Ongoing Assessments

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2063

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-07-17 22:21:10

Of the new breed of pims, I’m now the proud owner of licenses to: ADM 3, InfoRecallXP 2004, and Idea! Personal Edition.

InfoRecall is pretty stable on an XP system. I’ve been using it a lot and it hasn’t crashed so long as I avoid maybe 3 actions that I had no reason to try to crash it. Unless there are hidden instabilities, I consider the the current best of the traditional hierarchical pims, because of the excellence of its window management and the power of its find function. One defect that I should note is it insists on alphabetical sorts.

Despite the fact that InfoRecall has a better editor, window management, and multiple topic selection, to me Idea! provides a more inviting writing environment. I don’t know how much of this is my idiosyncracy, but the fact that you can avoid assigning a document to any category until you are ready to matters a lot. Why? It isn’t hard to assign to a general root category and reassign later, but the fact that the program works according to a logic that makes sense to me seems to matter more than window management or fancy editing.

I use BrainStorm with Idea! That is I think in BrainStorm and paste the results into Idea! ADM 3 allows a single application for composing and organizing, which in theory is preferable. The outliner is a little less powerful than BrainStorm but a little more ergonomic. If it improves its cloning functionality, its database capabilities will be comparable to Idea!.

So let the competition begin: BrainStorm + Idea! vs. ADM 3

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