Review: Knowledge Base

Knowledge Base 1.75, $24.95
OzmoSys Australia
+613 9553-0938
http://www.ozmosys.net.au/

Knowledge Base is designed to be a home for all the little bits of stuff that the working developer needs to remember - that hack to get the splash screen to paint on top of the main form, the URLs to your favorite support sites, how to hide information in the Registry, code to work with isolated storage, whatever. You can think of a Knowledge Base file as a sort of mini-MSDN, containing only the information that you choose to put in yourself for future reference. If you use it consistently, it can replace a whole bunch of sticky notes and little files and bookmarks, and give you one place to look for the things that you never really seem to be at hand when you need them. Most developers I've run across have some such "junk drawer" system (I use an old outliner named Vault myself; I've run across home-grown Access databases or Excel spreadsheets elsewhere). What sets Knowledge Base apart is that it was explicitly designed for coders.

The data in Knowledge Base is structured in a five (or more) level hierarchy. At any given time, you can have one database open. Each database can have multiple books in it. A book has categories, and categories can have nested subcategories. Within categories and subcategories you place topics, which contain your actual content. Topics are displayed in a tabbed window. The first tab is a freeform text area where you can type whatever you want. The second tab holds any code snippet you want to associate with the topic; Knowledge Base supports syntax highlighting for a batch of languages here (although there doesn't appear to be any way to add to its list). The third includes some additional fields such as an associated URL and keywords. You can also embed or link any file as an attachment to a topic. Toolbar buttons, hyperlinks, and keyboard shortcuts let you add, edit, and delete all up and down the hierarchy.

Other interesting features include the ability to export a subset of topics with XSLT transform of the exported results, a reasonably flexible search facility, the ability to set up to 10 bookmarks for quick topic access, password protection for individual books in a database, and scripting on topic events (add, edit, or delete). Though the program is definitely useable, there are a few loose ends and rough edges - I don't really like having the same icon on three different toolbar buttons, for example, and there are some unfinished topics in the help file. I'd also like to see some better import tools for getting my existing data migrated in from where I've been keeping it all these years. So Knowledge Base hasn't quite sold me yet - but I'm seriously considering it.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.