Obsolete and awkward software
Posted by srdiamond15
on 12/18/2005
srdiamond15
12/18/2005 6:12 pm
Neville,
In one of your deleted posts, you maintained that various pims were outdated or awkward. Among them was InfoHandler, which I have come to think of as state of the art. Since it would be overkill for my purposes, I lack significant first-hand familiarity with it. But it would be enlightening to know the respects in which you perceive Surfulator as more up-to-date or more ergonomic than MDE Infohandler. (Bearing in mind that increased power invariably brings about some lessened ease of use.)
Stephen R. Diamond
In one of your deleted posts, you maintained that various pims were outdated or awkward. Among them was InfoHandler, which I have come to think of as state of the art. Since it would be overkill for my purposes, I lack significant first-hand familiarity with it. But it would be enlightening to know the respects in which you perceive Surfulator as more up-to-date or more ergonomic than MDE Infohandler. (Bearing in mind that increased power invariably brings about some lessened ease of use.)
Stephen R. Diamond
daly_de_gagne
12/18/2005 6:36 pm
Stephen, that was part of what my post to Neville was about. He had suggested we should spend more time focusing on contemporary software where developers are making a real effort to be responsive to customers rather than on outdated or awkward PIMs.
I had suggested in my post that a review of our posts would indicate we in fact do as he was suggesting, with a lot of emphasis on such programs as MDE InfoHandler, ADM, Idea, UltraRecall, Brainstorm, and Evernote to name but a few.
I also wrote that my experience with Surfulater was limited because shortly after buying it I began to have the trouble with IE and all programs using an IE overlay such that some pages were render improperly. When the problem was finally remedied, two programs continued to render pages improperly: Evernote and Surfulater.
Another point I made was that I found the options for saving pages to S confusing because it wasn't clear what each one did, and from attempting each option to see what in fact it did I was still confused.
I do not remember if I made this point or not, but I also find that the appearance of S is not very attractive. However, had I the opportunity to try it for some time without the pages rendering themselves improperly, it might have grown on me.
Daly
I had suggested in my post that a review of our posts would indicate we in fact do as he was suggesting, with a lot of emphasis on such programs as MDE InfoHandler, ADM, Idea, UltraRecall, Brainstorm, and Evernote to name but a few.
I also wrote that my experience with Surfulater was limited because shortly after buying it I began to have the trouble with IE and all programs using an IE overlay such that some pages were render improperly. When the problem was finally remedied, two programs continued to render pages improperly: Evernote and Surfulater.
Another point I made was that I found the options for saving pages to S confusing because it wasn't clear what each one did, and from attempting each option to see what in fact it did I was still confused.
I do not remember if I made this point or not, but I also find that the appearance of S is not very attractive. However, had I the opportunity to try it for some time without the pages rendering themselves improperly, it might have grown on me.
Daly
subs
12/18/2005 7:15 pm
Stephen,
I just download V9 of IH and spent 10 minutes playing. Here is my initial reaction.
The entire UI looks like it is from 1990 something.
It uses splitter windows which are a pain.
No use of docking or floating windows, which are common place these days.
It uses Popup windows which get in the way and you have to keep on opening and closing.
No toolbar images on main menu items or context menus.
Toolbar images use old fashioned 16 bit colors.
Tools|Options|Fonts looks like it came from 1985. Haven't they heard of Font pickers.
I can't see even one use of modern UI techniques. And this is a .Net application which has access to all of the latest UI components. I find this more unbelievable than anything else. I assume they just did a quick hacked port of the earlier version to .Net.
Paste content from a Web Page that includes text and images and I get nothing very useful.
Drag an image from IE onto MDE doesn't work. Feature list indicates it should.
Help is WinHelp which was replaced years ago by HTMLhelp.
I'm sure IH is a powerfull application and lots of people love it, but this is 2005 and looking at IH you would never know it.
If it is "state of the art" as you say, then I'm very worried about the state we are all in. AFAIC it isn't even close.
I just download V9 of IH and spent 10 minutes playing. Here is my initial reaction.
The entire UI looks like it is from 1990 something.
It uses splitter windows which are a pain.
No use of docking or floating windows, which are common place these days.
It uses Popup windows which get in the way and you have to keep on opening and closing.
No toolbar images on main menu items or context menus.
Toolbar images use old fashioned 16 bit colors.
Tools|Options|Fonts looks like it came from 1985. Haven't they heard of Font pickers.
I can't see even one use of modern UI techniques. And this is a .Net application which has access to all of the latest UI components. I find this more unbelievable than anything else. I assume they just did a quick hacked port of the earlier version to .Net.
Paste content from a Web Page that includes text and images and I get nothing very useful.
Drag an image from IE onto MDE doesn't work. Feature list indicates it should.
Help is WinHelp which was replaced years ago by HTMLhelp.
I'm sure IH is a powerfull application and lots of people love it, but this is 2005 and looking at IH you would never know it.
If it is "state of the art" as you say, then I'm very worried about the state we are all in. AFAIC it isn't even close.