Re: Zoot Power (was Mind Raider)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3947

Posted by sub
2005-08-26 16:10:39

[I’m not sure if this wows you or not—maybe you’re going to tell me IDEA does all this and more.]

Warm thanks for the presentation Steve; yes, it wows me and I will tell you that neither IDEA nor any other software I know of does even half of what you mentioned.

I think I now realise Zoot’s secret; the collection of modules/features it represents can be freely combined and integrated. It looks as if Tom Davis himself might have trouble knowing what all the possible applications are.

What I find amazing is that many of these features are not necessarily innovative, but rather tools that have been lying around for ages, such as text string functions that have been well integrated and offered to the user.

For example, you said you “set “Product:” as the item delimiter, which means Zoot will create a new item whenever it sees that text string”.

Back in 1993 I used a brilliant shareware database called File Express to transfer a 5,000 donor database, including donation records, from a printed-to-ASCII-file report to Paradox 3.5 for DOS.

As far as I know, if I wanted to do the same thing today, I would either have to use File Express again, or write a script in some dedicated tool to do the text processing.

There are many of other examples; I think Zoot, UltraRecall and AskSam are the only information managers that can export their metadata, i.e. item attributes, but Zoot seems to have a lot more ways to do it.

alx

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