The BinderBabies were a spin-off of a larger, more ambitious project: the BinderMInder.

The main component of this larger project was the BinderMinder itself, a control panel for managing binders and their contents. As with all aspects of the project, the visual appearance of the BinderMinder was customizable. Here are two versions of the panel.

Note the use of table borders to give the panel a raised appearance. The overall colour was determined by the designer of the particular BinderMinder panel; the “touch panels” (buttons) were transparent GIFs which allowed these colours to show through.

The BinderMinder could open just one binder at a time, and could then manage up to five objects from that binder. These objects were opened via links from the contents page (accessed from the top touch panel on the right) and listed in the text slots on the left side of the panel, and could be closed through the “implode” buttons next to each slot. The middle touch panel on the right allowed the user to switch binders, and the bottom one was intended for an eventual help file.

The binders were intended to house notebooks and other objects through managers for each type of object. (I was starting to think in terms of component modules here, though I actually developed only a BookManager.) The intention was to have objects communicate with each other through the binder, so for instance a physics notebook could communicate with a lab module, and so on. Binders were set up via an index file, created from an annotated template. It was also possible for a binder to contain resources distributed across several IP addresses, as long as links to them existed. (At least in theory; I never tried to test this. There may have been security issues.)

The notebooks managed by the BookManager were more sophisticated than the BinderBabies. Their appearance was completely customizable: colours, the type of spine, number of sections, appearance of the tabs and so on. As with the BinderBabies, this customization was accomplished with setup files such as this one, created from a template. Setup files like those for BinderBabies were use for paths.

The notebooks had additional features such as auxiliary windows (sidebars, “elsewhere” windows etc.), more sophisticated branching, distributed content, and bookmarks.

			The bookmarks were set by the “hand” interface illustrated here: clicking a finger inserted it into the current page; clicking the thumb removed all fingers. Note that bookmarking was more than a matter of retrieving a single page; the position of the page through several sub-levels of paths had also to be accounted for.
The fingers out and in (each finger operated independently	The separate finger GIFs (green was transparent)

Of course, all this was terribly complicated and ultimately unstable. I briefly changed the project name to BinderKeeper (the BinderMinder.com domain turned out to be owned), but then I allowed the project to die a natural death, and moved on to other things.