Issa User Manual
Contents
1. Issa User Manual Last modi ed November 12 2002 By Ben Haller Copyright 2002 Stick Software This manual is only available in English at present Issa is a fridge poetry application for Mac OS X This manual assumes that you have already downloaded a copy of Issa if not visit Issa s main page at http www sticksoftware com software Issa html It also assumes that you know all the basics of using the Macintosh in Mac OS X including using the mouse menus and windows and opening and saving les Right now this manual is really an FAQ frequently asked questions list because Issa is a simple enough app that it doesn t seem to merit a full manual that would just be a lot of work and would probably be less effective at answering actual user questions Let us know if you disagree however if a full manual is needed for Issa it can be made Please send comments on this manual to us at support sticksoftware com Thanks Questions What is Issa and what does it do in a nutshell Where are the tiles like ed ing and an What is the virtual fridge What are the different ways to select tiles What keyboard controls does Issa have How can I share my poems with others How do wordlists work Where can I get more Can I make my own wordlists Can I save the way Issa is now and restore it later What bugs and issues are known for Issa What is shareware How do I pay What is Issa and what does it do in a2. Making your own wordlists is fairly simple all you need is a word processor that works with plain text les the TextEdit application that ships as part of OS X works well You might want to work from an existing wordlist so you get the basic structure of the le for free A typical wordlist would look something like this This is a word list for Issa title Music longtitle These are a few of my favorite musicians language English dictionary http www gracenote com php search2 php3 f artist amp q S Go author Ben Haller version 1 copyright Copyright C 2002 Stick Software words Brian Eno Eno 2 Caetano Veloso Veloso Laurie Anderson Anderson Kate Bush KT Gabriel Yacoub Yacoub John Coltrane Coltrane Tom Waits Waits end This is probably fairly self explanatory The rst of all starts a comment at the top of the le which similarly lasts until the end of the line You can put comments anywhere you want but only as a full line of content not as the end of a line with other content on it At the top are some standard tags beginning with an symbol that tell Issa the title language author and such Those tags must occur one per line and the remainder of the line after the tag is taken as the value for the tag The dictionary tag tells Issa where it should look up words in this word list when asked to de ne them since these are all musicians I put the URL for a music site The nea
3. or if you have a two button mouse a right click At the top of the menu shown before the other contextual menu commands will be the various word forms that exist for that tile Choose the form you want and the tile will change You can also rotate through word forms by selecting a tile and pressing the escape key Sometimes the word forms on a tile are less obviously related For example be am are is being was and were are all on one tile which makes sense if you think about it but might seem odd at rst glance Sometimes the tiles will be related semantically not syntactically one tile might have the names of the twelve months of the year for example Until you get to know how the tiles are organized the easiest thing might be to do a Find for the word you want it will be found even if it is not the currently shown form for a tile Find runner for example and the run tile will be selected You can also use Issa s type select feature by typing is for example the be tile will be selected What is the virtual fridge Issa lets you choose whether to keep your tiles inside a containing environment called the virtual fridge or loose on your desktop Which you choose is mostly a matter of taste if you prefer to see your tiles on a coherent background choose to use the virtual fridge If you nd that that interferes with seeing your work and you d prefer that Issa coexist more transparently with your other app
4. always used This would be fairly easy to x the problem and the reason we haven t xed it is the question of what we would then do if you tried to export your word list to a new wordlist le What would we write out as the dictionary URL Would we need to devise some modi ed word list le format that allowed each word to specify a different dictionary URL That seems terribly gross So for the moment we ve chosen to punt on this If you have an opinion and if you care feel free to drop us a line we ll probably do something about this problem in the next version of Issa whenever that happens Some users may nd that they have too many tiles for their taste and on slow machines this might cause slow performance although we have actually not heard any complaints about this from testers or users so far If this happens select some tiles you don t like and delete them gt Some people consider it objectionable that tiles cannot be edited We do not consider this a bug and we ll tell you why Fridge poetry is well it s like this really groovy head space you know It s like ahem The idea of fridge poetry in our opinion is that it is a constrained space for creativity By working within those constraints it can actually help you create This is similar to why poetic forms like haiku or the sonnet are popular or why music typically uses an eight tone scale by limiting the in nitude of options available to you you sometimes gain more tha
