Five-minute recommendation | Like to throw away the material? This software can help you “sort out” your thoughts

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The article represents the author’s personal opinion, and only minor revisions to the title and layout are made by the minority.

From writing the first word out of interest to crossing the threshold of being a freelance writer, I began to realize that my current freewheeling writing method could no longer meet the increasing demand for manuscripts. For me, creation is always a work that revolves around “materials”: finding inspiration from materials, decomposing materials to construct the framework of the work, and citing materials to support opinions – then, are writers like me also? Need an easy-to-use material management software? My answer is: people can, at least try.

*This presentation is from the official Billfish website.

Why Billfish?

There are a lot of material management software on the market, but these software are usually professional tools “for” designers. Old-fashioned file managers such as Digikam and XYplorer are stable and feature-rich, but the user interface is not modern enough, and they are piled up in the top bar. The various tabs and widgets in the sidebar are really confusing. These software require long-term training and running-in before users can do it well, which is far from the standard of “out of the box”; The Eagle in the first tier has indeed achieved a good balance in functionality and ease of use, but the buyout price of 199 yuan still has to be weighed for light users other than designers.

Before deciding to buy Eagle, I found a freeware counterpart to Eagle: Billfish. After a month of experience, I decided to use it as the current main material management software – nothing else, only simple and easy to use.

How Billfish?

Like Eagle, Billfish is an asset management software that requires a browser plug-in for the best experience. Billfish 2.0 currently supports Firefox and any browser that uses the Chromium kernel to install plug-ins, while the plug-in for Safari is still under review by the Mac App Store. Considering that Billfish’s browser acquisition function has been online for more than a year, it can only be said that Apple’s review speed in this area is ridiculously slow.

save material

Billfish’s browser capture function mainly saves materials through screenshots and dragging, and these two modes naturally correspond to the texts and pictures I referenced in my writing. Before I start writing, I will look for literature related to the topic selection on the web page, but most of the content on the web page is usually only a few words, and the content that needs to be directly captured and saved with one click can save a lot of time and effort. Writing time wasted by switching tabs back and forth.

Billfish’s drag-and-drop function is even simpler. Billfish supports dragging and dropping original images directly from commonly used material websites, and also supports one-click download of all materials on the current page. Before adding pictures to articles, the required picture materials can be uniformly saved, filtered and Processing is obviously more efficient than picking and downloading one by one.

Manage material

The browser capture function is only a basic function that modern material management software should have, and Billfish’s material organization and retrieval function is a higher level on this basis. I usually like to drag all the pictures to the desktop, and Billfish’s material indexing function has largely avoided the trouble of finding a needle in a haystack of pictures. The material imported into Billfish by indexing is synchronized with the folder in both directions, so there is no need to worry about the problem of unilateral loss of files; the database established by this mode only contains index information, so it does not need to occupy additional hard disk space. It is also very important for individual users.

In addition to this, Billfish also supports quick filtering of footage by criteria such as size, format, label, shape and color. However, the color algorithms of Billfish and Eagle are different: Eagle is more error tolerant and has a wider range of filters, while Billfish is more strict, there are always opinions on this issue, and I personally prefer Eagle.

Summarize

As a material management software, Billfish can be said to be the replacement of Eagle – the Billfish 2.0 version currently on the official website covers about 80% of the basic functions of Eagle, and is smaller and lighter on the basis of meeting general needs, and it is completely free. . However, Billfish is still in the development stage, and there will inevitably be missing features and various small problems. Fortunately, its development team is willing and good at listening to users’ opinions and suggestions, which undoubtedly sends a positive signal for Billfish’s future.

In my opinion, Billfish can fully differentiate itself by adding features such as local ORC text recognition and AI material classification, and now the biggest significance of using Billfish is still elegant, comfortable and nearly zero-cost cultivation, establishment and organization of personal Good habits of the material library, so as to improve work efficiency in a “cure” way.