Recombination in Idea!

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3112

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-04-08 21:23:49

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

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