my RSS client) needs “-a” option to add a new feed, but Firefox doesn’t allow to edit a command line. But it should work fine with on-line agregators (and few ones are predefined there).

Well, Firefox 2.0 is, of course, not a revolutionary step in web-browsing experience. It is just an usual best browser on the planet which now is got even better. It’s just Firefox.

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My software reviews usually have two parts “What’s good” and “What’s bad”. As this review had been written under first impressions, I had no idea what’s bad in Firefox 2.0. But after three days of using it I found a really nasty bug: When scrolling the window, there are the visual glitches with fonts. Sometimes they look just mangled. I have no idea is it an X, xfs, or Firefox issue, but I didn’t see it on 1.5 version. So, “What’s bad” section is opened. Sadly enough.

BasKet acts as a persistent clipboard manager for various data types (plain text, rich text, images, links, files and application shortcuts). You can create few containers (baskets) inside it to organize your data items as you wish. You can copy (or drag-n-drop) the items into the baskets from applications and paste them back from the baskets. In my case, I set the global keyboard shortcuts “Win+C” for to copy a selected item to a current basket and “Win+V” to paste the latest copied item (from the top of a current basket’s stack) into the current selection (like conventional Crtl+C/Ctrl+V for default system clipboard).

Moreover, BasKet can track all your operations with system clipboard and store the whole clipboard history in special “Clipboard manager” basket, if you would create it. Though, I found this feature not very useful – I don’t want to store all data passing through my clipboard for ages and bother to clear the overblowed stack. So, I used to press Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V when I want to use the default system clipboard and Win+C/Win+V for important things which I’d like to save for the future.

What is good

• Convenient storage for small important data items – quick as the system clipboard but persistent and structured.
• Is not limited by text data types. The specific types of items are opened with appropriate programs (for instance, double-clicking the email address opens new message window).
• Inline editing the basket items
• Along with copying existing data from applications, it is possible to create new items and fill them in place – this feature is very useful for taking the text notes.
• Quick search the items
• Special basket type for mirroring the files in selected folders.
• Global shortcuts support
• Transparent and inobtrusive – no saving/loading operations, lives in the system tray, accessible by one click and hides automatically when inactive.

What is bad

• There is a bug with Firefox – when a piece of text is copied from a web-page to the basket, a link is inserted instead of the text.
• Every time when items are deleted from the basket, the annoying “are-u-sure?” dialog is appeared. At least, it should contain a checkbox to not asking me anymore, I believe.
• Occasional crashes by unknown reasons.

I should say I am old fan of Eclipse IDE. It is my only IDE for Java development since 2.0 version (2001?) and also for Python some time ago. Because of my sporadic PHP experience before, I never had an idea of using Eclipse for PHP development but the time has come and I installed PHPeclipse plugin.

What is good

In general, benefits of using a special development environment against a common text editor are obvious. But there is what I especially liked:

• A sence of home
  Only the fact of being in familiar, friendly working environment helps to get into the productivity flow. I should reward PHPeclipse team for they avoided of reinventing the wheels and made everything looking and behaving almost like in default Java mode.
• On-the-fly code parsing and finding the problems/errors works for PHP and helps to produce clean error-free code (not so much as for Java, but PHP has more liberal grammar, indeed).
• “Outline” view works and does a great help for navigation through the large files. Familiar “Ctrl+click” for quick jumping to a function is also working.
• Code assist works rather well for variables (is activated when a user hesitates after typing ‘$’).
• Code formatter works.
• Full PHP reference is included and integrated into Eclipse help system.
• PHP debugging: actually is not tested but sounds good.

What is bad

• There is no “PHPdoc” view similar to “Javadoc” in JDT. It’s very helpful when I go through a unfamiliar API to see an explanation of the imported library function I’ve just typed in or selected in the code. In fact, PHPEclipse can parse PHPdoc comments in the included files but displays them only as those fixed-size “hovers” – it is rather useless.
• “Quick fix” feature is disabled all the time (have no idea whether it is implemented)
• Code assist for functions works by unobvious way – I should type ‘?’ to get the list of available functions. Function arguments are not prompted as in Java mode.
• There is no refactoring tools (like those in JDT)

It looks like Google decided to simplify things as much as possible. They just took the original Picasa for Windows and made it working on Linux with Wine (it is included into the Picasa Linux distribution). So, it is really not a true Linux version. But due to stability of Wine technology (see my “Wine and Photoshop” post) it seems to work well.

At first view, Picasa provides the same set of the photo organizing functionality as digiKam. It supports the same faceted photo collections organized by folders, timeline and tags (“labels”). The only difference is a distinctive feature of any Google product – the search box which is always presented in the program window. The photo editing functionality is also similar to the default set of digiKam tools. But the rich set of digiKam’s additional plugins makes it image processing functionality looks more professional, while Picasa supports only a basic set of simple and most needed image fixes and effects. Many of them are automated and lack some fine-tuning but in general, they should be suitable for the most of non-professional photographers.

And, as it was expected, Picasa doesn’t import photos to Flickr – perhaps by understandable (competition) reasons.

Why not to try to run Photoshop under Wine? – I thought. I should say, I never had used Wine technology before. I had some biases against it and for years of using open source I missed no Windows apps. But it seemed it was just the case.

