xmlSnippets (vb.net)

xmlSnippets is an application I developed in response to the overwhelming number of text files I had lying around. For a few years I had come accustomed to saving a whole bunch of things in text files. This ranged from account information and tips & tricks to jocks and quotes. Now after a while I became lost in all these text files, and was starting to have a hard time finding what I wanted, especially since most of the time these items were miss labelled and archived in a hast for “future reference” (which never happened since I could never find this information again and forgot about its existence).

I wondered how it would be if I had all these files in one single file, easily viable , searchable and preferably in a tree hierarchy. This is where XML came in. I had been working with XML for not too long and realised that this would be a great application for it. So I created xmlSnippets. Over the period of I'd say more than a year, I worked on creating this application so that it becomes as fast as possible and as intuitive and simple as it can be. In essence I wanted something that is as close to notepad while satisfying the criteria mentioned above.

The end result is this:

• Infinite hierarchical organization of nodes.
• Each snippet has a title and body section, and last modified date/time.
• Incremental searching (search as you type) of all the contents in the file, of title, data, or both.
• Optional Password protection using 128bit encryption.
• Options for changing fonts, auto saving, auto open last file on load, and more.
• Almost as fast to load and as clutter free as notepad.

Ever since I created this application, I stopped using notepad for storing information. I now only have 3 files and each of them contain from 20 to 300 snippets.

You can download the application and try it, let me know what you think; I might be releasing its source code shortly.