14 DAY TRIAL // If you are looking for a way to get your ideas down on paper, but don't have them all formed out exactly, you need a tool that is adaptive and can accommodate your train of though, no matter which way it goes. Most of the time, one idea leads to another, and the vast majority of ideas are linked to other ideas. VoodooPad is a program that will let you get even the most complex, multi-layered ideas down into letters and images with minimal effort on your behalf.
Like a localized Wiki Wikis are in essence web pages that are automatically interlinked. So if you had an entry for "fish", whenever the word fish will appear in any other entry from that point on, it will automatically become a link pointing back to the fish entry. As the number of entries grows, and new ones appear, the old entries are updated so that any word that coincides with the title of another entry becomes a link to that entry.
In essence the wiki becomes a tangled mass of links that point back and forward in a manner that mimics the way information is linked in our memory.
Using VoodooPad When you start up VoodooPad for the first time you will be greeted by an introductory page that explains the functionality of the program and also serves as an example. Basically, since at the end of the day, the document is made up of a lot of pages, in making your own local wiki you work with 3 elements: pages, links and content.
There are two ways of creating a page. The first is choosing new page from the menu, entering a name for the page, and then getting the content in there. This approach works best when you are adding new ideas and content. The second method involves selecting a word and choosing the link command or using the link button in the toolbar. This will take you to the new page which was just created and named after the linked word. This approach works best when you are already working on something and have a new idea or realize that something needs additional explanations.
The title of a page is used to highlight words that will link to it. However there are times when you want several words to point towards the same page. To achieve this you can enter Aliases in the page information. Moreover, for an easier internal organization, pages can be grouped under categories. Unfortunately there is only one level of categories and pages cannot be freely dragged between them. All in all, categories are too unwieldy if you have too many pages, and pretty much not needed if you don't have too many.
Linking between pages is done automatically, without any effort on your behalf. However, you can drag and drop files and folders from the Finder into it and it will automatically link to those files, letting you open them by clicking the link. Same goes for URLs which can be either pasted directly or launched by a word.
Universal keyword The way the program works revolves around the use of keywords for linking across pages. While this is the expected behavior in most of the cases, if you want to use a word like "link" to launch a web address, it is treated as a page, meaning that every instance of the word link will refer to that exact same page. Same goes for local files. There are times when one wishes there was a way to bypass this and have the same text point to several different locations in different pages.
Content Other than text, VoodooPad also supports lists and images of various kinds, as well as any formating that you can expect form a RTFD editor. IT has no support for text wrap but that is to be expected... other than this, you can format a page exactly as you would in TextEdit and getting images is easy using drag and drop. Normally, files dragged into VoodooPad are linked to, but, if the file is one that the program can work with, you will be given the option to embed it.
The Good A great way to get a jumbled mass of ideas into a coherent form, that can be browsed as a web-page. Keeps everything in one document that can be encoded for added security and can even export to a webpage.
The Bad The universal keyword can sometimes be a bother but it is something you learn to work with. Sometimes the interface elements are a bit quirky, like the page list in which you have to double click to select.
The Truth If you are used to wikis and like the way they work you will love this program. It offers a great way to create a complex, inter-linked mass of information that can then be navigated easily.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
