Installing the CILTKN desktop integration tools, alpha 2
These tools help you more quickly look up items in the CILT Knowledge Network. They provide
three sets of features:
- A little program to let you look up a CILT person in your Apple Menu
- Integration with Sherlock. This means when you use Sherlock to search the Internet, you can choose whether
to search for a person in KN. (Unfortunately, this release doesn't take advantage of the new features in
MacOS9's Sherlock II. What this means is that you have to go to the Sherlock Hat "My Channel" instead of the
pretty face "People" channel.)
- The ability to select a person or institution's name
in the text of almost any program, control-click it, and look it up in the
knowledge network.
To install,
- Make sure you have Sherlock. If your MacOS isn't recent enough for Sherlock (8.5 or higher), you'll have to upgrade. MacOS 9's Sherlock II has generated some bugs in this software; if you're using OS 9, let me know.
- Install Apple Data Detectors. The info page is at http://www.apple.com/applescript/data_detectors/. The actual file to download is here. Run this installer and reboot if necessary.
- Get the CILTKN people lookup program here. Drag this program to the "Apple Menu Items" folder in your Mac's "System Folder".
- Get the CILTKN sherlock plugin here. Drag the ciltkn.src file to your closed system folder.
- Get the two files CILT Collection and Look up in CILTKN
- To install these two files,
- open the Apple Data Detectors control panel.
- from the file menu choose "install detector file" and find the "CILT Collection"
- from the file menu choose "install action file" and find "look up in CILTKN"
- close the control panel
You should now be able to use the detectors and plug in. From within Sherlock, you can choose "search internet" and (whenever CILTKN is checked off in the list of search engines) search for people or places on the CILTKN.
From within any application, select a body of text containing a person's name or institution (it recognizes these using capitalized letters, so it won't find "unext.com" but it should work on "Hoadley" or "SRI International") and control click. A menu will pop up allowing you to look up the person in the CILT database.
As you're using these, please think about:
- Which interface do you use most (or like most) to look somebody up (Apple Menu, Sherlock, Data Detectors)?
- Would having this kind of utility for other types of data (projects, for instance) be worthwhile?
- What suggestions can you offer for making CILTKN
easier to use?
Email me with bugs, questions, suggestions, or reactions anytime. Many thanks for helping us with CILTKN.
Thanks,
Chris