An organizer should facilitate three activities: entering information, finding information, and using information. Most traditional products have focused primarily on the finding component. "Never lose anything" is the refrain. With the recent advent of notetaking application fueled by the tablet PC, strides have been made in the entering of information, such that the user is no longer limited to typing.

Few developers seem to care much about actually using the information that has been entered and duly found. The most basic features pertaining to use are absent from most applications in this category. Consider this: how many pims provide a mechanism for extracting information from various notes and amalgamating it? To break up notes and recombine the information--what could be more fundamental--in applications as varied as ADM3, OneNote, UltraRecall, ndxCards, and MyInfo3, the user must resort to ordinary cut and paste operations. One of the few applications that addresses the problem, InfoRecall, really provides nothing stronger than the equivalent of a clip manager to recombine information. (I should note, however, that UltraRecall includes recombination in its future plans--but it is a _distant_ plan.)

Zoot is the most obvious exception. I don't completely understand how the "Zooter" works. So I hope users will correct me if my surmise is wrong, but it appears to send selected material to another location. If so, it is a solution not tremendously better than a clip manager, and one remarkable mainly in the thoroughness of its implementation.

Part of the reason for lack of development surrounding this kind of feature, no doubt, is that it isn't immediately obvious how to expedite recombination. The only new idea I've come across can be found in sycon's Idea! Idea! allows you to select multiple records in the matrix and then combine them all at a stroke. You are then presented with the combined result, where you can delete the parts you don't need. I think this represents a significant advance over the "send to" approach both in efficiency and clarity. You see the combined records in the new context, and from there have a better idea of what to strike. Like many features in Idea!, you probably won't know this feature exists unless you either read the manual or ask, which is what I did.

Stephen R. Diamond

Consider this: how many pims provide a mechanism for extracting information from various notes and amalgamating it?

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I find the two-pane (or three-pane) outliners far less appropriate for writing than the one-panes. In a one-pane outliner just moving your elements around achieves the combinations you're refering to.

I can think of two other PIM-type programs that have (or, in one case, had) this facility: Acute Notes (which appears defunct), and Literary Machine. In LM, you can select any notes and have them appear in a single window... I think the developer calls it the "book" view or something like that.

As a work-around, of course, you can use BrainStorm's Magic Paste feature to clip text from multiple sources, then shuffle it around at will once it's in BS.

Steve Z.

Stephen,

ndxCards may be a bit better than you suggest.

You can open a project outline in one window and the open the Notes List in another. You can then drag notes from the Notes list into the Outline. the Outline is then exported as a Word or RTF document.

You can also open several notes at the same time, but you cannot drag an open note or text within an open note into the project pane.

The next version of ndxCards is going to have a "desktop" where you can scatter, shuffle and stack open notes, into some organised fashion before dragging into the Outline. Or something lke that - I haven't seen what they have done.

With Zoot you would use its Autoassign tools to gather all the relevant information into a single folder. There is a lot of flexibility in how you do that.

For example, If you were trying to gather together all you research on "outliners"

You would set up a new folder in Zoot called "Outliners" You would then set up a rule for that folder for it to gather together every entry in Zoot that contains the word "outliner".

The folder would then be almost instantly populated with every Zoot item that contained the Word "Outline". In fact if you have linked any external files to Zoot (PDFs, Word Documents, HTML files etc), it would also contain links to any document on your hard drive that contained the word "outliner" and show the first 32kb of text in that document.

It doesn't actually move any information, the folder is just a filter to everything that contains the Word "outliner"

You can set up several rules for any single Zoot folder and you can explicitly remove items that Zoot has found but you consider irrelevant. You can also explicitly add items that do not contain the words you have set up rules for.

If you had been gathering in

Getting information from Zoot to another application is a little better than using the Clipboard because you send items from Zoot to any running application without going through the copy and paste routine.

Having said that, I agree with the general point you are making, but I find Zoot and ndxCards to be better than other programs I have tried.

Graham