Research

 

Research is a feature primarily aimed at the iOS version where drag/drop and copy/paste between a browser and iThoughts is not really practical (or even possible.) It does work to a certain extent on Mac/Windows versions (scroll to the bottom.)

 

iOS

Tap on any topic or select any piece of text and one of the options presented (after Cut/Copy/Paste) will be Research. This will take the text and 'Google it' - using a browser built into iThoughts. You can then press and hold on images, text and links on the page and have them turned into topics in the map. This makes it easy to quickly collate information from the web - without requiring a whole load of copy/switch app/paste type operations.

The feature is not forced to use Google as a source, it can default to using any of the following:

  • Wikipedia
  • Bing
  • Yahoo
  • WolframAlpha
  • Google Scholar
  • MedlinePlus
  • NCBI Entrez
  • Baidu
  • Yandex

NB: It is also possible to configure up to 5 'user defined' sources (see later in this article for a description of how to setup a user defined source.)

 

See below for the 'Research' option presented when tapping on the central 'Dickens' topic in a new map.

This will launch a browser with 'Dickens' already entered into Google. In the following case the first result was selected which took us to Wikipedia. 

#1 - Long press on the next/back toolbar buttons to present the page history list.

#2 - By tapping on the title of the web page (as below) we get options to:

  • Copy Link (to the clipboard - so you can paste it in later)
  • Make Topic (make a new topic with the page title and hyperlink already set)
  • Save Page (will download the page and images into a .webarchive then attach it to a new topic.)
  • Open in Safari (as you'd expect)

#3 - Tap on the 'compass' toolbar button to change search providers (e.g. Bing, Yahoo etc.) The search term (e.g. Dickens) will remain the same.

#4 - Long press on a link and you'll get options to:

  • Copy Link (to the clipboard - so you can paste it in later)
  • Make Topic (make a new topic with the page title and hyperlink already set)

#5 - Long press on an image and you'll get options to:

  • Save Image (into the iThoughts 'image library')
  • Copy Image (to the clipboard - so you can paste it in later)
  • Make Topic (make a new topic with the image inserted)

#6 #7 - Select some text and you'll get the options to:

  • Make Topic(s) (each line of text will be made into a topic.)
  • Add to Note (append the text to the note field of the selected topic.) 

 

 

Up to 5 custom search providers may be configured in the System Settings (menu under the gear toolbar button.) Tap on one of the 'CustomX' fields. The syntax for a new engine is as follows: 


      Display Name,URL 

The URL should include the placeholder text <SEARCH_TERM> which iThoughts will replace with the actual text. An example entry for Wikipedia is as follows:

      Wikpedia,http://www.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=<SEARCH_TERM> 
 

 

Mac/Windows

On Mac/Windows versions, it is still possible to select text or topic and CMD/CTRL R to search for the term in a browser. However, the only option is Google and because the browser is a separate app, the options to turn text/image/link into an entry in the mind map is not available. It is assumed that Mac/Windows users will use Copy/Paste/Drag/Drop to get the researched information back into a map.