More on MyInfo3(public beta) vs. Ultra Recall
Posted by srdiamond15
on 1/5/2005
srdiamond15
1/5/2005 1:47 pm
I have been looking at the search function in Ultra Recall. It is very sophisticated. There tends to be little ground between search engines that require mastery of regular expressions and those that apply Boolean logic in only the simplest way, that is, without nesting. UR has a way to nest Boolean terms, using an intuitive system of indentation.
The difference between Ultra Recall and MyInfo3 is the difference between the molar and the molecular. Ultra Recall excels at the organization of items. (Although there's one glaring weakness in the current version: the only way to *reorder* items is with the up and down arrows or their keyboard equivalent. No drag and drop for reordering--but then InfoRecallXP 2003 doesn't allow free reordering at all. This will probably change though in UR.)
MyInfo3, on the other hand, offers more control over an individual item (info item in UR; document in MyInfo3). You cannot insert a table directly into UR, and the developer has no definite intention of implementing tables. MyInfo3 also has full font and paragraph style control, so if you choose, you can accomplish a lot of formatting within the pim.
More globally the two programs have a different design philosophy. Both aim at power and elegance, but UR's primary emphasis is on power and MyInfo's on elegance. Do you create as powerful a program as possible, without introducing complexities likely to confuse, or do you create as elegant a program as possible that contains the key features of a modern outline-based knowledge organizer? Is this just a question of taste; of style of work or cognitive style more broadly; or maybe of intended purpose?
Stephen R. Diamond
The difference between Ultra Recall and MyInfo3 is the difference between the molar and the molecular. Ultra Recall excels at the organization of items. (Although there's one glaring weakness in the current version: the only way to *reorder* items is with the up and down arrows or their keyboard equivalent. No drag and drop for reordering--but then InfoRecallXP 2003 doesn't allow free reordering at all. This will probably change though in UR.)
MyInfo3, on the other hand, offers more control over an individual item (info item in UR; document in MyInfo3). You cannot insert a table directly into UR, and the developer has no definite intention of implementing tables. MyInfo3 also has full font and paragraph style control, so if you choose, you can accomplish a lot of formatting within the pim.
More globally the two programs have a different design philosophy. Both aim at power and elegance, but UR's primary emphasis is on power and MyInfo's on elegance. Do you create as powerful a program as possible, without introducing complexities likely to confuse, or do you create as elegant a program as possible that contains the key features of a modern outline-based knowledge organizer? Is this just a question of taste; of style of work or cognitive style more broadly; or maybe of intended purpose?
Stephen R. Diamond
stephenz
1/5/2005 2:16 pm
Related to your issue of elegance, a difference that matters to me is that in MyInfo 3, you can access different topics quickly and easily through the new tabbed interface... essentially, this is like having a hoist feature for the top level categories in an outline, but it helps to cut data up in easier to peruse chunks. One of the major drawbacks of any tree-based info manager is that it gets crowded awfully fast. UR can only open one database at a time, but does allow you to open multiple instances of the program, so you can, in effect, switch back and forth between two files, but this seems somewhat clumsy and awkward.
Steve Z.
Steve Z.