Re: Looking for the information

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2160

Posted by 100341.2151
2004-08-27 12:32:29

>For the second purpose, an indexed search will often not be effective. For this purpose a program like InfoHandler and Zoot seem excellent: facet analysis or contexually activated material.

I absolutely agree. It’s something like the difference between recall and recognition as memory tasks that we were taught about in psychology. But indexed searching has its place within a program like Zoot - to speed up the search process once its databases get large (e.g., over about 50Mbs). I gather that the developer is hoping to have an integrated indexed searcher in the 32-bit version.

>The main structuring tool is the outliner. This topic begs for a comparative analysis of the virtues and infirmities of the Zoot and outliner approach.

I use them (outliner+Zoot) in a two-stage approach I learned about from Jim Fallows, when he was using Grandview and Agenda for the same purpose. Briefly, one begins to develop an outline for a project in the outliner (NoteMap, say)and, at the same time, sets up a series of folders in Zoot that mirror the main heading and subheadings of the outline. data is then hoovered into Zoot from whatever sources (web, notes, etc.)to provide material for developing the NoteMap outline.

Both the Zoot folder system and the outliner’s outline get modified in the light of developing ideas, so although it’s simple, there is a dynamic interplay.

Zoot is much better (IMHO) than Agenda was for these purposes, but I found Grandview a lot nimbler than NoteMap on my WIN98SE machine. On my new one, NoteMap is a lot quicker than it used to be.

As an aside, on my latest project I found myself having to use Word and its outliner rather than NoteMap, because I needed from the outset to use extensive footnotes. The great thing about Word is that you can make footnotes while outlining. This saves an enormous amount of work later. Before that, using NoteMap, I had attached footnotes to the Notes, using NotewMap’s “Comments” facility - only to find that if I moved a Note, doing so deleted the “Comment”. (The developers know about that one :-) ).

So - to cut a much too long story short - I’d see Zoot and NoteMap as complementary rather than competing packages for this particular task.

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