Re: 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: 3816

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-08-18 18:58:48

ADM is essentially a multi-pane outline-based database. It works with your data in relation to the outline the same way as 2-pane information managers. So if you know TreePad, KeyNote, ActionOutline, Jot, UltraRecall, or MyInfo, you have the basic idea of ADM, as to how it relates data to the outline. (If you don’t know these 2-pane outliners, what planet are you from? Kidding.) Where it differs is that the outliner is much more powerful than that in these other products and it has an advanced column scheme for metadata, like MyInfo but a lot more powerful. The presence of annoying (or worse) bugs and the absence of an undo command in the tree makes it unsuitable for important work, in my opinion. But it is an opinion that may be hotly contested in this forum.

I haven’t used Zoot, so I’ll leave the explanation to others, but the consensus is that Zoot is the most powerful utility on the planet for collecting, organizing, and retrieving data. Its difficulty seems to be generally over-rated. It’s main limitation is that it is plain text only. (So what do you do if you have a quote that’s formatted, say with bolding. How do you retain that information, since you will need to reproduce or at least acknowledge it in your document? Maybe someone else can answer that. I don’t know.)

I haven’t heard that ADM comes near to Zoot for pure data management. The only application I’ve heard of that rivals it is MDE InfoHandler. Again, I don’t use it—my work isn’t that extremely data intensive as that of others seems to be. But I think if I were in the market for an application to manage a huge amount of data, InfoHandler would be the first one I’d look at.

The only application I’m aware of that functions the way you suggest in connecting the outline to the data is ndxCards. I think it would be very nice for collecting information, if you don’t have so much that you need the ones mentioned. The developer is careful and generally avoids bugs and instability, but the product is still young, perhaps still too immature for the most serious use professionally or academically. Perhaps not. What it now lacks but is in the works is a work space in which the cards that form its foundation can be organized. This feature will, I think, likely be the threshold after which it will be fully recommendable for serious work.

Stephen R. Diamond

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