Re: Surviving outlining fever (longish!)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2836

Posted by sub
2005-02-23 06:58:00

[Steve Z.: I agree that the UI is extremely important with PIMs. I guess it is because a good PIM requires a lot of interaction with your data and should provide various views of it as well, so you are continually facing the UI.]

You are indeed facing the UI much more than with other applications, because the UI is to a large extent what a PIM is all about; collection, classification and retrieval of information items, interactive navigation, i.e. various views, “greater picture” etc, all these have to do with the UI and constitute what one bought the PIM for in the first place.

By contrast, when working with a Word, Excel etc document, you are more or less “focusing” on just one of the information items that might be contained in the PIM database.

The other kind of program where the UI is so crucial is a standard database aplication like Access. It is not surprising then that the various database management systems have so differing UIs, starting with different representations of data relationships, even though the underlying structures might be very similar.

alx

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