ndxCards
Posted by daly_de_gagne
on 7/21/2005
daly_de_gagne
7/21/2005 8:00 pm
As I am trying to rationalize my use of programs for different functions, I am increasingly leaning to using ndxCards as a writing environment. I learned today that one of the social work schools wants me to give a three hour lecture on therapy for adolescents on Aug. 3, so I decided to use ndxCards to generate both some ideas and an outline of the presentation.
Generally speaking I was very impressed with the way the software's designers have implemented the index card metaphor, and the simple, minimalist outliner. The bibliographic side of the program is light weight at best (For example, while it allows for a book source, it does not give the user the choice of an edited book source (ie. a book that is an anthology of chapters by different writers. Edited books are, however, very common in the academic literature.).
A key advantage from a writing perspective is that ndxCards allows multiple open windows.
Daly
Generally speaking I was very impressed with the way the software's designers have implemented the index card metaphor, and the simple, minimalist outliner. The bibliographic side of the program is light weight at best (For example, while it allows for a book source, it does not give the user the choice of an edited book source (ie. a book that is an anthology of chapters by different writers. Edited books are, however, very common in the academic literature.).
A key advantage from a writing perspective is that ndxCards allows multiple open windows.
Daly
graham.smith
7/22/2005 5:31 am
I am increasingly leaning to using ndxCards as a writing environment.
I am also constantly going through some sort of rationalisation :-(
The 1.93 beta (which has just come off beta so presumably should soon be the current release) offers an edited book as source option. plus the ability to import and export to EndNote. This uses the REFER format so should work with other bibliographic programs.
Brainstorm also allows multiple open windows and is probably a better overall tool for thinking/writing, but is not as useful as a database.
As with you, I am very impressed with ndxCards, but I am finding that it overlaps considerably with Zoot and Brainstorm, and I am having problems deciding where it should sit in my workflow. The really big advantage of Zoot over everything else I have used is the way you can almost instantly hoover data into it. ndxCards is more versatile in the types of data it can store, but much much slower at adding and retreiving data than Zoot.
ndxCards is however, very good at structuring data into an Outline that could form the basis of lecture (as you have found out)but I tend to want to do that in Brainstorm or Mind Manager.
However, I do think that ndxCards is a great program and I am desperately trying to work out how best to fit it in with my other programs :-(
Graham