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Re: NoteMap vs Word
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 3744
Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-12 03:50:01
>Graham, I’m interested by your descrition of NotaBene as “woodwork >without power tools.” What do you mean?
Difficult to really describe, but when working with Nota Bene there is a sense of “crafting” a document. You are given a set of very good tools, that you know will take time to learn, but you feel at the end of it you will be a master craftsman in full control of your end product
With Word,I feel that I am learning to control an out of control power tool, which is excellent at producing 6ft long shelving, but getting it to produce a shelf 5ft 9 inches is a nightmare, and if you don’t watch it like a hawk, suddenly it will be producing 6ft shelves again.
I know this is over the top, but it best describes the general point I am trying to make.
I feel that with Nota Bene you are learning a different kind of skill, and I feel the same way about Brainstorm and Zoot. With these programs you seem to be learning the program at a much lower level of raw program power, where with Word and others, you seem to be learning to overcome a surface layer of the program designed to make it easy to use.
I actually feel the same way about lots of things so maybe its just me.
More and more we are being forced to develop skills in “manipulating machinery” rather than the underlying raw skills. To use a different example My old cameras only had two controls; an aperture ring and a shutter speed dial, in terms of “manipulating the machine” that was all you had to learn - the rest was craftsmanship.
With my current digital SLR, I seem to have dozens of multi-purpose small buttons. I am now forced to carry the instruction book, because even simple operations are obscure and hidden under layers of buttons and menus.
Does that make any sense?
Graham