More on MyInfo3(public beta) vs. Ultra Recall

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2441

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-01-05 13:47:10

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

Back to archived message list