Sɪᴀ has many uses: any time one stores textual information to be retrieved later. The information is stored as it is structured: lists, trees, items in multiple lists, and items linked together, e.g. Fred — friend → Barney. Sɪᴀ is better than the competition as it can handle tens of thousands of items. This application is great for brainstorming, requirements gathering, strategic planning, mapping complex systems and writing books; one can not run out of space.

Index.

Sɪᴀ is free for personal use. If you use Sɪᴀ for business you will be required to purchase after a month of hours of usage, not a calendar month.

Flexible To-Do List Example

Have sub-tasks, link to other information such as contact details and highlight items. Note that the same David Decker item appears under multiple jobs.

Large Example

Sɪᴀ can store tens of thousands of items and makes it fast to find the information you require. The example above is obfuscated to protect the user’s privacy.

Movies Example

One could use Sɪᴀ to remember all the movies you have seen with ratings and descriptions. The movies could be both in a list of all movies and stored under a genre. If one wanted to spend the time, one could also note the ‘director’ and ‘actor’s for each film; that would also enable one to see all movies directed by a particular director or starring a particular actor.

The Main Screen

• Move the mouse over an item to select it.
• Space adds a new child to the selected item.
• Tab edits the selected item.
• Enter or Left Click makes the selected item the focus.
• Other keys such as letters select the first child starting with the text typed facilitating rapid navigation.
• Right click on items, lines, or ‘with’ (blue) items for menu options.
• Hit F1 in the main screen or when editing an item or to show help for that context.
• Try things out you can undo actions by clicking (undo).

The Item Dialog

The item dialog lets you create and edit items and links between items.

• Spelling mistakes are show underlined in red, right click or hit the Ξ key to correct.
• Hover the mouse over controls to get tips.
• gives help, particularly about using Sɪᴀ to get the most out of the keyboard.
• To Basic View switches to a simpler mode of editing described below.
• A blank ‘with’ item creates a simple parent-child link.
• When there is a ‘with’ item we have a labelled parent-with-child link.


• changes the adjoining text field to add a new item.
• changes the adjoining field to select an existing item.


• toggles the Enter key’s action: insert a new line when on [shaded] and close the dialog when off.
  Shift-Enter always inserts a new line and Ctrl-Enter always closes the dialog. When Enter inserts a newline, multi-line mode, the background is colored pale yellow.
• Basic View switches to the simplified mode described above.


• The #number is a unique ɪᴅ for the item, you can use this to unambiguously refer to a Sɪᴀ item within a document.
  For example, one can use this to give customers unique job ɪᴅs. Use Search > Go to Item by Iᴅ to find an item using it’s ɪᴅ.
• The date the item was created and last edited are shown beside the ɪᴅ.

Basic View

Basic View simplifies editing.

• Advanced View switches to more complex mode of editing described above.

Drag and Drop

Items can be dragged to change the order in their siblings, or to move them to another parent. Hold Ctrl down while dragging to copy an item. Hold Ctrl and Shift down to add a new link to the dragged item. Lines can also be dragged or Ctrl dragged to create new links.

There are right-click menu items to sort children and parents. Items can also have sorted → true to keep their children sorted. A parent sorted → true keeps the parents sorted.

Uʀʟs and File Paths

By default Sɪᴀ documents recognise uʀʟs and file paths allowing one to right click and Open: Uʀʟs in your web browser, folders in Windows Explorer and files as if they were double clicked on. In Windows Explorer use ‘copy path’ to copy a file’s path to the clipboard and then paste in Sia to create an item that opens as described.

Powerful Topology

Exactingly a Sɪᴀ document is a cyclic labelled graph with items ordered in both directions. The data are semantic triples. An empty string predicate gives a parent-child relationship, we use a parent-with-child nomenclature rather than “subject-predicate-object”. So as well as lists and trees, Sɪᴀ items can appear in multiple lists, i.e. have multiple parents:

• Right click on an item and click Copy, navigate to the additional parent to be, right click and select Paste Link.
• Alternatively: Hit Space to add a new child to the parent to be. Hit F3 or click the button to make the child window select an existing item rather than create a new one; start typing the child item’s contents to find it or select it from the drop down list. Hitting Ok adds this link.

If the ‘with’ item in a link is not the empty string then the link is shown as a property, e.g. Sɪᴀ — provides → Digital Vellum. Empty string ‘with’ items are parent-child relationships. If an item is used as a ‘with’ the number of times is shown a blue subscript, e.g. provides₂₄.

Siblings and parents can be arranged in any order, drag items or hit Alt-Up, Alt-Down, Alt-Home or Alt-End to change their order.

Links can also create loops.

It’s all Class

Sɪᴀ items can have a class which determines the colors they are drawn in.

To create a new class “Good” whose items are coloured with a green background:

1. First click on Show Hidden , far-right toolbar item, to show links that are normally hidden, such as color and is.
2. Hit Space to add an item, select is for the with item and type Good for the child. Hit Ok to create the link: item — is → Good.
3. Now add a link Good — is → class (select the existing class item).
4. Then set the background color: add Good — background color → green.

