DataOmega's InSight

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3338

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-05-26 18:50:57

Did anyone try the text-based pim InSight? (http://www.dataomega.com)

I’m increasingly impressed with its facility for reorganizing text, and the lack of need for database maintenance.

Reorganizing is facilitated by its floating windows. Also you can turn on the “Snatcher,” which automatically copies what’s copied to the clipboard to the insertion point or appends it to a topic, as you choose. This is like BrainStorms’s “Magic Paste,” with this difference: you can “Snatch” from _within_ Insight.

Topics are organized into catalogs, which can be as ad hoc or as permanent as one wishes.

The main device for locating material is a highly efficient find command that instantly displays all instances of the found text, and also allows refining the search progressively. To use James Fallows dichotomy, it is a program which intends for you to dump things in without structure, and locates things with search rather than an outline or key words. The problem with this approach, as others have noted here, is the lack of context for searches. But the progressively refined search seems to be an alternative road to coherence, if you start with search terms calculated for the generality of notes containing them.

Stephen R. Diamond

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