5. the way that works as expected If you aren t using the virtual fridge you can begin a drag select from any tile by holding down the option key sometimes labelled as the alternate or alt key but you can t start a drag select from the space between tiles since without the virtual fridge that click goes to whatever application is behind Issa If Issa is not the active application however the option click will cause all applications other than Issa to hide this behavior is built into OS X and cannot be disabled as far as we can tell unfortunately To select by typing just type Issa has to be the active application of course Whatever you type will be matched against the contents of the tiles both the visible word form and any alternate word forms on the tiles If there are tiles that match exactly you type run and the tile has run all tiles with exact matches will be selected If there are no exact matches then it will match pre xes you type ze and the tiles has zebra if there are 10 or fewer tiles that have pre x matches they will all be selected if there are more than 10 only one matching tile will be selected The point of this is to keep from selecting 50 tiles when you type e it will just select one tile that starts with e This can be a good way to get inspiration by the way type a random letter and see what tiles get selected and then work from one of them Selection with the Find panel is exactly as you wo
6. e Finder you can use the mouse with modi er keys if desired you can type a word to select tiles with that word or you can use the Find panel to search for the tile you want to select This explanation will run on quite a bit but really it works almost exactly like selection in the Finder so you may not need to read all of this The one thing that works differently is that if you are not using the virtual fridge you cannot click off in empty space to deselect because unlike in the Finder the empty space between the tiles is not owned by Issa For this reason clicking on the Stick Software logo tile or any image tile actually will deselect completely the image tile will not be left selected This is intentional and is to prevent the annoyance of being unable to deselect easily To select a tile with the mouse just click on the tile you want to select You can hold down the shift key to select additional tiles that you click on hold down the command key to toggle a clicked tile between being selected and deselected You can double click on a tile to select a cascade of tiles that are all suf ciently close to each other this is a quick way to select an entire completed poem for example You can shift double click and command double click to augment the current selection by adding or toggling a cascade of tiles Dragging out a selection rectangle in the virtual fridge works just as it does in the Finder and shift and command will modify
7. e the Match Selection menu item More on this can be found in the section on selection above The delete and backspace keys delete the currently selected tiles just like the Delete menu item How can I share my poems with others Issa makes it very easy to export your poems to formats that can be easily shared over e mail or the web Just select the tiles the poem is composed of double clicking to do a cascade select may be an easy way to do this and then choose an exporting option Under the Tiles menu you can choose to export the selection as a JPEG or TIFF image or an HTML page these choices will save the exported poem toa le Under the Edit menu you can choose to copy the selected poem to the clipboard as text or as an image these choices will modify the clipboard but will not savea le to disk Finally you can choose an OS X service from the Services menu such as Mail app s Mail Text service that creates a new e mail message with the service text If you want to share your poems with other users if you want a single poetry space shared among the users of your machine you can do this by linking together Issa s tile record les You probably don t want to attempt this unless you are comfortable with your Administrator priveleges and using Terminal and Unix however First quit Issa so the les you ll be using aren t busy Next choose a master user that other users will link to and delete the tile record les for all of the us
8. ed string If you want to include a backslash therefore you need to quote it in the same manner This all probably sounds completely insane to people who have never programmed while all the programmers are saying yeah of course gt For those who are a bit lost here are a few examples The column on the left is the string as it would be written in the wordlist le the column on the right is exactly what will be shown in the resulting tile in Issa foo foo foo foo foo bar foo bar is taken as the second word form foo bar foo bar foo bar foo bar foo bar foo bar foo bar foo bar the backslash quotes the space as a literal character foo 2 foo two tiles that each say foo foo 2 foo 2 is the second wordform on the tile since it was quoted foo2 foo2 numbers are not taken as a count unless they are separate foo 2 foo 2 the backslash quoted the space continuing the word If you do something suf ciently heinous there are cases where Issa will log an error message to the console which is helpful if you know how to look at the console Most of these sorts of cases are pretty obscure though in general you can write words plainly and if you want something with spaces to be treated as a single word you put quotes around it That should get you a long way Can I save the way Issa is now and restore it later As a matter of fact you can Suppose you want to look at different word lists and generally
9. ers but the master user the tile record les are located at Library Preferences IssaTiles for each user of Issa Finally use In s to create soft links to the master account s tile record in all of the other user accounts If you ve set this up properly Issa should now share the tile record among the users of the machine You probably want all the users to keep their tiles in the same screen area so that they t properly for all users you could probably link together Issa s defaults les located at Library Preferences com stick app issa plist if you really wanted to although then all of the user s preferences would be linked Linking the defaults les together has not been tested by us you do it at your own risk although it seems unlikely that any very dire consequences could occur How do wordlists work Where can I get more Wordlists are how Issa works with sets of words they are how Issa manages its vocabulary You can create wordlists in Issa by exporting the set of words you are currently using or you can create or modify wordlists in a word processor see the next section for details You can download wordlists e mail them to friends or post them on your web page Inside Issa you can replace your current set of tiles with new tales based on a wordlist of your choice or you can merge in a wordlist creating new tiles for the words in the wordlist while keeping your current tile set Some wordlists are small and are designed to be me
