Re: 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: 3116

Posted by graham.smith
2005-04-09 03:27:14

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

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