I looked at the Idea! Web site and read its description. It has 4 on-screen windows, including a tree, a list of attachments and, if I remember correctly, a place to put concepts,etc. with links to the attachments. The attachments appear to be links to OLE files rather than the files themselves being stored within Idea! It did not look like Idea! could search the attachments, but I asked their support. Here is the response:

"Yes, Idea! can search the content of the attached files. We just
implemented this function and on this moment I finished the documentation in german and will continue to translate it now into english.

"We use the indexer of the operating system (from MS Windows 2000, 2003 or XP) to realize this function. The index catalog of the operating can be addressed for a full text search beside the internal search in IDEA!. And we have a function that lets you build the intersection between both results.

"I will try to send you the english documentation today. If I can't make it today, you will have it tomorrow. The documentation also covers some additional features of the coming new release. Testing for this new version is still ongoing but the version has the status of a release candidate (it will most probably be released end of this week or next week).

"If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me."

So, this may be very useful, depending on how robust the search function is. It did seem that Idea! requires a fair amount of up-front work: You have to decide on the concepts up-front and establish links between them and attachments. I do not know if new attachments can automatically be linked to existing concepts.

Finally, as I have sometimes done before, I invited the Idea! people to check out this site with the aim of seeing some of the functionality we think is important.

-sc

I have played around with the free version of Idea! It has some unique and interesting ideas (pun intended) built in. One thing that I didn't like was that it seemed that the four windows or panes were more or less static... that is, I couldn't close one and expand one for instance. Is that what others have found, or did I miss some mechanism for customizing the desktop (or whatever it is they call their environment)?

Steve Z.

Probably the most useful feature of GrandView, Agenda, and Zoot was/is the ability one has to set up rules that tell the program that when it encounters a certain group of words in a new entry, it should automatically assign or connect the new entry to one or more specific categories or concepts.

Have any of you found other programs that can do this? That is, one doesn't have to manually make the assignment. If so, please elaborate.

Thanks!

-sc