10. experiment in a destructive way but you ultimately want to come back to the way you have Issa set up right now right down to the position of every tile on your fridge This is quite simple to do although it isn t supported from within Issa s user interface for reasons of limiting the complexity of the app Just follow these steps to save your current state 1 Quit Issa 2 Copy the le Library Preferences IssaTiles somewhere else this is your backup le Then to restore yourself to that previous state quit Issa and then just put your backup le back where it came from making sure to give it the correct le name of IssaTiles again You might keep a copy of the backup le so you can try again if this doesn t succeed for some reason You can make as many backups of the IssaTiles_ le as you want You can probably even mail them to friends exchange them among different machines and so on this hasn t been tested but I don t see any reason why it shouldn t work If you back up your IssaTiles les properly the worst you re likely to do by experimenting is to crash Issa gt Note this does not back up your user preferences regarding Issa everything you set up in the Preferences panel plus a few miscellaneous other things those settings are kept in a separate le that you really probably don t want to mess with What bugs and issues are known for Issa In a previous version of this manual we stated that a bug that caused Issa s tiles to dra
11. lications you may choose not to use the virtual fridge There is also a transparency setting in Issa s preferences that you may nd relevant to this choice The only side effect your choice has is on drag selection with no virtual fridge you can t click in the background to start a drag selection of tiles since your click will go through to whatever application owns the area you clicked on To drag select without the virtual fridge therefore hold down the option key as you click in a tile Be aware however that is Issa is not the active application OS X will take the option click as meaning hide all other applications so you will want to be sure Issa is active before doing a drag select in this way One of the nicest things about the virtual fridge is the various seamless background textures it can display below your tiles These textures are generously provided by www The3dStudio com you can surf to them for many more free textures that you can download If you put your downloaded texture images in Library Issa Issa will add them to the list of textures available in the Preferences panel so you can use them in your virtual fridge Please give The3dStudio your business if you can they sell all sorts of 3D related products and let them know that their generosity towards Stick Software has come back around to them if you do What are the different ways to select tiles Issa s selection works much like selecting icons on the desktop in th
12. n you lose We consider the constrained vocabulary of fridge poetry to be exactly this sort of thing we didn t even want to put the New Word Tile command in but we gured users would kill us if we took that extreme of a position But we suggest that if you want to get the most out of Issa you might try working with the tiles as given If you compose your poem in your head without reference to the tiles that exist and then create all the tiles you need you might nd Issa less than rewarding and a word processor or a pad of paper might be a better environment for you to work on your poetry What is shareware How do I pay As a closing note we d like to remind our readers that Issa is a shareware product While Issa is not disabled in any way for non registered users it is still required that you pay the shareware fee if you use Issa beyond a trial usage Issa costs 10 We at Stick Software hope that by not disabling our software we make it easier and less annoying to use and we hope that more users will register for our software as a result Please be worthy of our trust Information on how to pay and other registration details can be found at http www sticksoftware com software html Comments on Issa suggestions for future products and other feedback are welcomed at support sticksoftware com Thanks for your support
13. nutshell Issa is a fridge poetry set for Mac OS X It gives you a bunch of word tiles that you can arrange to form poetry For example BA E nuia as peyi fust fana Jand Em delirious lirious SSeS el Everything about this poem from the words and the font it uses to the background image it is presented upon is con gurable in Issa For more information on the basic concept of Issa as well as links to sample poems and wordlists and an explanation of where Issa s name comes from please check out its home page at http www sticksoftware com software Issa html This manual will try for brevity to concentrate on explaining the more dif cult or confusing aspects of Issa Where are the tiles like ed ing and an This is the chief difference between Issa and the magnetic poetry you probably have on your fridge Issa takes advantage of the fact that it is on a computer to both increase the available vocabulary and decrease the number of tiles It does this by allowing a single tile to have more than one word on it The words on a tile should all be related to each other such that it makes sense to place them together For example run runs running ran and runner are on a single tile This means that the ending tiles like ed and ing are not needed in Issa just choose the word form you want That begs the question how do you choose the different forms This is as easy as a control click on the tile
