catCat lets you extract the categories from a list of Web sites, so you can compare, count, sort or export them. When you install the application, you are prompted to look up a site using Google, then give it a short description. Each site you add appears in a site list with part of its home page. At regular intervals, between the hours you choose, catCat accesses your sites, building a database of categories (words, numbers or symbols).
Using this database, you can instantly find the categories matching a given site, length, count or string of characters - so, for example, you could select just the words from a Shakespeare site with length less than 6, that occur more than 5 times and that end with "y"; or select the numbers from all your sites that have more than 4 digits. The list of categories can be sorted by name, length, count or order of discovery.
You can export the category list to a CSV file for use in a spreadsheet or database application. At any time, you can clear the database and rebuild it using a new set of sites; or just add categories from the new sites to the existing database. Tapping a category in the list will display its total count, and the count in each site.
catCat allows you to set up alerts, so you are notified if a certain category is found in your site list - or is not found. Each alert can be based on an exact match, or on wildcards; for example, you can create an alert for any category matching the pattern "a_y" ("any" would work) or "a%y" ("any", "actually", etc.). You can also ask for an alert if nothing matches "a%y". catCat's alert notifications can be managed with all the usual Android settings, so if you have a wearable device, you could see an alert on your wrist.
Whatever categories are selected in the list can be mapped using a number of moving squares. The size of each square is proportional to the count of its category, so you can see at a glance which categories are used most often. You can change the number of categories to appear in the map, and the color of the squares.
catCat is a work in progress - there are a couple of features it probably should have, but does not. First, the way catCat extracts categories is a little unusual: rather than just getting a site's HTML and separating it into tags, it uses delimiters to get the categories, then marks them as alphabetic, numeric, etc. I find that this reveals interesting things about a site; but I admit it would be useful to be able to change the delimiters and get different categories. There could be a setting for the list of delimiters used to do the separation.
Second, when an alert fires it produces a notification - but there is nothing permanent about this, any more than with other notifications. It might be useful to be able to generate an email or text message in addition to the notification - or it might be incredibly annoying. With this, or any other feature, I would really like to get your feedback.
catCat is a philosophy project that turned into an application. The project concerns the way we split the world into categories, sometimes arbitrary, sometimes very meaningful, in order to decide what is important to us. The Web consists of sites, each of which has a structure designed by its creator, built using HTML (and CSS, Javascript, etc.). When we use the Web, however, we pay attention to only certain sites, and within each site care about only certain things. catCat is trying to let us say what interests us first, rather than finding what someone else wants us to notice. Of course, catCat could be useful in other ways as well - for example, to find which words are most common in certain situations.
If you decide to try catCat, please let me know how it could be enhanced. I will try to incorporate any change that might help more than one person, or that is too cool to pass up!
(Copyright 2016 Michael A. Bedrosian)
Using this database, you can instantly find the categories matching a given site, length, count or string of characters - so, for example, you could select just the words from a Shakespeare site with length less than 6, that occur more than 5 times and that end with "y"; or select the numbers from all your sites that have more than 4 digits. The list of categories can be sorted by name, length, count or order of discovery.
You can export the category list to a CSV file for use in a spreadsheet or database application. At any time, you can clear the database and rebuild it using a new set of sites; or just add categories from the new sites to the existing database. Tapping a category in the list will display its total count, and the count in each site.
catCat allows you to set up alerts, so you are notified if a certain category is found in your site list - or is not found. Each alert can be based on an exact match, or on wildcards; for example, you can create an alert for any category matching the pattern "a_y" ("any" would work) or "a%y" ("any", "actually", etc.). You can also ask for an alert if nothing matches "a%y". catCat's alert notifications can be managed with all the usual Android settings, so if you have a wearable device, you could see an alert on your wrist.
Whatever categories are selected in the list can be mapped using a number of moving squares. The size of each square is proportional to the count of its category, so you can see at a glance which categories are used most often. You can change the number of categories to appear in the map, and the color of the squares.
catCat is a work in progress - there are a couple of features it probably should have, but does not. First, the way catCat extracts categories is a little unusual: rather than just getting a site's HTML and separating it into tags, it uses delimiters to get the categories, then marks them as alphabetic, numeric, etc. I find that this reveals interesting things about a site; but I admit it would be useful to be able to change the delimiters and get different categories. There could be a setting for the list of delimiters used to do the separation.
Second, when an alert fires it produces a notification - but there is nothing permanent about this, any more than with other notifications. It might be useful to be able to generate an email or text message in addition to the notification - or it might be incredibly annoying. With this, or any other feature, I would really like to get your feedback.
catCat is a philosophy project that turned into an application. The project concerns the way we split the world into categories, sometimes arbitrary, sometimes very meaningful, in order to decide what is important to us. The Web consists of sites, each of which has a structure designed by its creator, built using HTML (and CSS, Javascript, etc.). When we use the Web, however, we pay attention to only certain sites, and within each site care about only certain things. catCat is trying to let us say what interests us first, rather than finding what someone else wants us to notice. Of course, catCat could be useful in other ways as well - for example, to find which words are most common in certain situations.
If you decide to try catCat, please let me know how it could be enhanced. I will try to incorporate any change that might help more than one person, or that is too cool to pass up!
(Copyright 2016 Michael A. Bedrosian)
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