Re: InSight's features promote insight

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3355

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-05-30 15:44:27

I think your question is essential, in that I did buy it with a specific purpose in mind. This contrasts with my previous purchase behavior, where I generally obtain a license to use the software because of more generalized dimensions of quality. For example, I have a license for Idea! Professional, because I think it best embodies the logic of faceted classification, in a vehicle with a lighter feel than MDE InfoHandler. (I don’t have a lot of experience with the latter product.)

Perhaps to rationalize my CRIMP, I am thinking increasingly in terms of specificity, of pims for specific purposes rather than for instantiating my ‘philosophical’ positions. Idea! will no doubt be useful when I have a great deal of data of the right kind to organize.I like having it on hand, but have yet to put it to anything more than test uses.

The purpose for which I bought the InSight license is to rewrite a book length manuscript. The desirable features are comparing versions and sections side by side; finding and displaying the results of searches within the manuscript all at once in context; very quickly combining topics into catalogs, and ordering them (corresponding to chapters); combining catalogs into projects that are displayed at one time (to tackle easily matters strewn throughout the draft on a single desktop); a magic paste like function that operates within the program (to facilitate different recombinations of material).

For subjective reasons, I also find it easier to take notes in plain text. It gives the notes a tentative feel; but probably that’s just me.

I think the way the developer sees the product, it is a general notetaking, information gathering environment which allows you to build an organization without pre-planning or much maintenance. The key feature is probably the find command, which progressively narrows the choices and displays all found lines. General and narrowed searches substitute for hierarchical depth as the main pragmatic approach to retrieval. (James Fallows has written of the split between two schools of information management, depending on whether the main trick is storage organization or retrieval.)

Stephen R. Diamond

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