Re: ndxCards v. 1.92 Re: Lessons from the World of Clip Mana

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2748

Posted by ckester
2005-02-15 14:34:41

> This obviously explains the prevelance of what I call tree-based
> information managers, or TIMs.

So much so that the use of the tree as an organizing principle practically falls off the list of criteria used to differentiate and rank information managers.

More important are features like the kinds of data that can be stored, and the ease with which data can be saved or retrieved. Search capabilities. The ability to draw rich connections between data items. Natural, intuitive support for common tasks like writing research papers, building weblogs, managing shortcuts, project management, document management.

Internet-aware: tapping into published data sources. A good example of this is a Macintosh app I found recently. ReferenceMiner (http://www.sonnysoftware.com/aboutreferenceminer.html) allows you to query the Amazon or Library of Congress databases for books matching your search criteria. Then you can drag lineitems from the results into a companion app called Bookends, which is essentially a bibliographic database. Imagine this functionality coupled with a good outliner, so that you could type in notes from your reading of the books you found, and then use a single-pane outliner to stitch them all together into a paper, without losing the reference to the books where you found the information. (Some of the functionality I’m imagining here can be found in TakeNote http://store.yahoo.net/takenote/index.html. But it’s not Internet-aware, and there are some aspects of the interface that I dislike.)

—Charlie

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