I downloaded Ecco to see what all the fuss is about. While it's a full-featured PIM, I don't think it is a particularly powerful outliner for writing or thinking by today's standards. As an outliner, the Big Windows Three, BrainStorm, NoteMap, and ADM, easily surpass it. It lacks various basic reorganizing commands such as mark and gather and hoist.

I bought Ecco several years ago, on Ebay, and after toying with it for awhile I set it aside in favor of Info Select. After spending years with Info Select I started getting restless and gave Ecco another chance. I began by reading a lot of the back issues of Easy Ecco Newsletters and started learning about some of the programs finer points. I discovered that the real key to working with Ecco was making use of Columns to help "slice and dice" data in all manner of ways. By using columns along with filtering you can do all sorts of tricks that may not be apparent at first such as hoisting (or a facsimile of) and gathering. You can also have an item belong to mutiple parent folders and achieve a non-linear data structure that comes close to the pseudo nueral network type structures that The Brain is capable of.

There are a lot of other interesting features, like Forms and multiple views, that are too numerous for me to go into right now but suffice to say that Ecco is a very powerfull program with benefits that are not readily visible untill you really spend some time with it.

I am currently in the proccess of porting over all of my data from Info Select to Ecco and trying different data managment scenarios out to see if it will fit my needs. So far so good.