Also:

• Colours can be named, e.g. green; as three numbers “red,green,blue” between 0 and 255, e.g. 0,80,80 for teal; or as hash # followed by three or six hex digits, e.g. #000080 for a dark blue.
• The (foreground) color can also be set.
• Once you have created a class items can be set to be of that class by right clicking, select Is submenu and the class.
• If you have many classes a class can be given a group to move it into a separate sub menu of the Is menu item.
• Other links can be made to be hidden as is and shortcut key are by adding item — show → false.

Individual items can have their color or background color set without a class, but this is not recommended as classes are more rapidly assigned later.

Commands

Classes can have a regular expression regex that makes any item that matches that become that class, in addition to any classes set explicitly with is. Regexes only match single line items. By default there are Uʀʟ and File classes, if you created your document with an older version of Sɪᴀ see Tools > Create Missing....

Classes can also have actions attached to them via menu, e.g. ᴜʀʟ — menu → Open adds Open to the right click menu for items that look like ᴜʀʟs. When no explicit command nor ᴜʀʟ is attached to the the menu: A url is opened in one’s web browser, a folder is opened in File Explorer and a file behaves as if one double clicked on it.

Menu items can have explicit command to run a program on one’s computer or a ᴜʀʟ to open in one’s web browser. <this> is substituted for the content of the item, and any property of the item can be accessed via <property>. If your command has no <> substitutions it is taken as the name of the program to run, the contents of the item are passed as the first argument, e.g: C:\Users\Owner\Documents\Reference\World\The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.docx.

For commands one must use “quotes” [any of “”"] to allow spaces in program names and arguments, or to allow literal< or > symbols. Inside quotes strings use two of any sort of double quotes in a row to pass in one. For ᴜʀʟs use “<<>” for < and “<>>” for >.

For example:

Now if one right clicks on Fred and selects View Trailer one’s web browser will show a link to the trailer for his favourite film.

Shortcut Key Teleportation

In addition to surfing to items by clicking, navigating to child items by typing, and searching with Ctrl-F one can assign shortcut keys to items to jump to the item via the F12 Shortcut Dialog. Add a shortcut key link from the item. shortcut key links are hidden by default, click on Show Hidden toolbar item or hit Ctrl-H to see them.

Extended Keyboard

Demonstrating Sɪᴀ’s enhancements to the keyboard, Alt-Minus can be used to create a horizontal line item to delineate siblings, as shown above. Hit F1 or click on from the item dialog to see the additions. Good looking “double quotes” and ‘single quotes’ are provided by overriding Shift-~ and the quotes keys Shift-", ` and '. To type a ~ press Shift-Alt-~.

Another tip: if one has items that one keeps sorted, making a special item start with ‘!’ will keep it before items beginning with letters. Setting it’s is to Highlighted will make it stand out.

Safe and Secure

Your information is safe both if you ever need to read the document and you do not have the Sɪᴀ application or for readers in the distant future; simply rename your document to name.sia.html and open in a web browser from the early twenty-first century. If you have not already you will need to tick [✓] File name extensions in the View tab of Windows Explorer to change the filename extension.

You can password protect a Sɪᴀ document, see File > Set Password. The information is then encrypted with a system one can trust: three cyphers: Triple Dᴇꜱ, Twofish and Aᴇꜱ.

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Sɪᴀ is both the ancient Egyptian god of perception and stands for Structured Information Application. Sia’s hieroglyph shows three bars, matching the semantic triples used in Sɪᴀ: parent — with → child.

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Glossary of Items

ᴀᴋᴀ

Also Known As. Used to facilitate finding an item. The Find Dialog by default resolves ᴀᴋᴀs. If we search for “jim” but James — ᴀᴋᴀ → Jim exists we find ‘James’.

background color

Set the background color of an item or of items of the parent class. e.g: if
Fred — is → Person
and Person — background color → red
Fred will be drawn with red background.

class

If an item is a class it appears in the Is sub menu of the right-click menu, So one can set the is link to set the class is an item.

color

Set the foreground color of an item or of items of the parent class. e.g: if
Sequoia — is → Tree
and Tree — color → green
Sequoia will be drawn in green.

command

Used to set the program to run with the given menu of a class is selected. This may contain <this> and <field> substitutions.

false

Used to set show and other links to the negative.

group

Sets the group of a class to move the class into a sub menu in the Is item of the right-click menu.

home or home

Set the home item, either as a child of root called home or Home or as a link, e.g. root — home → My stuff

is

Sets the class of an item, this determines the color and menus.

menu

Creates an item in the right-click menu of items of the given class. By default: a url it is opened in one’s web browser, a folder is opened in File Explorer and a file behaves as if it was double click on. command and ᴜʀʟ can be added for customised behaviour.

regex

In a class specifies a regular expression that when matched will make those items of the given class. Only single line items are matched.

shortcut key

Specifies the item to move to when the given key or key combination it hit. e.g. if Ideas — shortcut key → I then hitting F12 then I will move the focus to Ideas.

show

Used to hide links, e.g. is — show → false means that is links are not shown except when Show Hidden it turned on, i.e. Menu View > Show Hidden, the toolbar item, or Ctrl-H is pressed.

sorted

As a child link this is used to keep children the given item in alphabetical order; or as a parent link to keep the parents sorted.

true

Used to set sorted and other links to the affirmative.

ᴜʀʟ

In a menu item sets the ᴜʀʟ to open in the web browser, may contain <this> substitutions.