Wiki stuff
A wiki can be a very nifty little thing in some situations. We’ve recently started using this at work in an attempt at encouraging employees to create content (in general documentation, design document) and to discuss areas we’re curently.. well, discussing. It’s working, too.
For a long time I’ve been aware of programs such as Treepad, KeyNote and EverNote that offer similar functionality. There are also programs out there that tries to pair the concepts of a wiki with the features of a simple text editor to use as a personal information manager or notebook.
WikidPad is written in Python and is cross platform. I’ve yet to get it to run on my Mac and Python 2.5 and wxPython 2.8. It comes as a compiled application for Windows, and this works fine. It should be possible to something similar for the Mac by using py2app. At least in theory. On Windows it works quite well.
ZuluPad is written using wxWidgets and is a compiled application on both Windows and Mac. I found the Mac version to be a bit strange with some keyboard shortcuts being normal Mac ones, and some using the Control key instead of the Command key. There seem to be no way of creating links using CamelCase (or a non-camelcase wiki link) either, instead you create links by selecting text then use a menu item or a keyboard shortcut to do it.
Both WikidPad and ZuluPad are open source.
In addition to this, there’s also a browser based single-file wiki that runs on the client and could work like a notebook (but through a browser): TiddlyWiki.
The code is written in java script and everything, the wiki engine and the wiki content, is stored in a simple HTML file. Saving your changes backs up the old file and stores you changes.