The biggest of my biases against Wine was it should be a huge and very complex thing – it looked like I had to move perhaps a half of the whole Windows to my box and setup it for weeks to get it working. I was absolutely wrong! Installing Wine on my Fedora IV is turned out to be simple as installing a single RPM package and needed no configuring. Then I mounted Photoshop 7.0 CD, run “wine Setup.exe” and voila! – I got Photoshop installed on my Linux system.

I didn’t test it alot but so far it seems to work pretty well. It’s fast enough (my another bias on Wine was that it should be painfully slow) and all Photoshop functions are workable. I can create, open, edit and save PSD files without any problem, can work with layers, effects, text and so on. It correctly recognized all TTF fonts installed in X and my default CUPS printer. So far, I only noticed some minor visual glitches with “palettes” (maybe because they utilize a non-standard API) and that it doesn’t work with KDE clipboard (though, it was predictable).

For years I used no special software for digital photography and photoalbums management. Just command-line gphoto2, GIMP and usual filemanager in preview mode were enough, or at least I thought so. Few months ago I decided to scan my old photo archives to have them in digital form and was drowned quickly in the thousands of shots many of which needed for some correction. And new shots from my digital camera are going on. So, once I felt I’ve lost control on my photo collection.

I looked for a software which could help me and found digiKam – a great photo organizer, editor and more.

Acquiring photos

digiKam works directly with a digital camera. In fact, it depends on gPhoto framework, so you need to have gphoto2 installed and working (if you are a photographer on Linux, you probably already have it). digiKam provides an easy to use interface to the camera that enables you to browse, preview, download and delete your images.

Camera interface

For those who used to download photos with gphoto2 from console, this new experience is really impressive.

digiKam also can acquire images directly from a scanner (through SANE interface) and grab the screenshots. Of course, you can also import your existing photo directories into the digiKam database.

Organizing

An essential part of digiKam what makes it a really great app is its photo organizing functionality. It makes use of a database to store tags, comments and other metadata related to images and albums. So, you can easily find, browse and sort images in your collection.

The photo browser supports faceted navigation – you can explore your collection by albums (just the folders), tags or dates. It is possible to assign a number of tags for each photo which makes its finding extremely easy (if you are a Flickr user, you know what help the tags make).

    
Faceted navigation by tags and dates

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The key difference from the Flickr tags (not too obvious) is that the tags can be organized hierarchically – they are rather taxonomical categories than usual labels. So you can set, say the “Roses” tag as a child of “Flowers”, and “Flowers” in turn, as a child of “Nature”. Then, all your “Roses” photos will automatically be assigned to “Flowers” and “Nature” which makes a great help in further navigation

The advanced search functionality enables to select the shots which match the specific criteria (it looks like the queries to database). You can save your queries to quickly repeat them in future.

There is a bit of fantastics – searching images by similarity. It makes use of an intellectual algorithm of “fingerprints” to compare images and find their “optical similarities”. You can adjust a treshold level to find more or less similar images – from the exact duplicates to the “slightly resembling” shots (for instance, from the same session).

It supposes these shots are similar. I think so too :-)

Editing: Goodbye, GIMP?

digiKam integrates an advanced image viewer/editor (ShowFoto) which also can be used as a standalone application. Along with basic image processing functionality (cropping, resizing, rotating, color correction) it supports a plugins architecture for to add new tools and image effects. digiKam plugins are developed by another project and should be downloaded and installed separately. Current distribution includes a variety (about 30) of plugins including correction filters, funny artistic and distortion effects, adding borders and text to images and so on.

The most interesting and useful tools for photographers are, of course, those for improving image quality. digiKam provides a rich set of those tools (both embedded and pluggable) – from basic brightness/contrast/color adjustments to sophisticated photo restoration utilities. They are collected in a “Fix” menu of the image editor:

I think, even a professional photographer will be happy with that toolkit. All filters have the live previews and work surprisingly quickly. In general, digiKam seems to work much more faster in comparison with monsters like GIMP or Photoshop.

There is a magic feature which really impressed me – an “auto-correction”. It is unbelievable, but by a single mouse click you can turn your ugly dark or low-contrast photo into an eye-candy. Just take a look:

Auto-correction: before and after

digiKam makes use of the KIPI plugin framework which aimed to be a common shared plugin infrastructure for KDE graphic apps. The current set of KIPI plugins enables very useful features of batch image processing. You can do resizing, converting, adjustment, applying filters and effects on the selected photos or even on the whole directories just by few mouse clicks.

Sharing and exporting

Yes, digiKam does flickring! Uploading photos to there is a snap – just choose images you want to upload and (optionally) enter the Flickr tags and privacy options. At very first time it will open your default browser for logging in to Flickr. A very useful feature is that it can resize the uploading shots on the fly, so you don’t need to prepare the special low-res variants of your original shots. For instance, I usually take the hi-res shots of 1600×1200 or even more, and reduce them for Flickr to 640×480, so automatical scaling makes a great help for me.

digiKam also can build HTML photo galleries, burn CD/DVD with your photo collections (via external b3d software) and of course, print your photos.

A really cool and handy app which seems to have no competitors in Linux world for now. Recommended for all Linux photographers – profies and amateurs like me.