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Best app for collecting information
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 3803
Posted by pma
2005-08-18 08:44:59
<procrastination>
An optimal way to collect information for something you are going to write would be to enter your notes in an application, where you have
A. An information gatherer:
- The citation
- Your own comments (how does it relate to your work)
- The source
- One or more categories, which directly relate to an outline
Taking notes from web pages, you would often just copy and paste the actual citation, (it should fill out the source automatically, making a link to the web page). Taking notes from printed material, you should have a Scanner Pen, that would feed the citation directly into the app. Preferably, there should be integration with a bibliographic database as well.
B. An outline:
The latter should then communicate with your outline, so that when you added a topic in the outline, the topic would also be added to the list of categories mentioned above.
And in the outline, you would see the notes belonging to each topic.
Is this what ADM and/or Zoot does?
If so, then what would be the reason for selecting one over the other? I have followed the conversations on those programs here and on yahoo groups etc., but I’m still puzzeled. Do they basically do the same things? I got the impression here that Zoot is more difficult to learn, but stronger than ADM. Or the other way around: ADM is more user friendly than Zoot, and though being a competent program, it lacks some of the functionality of Zoot.
Or is Zoot just more “nerdish” than ADM - basically having the same functionaliy?
There is not much point in going for the less user friendly application, if you don’t get something in return.
I guess that ADM and Zoot are the only apps to consider for this information gathering and sorting task, or are there other apps out there? CAN ADM or Zoot actually do what I’ve described above?
</procrastination>