Our sets

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4505

Posted by pma
2005-11-01 07:53:00

As this discussion anyway seems to have broader interest, I’ll just continue it here, instead of mailing Daly directly. It is, however, kind of continuation of a thread that was here this summer (“My set”, I think it was called).

Initially, I would like to state that although I’ve been active here during the last couple of months, I’m not at all an expert on the kind of applications discussed. I’m simply trying to find my way through the jungle, and find the very helpful people and friendly atmosphere much stimulating for getting an overview of a very interesting field, as well as discussing broader aspects of the writing process.

First to answer Wojciech’s question: I’ve just registered BrainStorm yesterday. I’ve been drifting between various outliners (BrainStorm, ADM, NoteMap and several others) for structuring my snips and pieces into a structure, but ended up with BrainStorm. Here is why (pasted from a mail to the BS development team) - :

“During the last couple of days I “gave in”, surrendered to BS and found that I started to get some kind of control of all the bits and pieces I’ve stored all over the place, related to my thesis. Because it kind of provides the link between the highly chaotic and lateral nature of raw notes, and the sequential structure of a written document. It’s probably a mix of having worked with the same problems for more than 2 years now, and having a tool like BS, but at last I’m actually able to visionalise the structure of my thesis, and of the details within in.”

For information management (mainly recording notes and taking info from the web), I’ve tried Zoot and InfoHandler. I ended up liking Zoot a lot, and I will probably register it one of these days (it has recently become a bit more aggresive in nagging me to pay). What I find the problem in many of these kinds of programs - as I’ve stated before here - is the obligation for some kind of title for every snippet you include. Zoot can give that automatically, while I really have to articulate it using IH.

For long time I thought that I could use Zoot in a kind of integrated info collecting + structuring process, but it wasn’t feasable. I have - however - an idea of integration between Zoot and BrainStorm, which I will take up in another thread here in the near future.

I still use Word for writing the final draft. I manage my bibliography in Reference Management, which is an old, rather stable, ship, but it’s features and user interface is like an anacronism.

Daly, actually, somehow I got the impression that BrainStorm was also part of your writing environment?

And another question/observation: I see that you mainly use ADM for grabbing web pages with grapics. However, I considered ADM more like an outliner for specific projects. I mean, you have the hierarchical structure inherently, so I find it difficult to visionalise using it for a kind of database of web pages. Also, don’t you find it confusing to have your information database (of which the web clippings conceptually must be a part) spread over several applications?

And, Daly, if (read when!) Zoot comes in the much awaited 32 bit version, will to be likely to shift from IH to Zoot? Why? What would Zoot offer you that you don’t get in IH? (I’m looking after more concrete terms than e.g. “versatility”). Thanks.

Again sorry for the long post.

Regards,
Peter.

Back to archived message list