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Just as an offhand request, does anyone out there know of a simple program for managing and searching simple lists of data? In particular, I'm imagining something where I could easily input a list of items, each with a title, brief description, maybe some other data (ratings?), and arbitrarily many keywords to describe it. I'd want the description text to be searchable, and I'd want to be able to browse lists of items with a given keyword (or, ideally, boolean combination of keywords).
I'm pretty sure that what I'm describing here would be satisfied by practically any database. And indeed, I happen to have installed MySQL on my laptop years ago (any important updates since 4.0.18?). But 1) that seems like massive overkill, and 2) if it would take me more than about five minutes to set it up and learn how to use it, I don't have time: this is for a maybe-useful maybe-vaguely-work-related project that is far, far from essential. (As I recall, my earlier look at MySQL sputtered out largely because the tutorials I saw all suffered from either a glacial pace, an overdose of obscure syntax variants and data models, an obsession with moral purity in relational database design, or all of them at once.) By contrast, I can just look at a program like iTunes and understand how to enter data, search and sort, create "smart playlists", and all sorts of other things.
I've actually considered just abusing the excellent Mac bibliography/research-paper-PDF manager BibDesk to do what I want. If I just pretended each data entry was a scientific paper, I think it could work fine. But given how easily I could adapt it (or maybe even iTunes or iPhoto) to do this, it seems crazy to think that simple general purpose tools like this aren't a dime a dozen. I have no idea how to find a good one, though. Any suggestions?
(I understand that newer versions of MySQL include GUI tools to make things a bit more manageable, but I expect that those would still require me to learn a bunch of database jargon and design principles. I wouldn't mind the option to gradually transition to that level of knowledge, but I can't afford to start that way.)
I'm pretty sure that what I'm describing here would be satisfied by practically any database. And indeed, I happen to have installed MySQL on my laptop years ago (any important updates since 4.0.18?). But 1) that seems like massive overkill, and 2) if it would take me more than about five minutes to set it up and learn how to use it, I don't have time: this is for a maybe-useful maybe-vaguely-work-related project that is far, far from essential. (As I recall, my earlier look at MySQL sputtered out largely because the tutorials I saw all suffered from either a glacial pace, an overdose of obscure syntax variants and data models, an obsession with moral purity in relational database design, or all of them at once.) By contrast, I can just look at a program like iTunes and understand how to enter data, search and sort, create "smart playlists", and all sorts of other things.
I've actually considered just abusing the excellent Mac bibliography/research-paper-PDF manager BibDesk to do what I want. If I just pretended each data entry was a scientific paper, I think it could work fine. But given how easily I could adapt it (or maybe even iTunes or iPhoto) to do this, it seems crazy to think that simple general purpose tools like this aren't a dime a dozen. I have no idea how to find a good one, though. Any suggestions?
(I understand that newer versions of MySQL include GUI tools to make things a bit more manageable, but I expect that those would still require me to learn a bunch of database jargon and design principles. I wouldn't mind the option to gradually transition to that level of knowledge, but I can't afford to start that way.)
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You could do each entry in a different file if you wanted to include more data. Say, keywords on the first line, and everything else the program treats as a big blob.
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I love programming in Python. I find that most of the time the way it works is the way I think about code in my head. It has worked very well for a lot of small projects I've done at work or at home.
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