Sycon's Idea!

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 1964

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-06-23 01:21:09

Here’s a database outliner that I find quite attractive. It is named Idea!, by a German quality assurance company called Sycon. (http://www.sycon.de/eng/)

It’s unusualness is rather subtle, but it incorporates several features I have come to see as useful in this type of product:

1. There are key words, organized in a hierarchy, with proper inheritance applying.

2. There is a sharp distinction between a document and a category.

3. Documents can accumulate before they are assigned key words.

There is also a very nice feature, OLE objects, that I had never noticed before in a hierarchical database, although after looking for it, found it implemented in a couple of others: WhizFolders Organizer Pro and MyInfo. The OLE feature allows a Word (or other MS Office) “object” to be inserted directly on a page in the pim. Now my high hope for this feature was that you could get the MS outline _view_ within the pim, and according to the developer, this should work, but I haven’t been able to get it going.

We all have seen two-pane outliners and even three-pane ones, but Idea! is a four-pane outliner. The panes are: the list of documents; the category tree (with documents that can be shown or suppressed under their categories); the text window; and the attachment window.

The outlining in the category tree isn’t terribly sophisticated, but it is better developed than in any of the other three databases with hierarchical key words: MDE InfoHandler, Karteset, and NoteLens. Documents can be assigned to multiple nodes in the hierarchy, and this is accomplished directly by dragging from the document list to the category tree. To me the metaphor of dragging documents to the tree is more intuitive than assigning keywords to documents, although I think they are logically equivalent. Categories are unfortunately only selectable one at a time, but documents can be multiply selected and this can be done discontiguously.

I find this a very convenient work environment. My only major reservation concerns the limit of one open window at a time.

srdiamond

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