Re: Is outlining the best free form database organization?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1887

Posted by ureadit
2004-05-10 19:17:20

Steve D,

I expect that the reason ADM has not had more success is its interface. Most people today are not willing to spend time reading a manual or dealing with a not-very-user-friendly interface. A couple of years ago, I wrote a users’ guide for a technical program that had some important-to-know subtleties and “gotchas.” Despite being step-by-step and despite warnings, most users still would not read the manual.

I must admit that I don’t know if, today, I would be willing to put the effort into a program that I did with GrandView. Of course, I’m nearing retirement, so maybe I don’t have the patience anymore.

I can’t really see having a hierarchy of keywords. I can, however see having overlapping “bins” of keywords, where related key words are in a bin. For example, a bin called “color” could contain red, blue, and orange, and orange could also be in a bin called “food.” Of course, one could then have bins containing bins and use boolean/logical constructs to help restrict keyword selections. Zoot probably does something like this and perhaps also Ask Sam.

Some time ago, perhaps before you joined the discussion, I equated the trees in tree-based PIMS to adjustable tables of contents and the “Find” function to a flexible index.

I’ll have to do some hard thinking on this, as lately I’ve been using PIMs only as info storage. Unfortunately, I work for the Government in Washington, and that tends to deaden one’s brain.

-sc

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