14. r the end of the URL is where the word to be de ned gets plugged in so if Issa is asked to de ne Brian Eno it would generate a URL of http www gracenote com php search2 php3 f artist amp q Brian EnoS Go The longtitle author and language tags give information that Issa shows to the user to help them choose a word list The version tag is not currently used but will probably be used by a future version of Issa to facilitate automatic updating of a user s word lists it should start at 1 and be incremented by one each time you publish a new revision of your word list The copyright tag provides a standard place for a copyright notice this text may be displayed in future versions of Issa the way that author and other tags are now Between the words tag and the end tag are all the words Each tile is one line multiple wordforms for a single tile are just listed one after another on the same line So the line Brian Eno Eno makes one tile with two wordforms on it Brian Eno and Eno The quotes around Brian Eno are just used to indicate to Issa that the space is part of the word not a divider between two different words The 2 at the end of the Brian Eno line makes Issa create two identical Brian Eno tiles because he s my absolute favorite if no number is given only one tile is created If you want to include a quote mark in a word you need to preface it with a backslash so Issa doesn t take it as establishing a quot
15. rged into a larger general vocabulary to provide special interest terms related to things like sports or science Other wordlists are large and are designed to be used as a base vocabulary Regardless you can use them however you see t and can modify them if you want to The way Issa keeps track of wordlists is a little bit non standard and bears explanation If you choose Issa s Set Word List or Merge Word List menu items you will not get an open le dialog to choose the word list you want Instead you will get a custom dialog box that shows only the wordlist les that Issa knows about Issa knows about word lists that are built into it and it knows about word lists located in your Library Issa folder Any other wordlists ones you download receive in e mail or whatever must be imported into Issa using the Import Word List menu command double clicking the wordlist file should work too All this really does is copy the word list to Library Issa and you can do this yourself if you prefer The reason for this design is that Issa doesn t want to show the wordlist lenames when you set or merge them it wants to present you with a more readable title and the number of words in the list This design also allows Issa to show you things like the language the word list is localized for a longer explanation of the contents of the le and other information Doing this within the standard le dialog would be dif cult Can I make my own wordlists
16. uld expect select the Find menu item type the word you want hit OK and the tiles that match will be selected The Find panel does a pre x match if you want an exact match choose Find Exact instead Finally there are menu commands and keyboard controls that change the selection Select All selects all the tiles Deselect All deselects them all Invert Selection makes any tile that was selected be deselected and any tile that was deselected becomes selected this can be useful if you want to delete every tile except for the poem you just nished for example select the poem invert the selection hit delete Blink Selection blinks the selection on and off a few times to make it more visible hitting the space bar does the same thing Finally Match Tiles is a shortcut that nds every tile that exactly matches the selected tile or tiles and they must match all word forms on the tile not just the visible word form hitting the tab key is a shortcut for this This makes it easy to nd another and tile for example when you already have one at hand What keyboard controls does Issa have The space bar blinks the current selection just like selecting the Blink Selection menu item More on this can be found in the section on selection above The escape key shows the next word form on the selected tile or tiles More on this can be found in the section on word forms above The tab key selects all tiles identical to the selected tiles just lik
17. w incorrectly in rare cases was due to an Apple bug that had been xed in 10 2 This assessment was incorrect it was due to a bug in Issa that happened not to reproduce on 10 2 when we tried it The bug has been xed in Issa 1 0 2 Our apologies to Apple for this incorrect diagnosis You may wish that Issa used the short three character versions of le extensions such as tif instead of tiff jpg instead of jpeg and htm instead of html We didn t deem this worthy of a user visible pref but you can use Terminal to change Issa to use short extensions Just quit Issa go to Terminal and type defaults write com stick app issa IssaShortExtensions YES and hit return The next time you run Issa the short extensions will be used instead And by the way we nd it just as annoying as you probably do that OS X attempts to force particular extensions on you you ought of course to be able to simply change the tiff to tif in the Save panel but OS X is too smart for its own good We have logged a bug on this with Apple we ll see what happens You may notice that when you ask Issa to De ne the word on a tile you may sometimes go to a web page that is not the dictionary web page that was given in the wordlist le that the tile is from This will happen for any tiles which are merged in with Merge Word List in fact if the merged list s dictionary URL is different than your base word list s dictionary URL the base word list dictionary URL is
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