MyInfo vs Mybase

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4983

Posted by graham.smith
2006-01-09 13:35:17

As a conclusion to me looking for a program to let me capture graphs and printouts from stats programs, I narrowed my choice down to Mybase and MyInfo.

Both are low resources and very fast. MyIfo being slightly heaveier on resources as it starts at 1200kb and creeps up to 1700kb in use. MyBase seemed to start at about 700kb and move up to 1000kb with use.

Both developers quickly responded to my emails. Indeed Petko at MyInfo offered to write a new routine just for me when I pointed out that IBM Thinkpads don’t have a Window key, and the keyboard short cuts I needed, relied on the Windows key. In fact I discovered that Thinkpads come with keyboard utility that maps the AltGr key to the Windows key, so this wasn’t required.

MyInfo allows you to have several databases open at the same time. Mybase only one at a time. But this will change in February when MyBase 5 is released.

Both programs drop an icon in the system tray, that allows you to switch autopaste of and on. With MyInfo, after you have copied an item you right click on the system tray icon and select the database you want to paste into, this opens MyInfo and you select where you want to paste the item, there is also a quick paste option which again is selected from the system tray icon and pastes the copied item into MyInfo wherever you left the cursor.

In Mybase when you switch on the clipboard monitor from the system tray icon, Ctrl+C in any program opens a pop up MyBase menu. This menu gives a list of options, including switching off the clipboard monitor. Some of these options paste the copied item into myBase as a new item, and you can then carry on working in the program you just pasted from. The other options take you to Mybase to decide where you want to place the item and allows you to add some notes to it. In this respect MyBase was the more powerful.

Now, the bad news:

1. Myinfo doesn’t automatically paste OLE objects, you need to go into the paste special menu and select pasting as an OlE object. According to MyInfo, this is a windows limitation, but this isn’t how MyBase does it. In MyBase, if you copy an OLE object, it is pasted as an OLE object.

2. Once you get an OLE object into MyInfo, you cannot copy it to paste it into a Word processor: there are no copy options available when you select it. You need to open the OLE object back in its native app, copy it in its native app and then paste into your word processor. This is seen as a bug, and will be fixed in a future release.

3. In SPlus (one of my Stats programs) you can edit a command line that hides behind a “copy graph and place on clipboard” icon, so that clicking on the icon, not only copies the graph, but opens a chosen application ready for you to paste the graph into. This worked flawlessly with MyBase, but has given me a bit of a disaster to deal with after using MyInfo.

Every time I pasted an item to MyInfo, one my SPlus toolbars was renamed as GMilenix_MyInfo___[test]1 to Gmilenix_MyInfo__[test]6 before I realised what was going on. I cannot rename or delete these toolbars and everytime I open graph in SPlus all six renamed toolbars open and spread themselves across the screen.

I am hoping a re-install will fix this as at the moment S-Plus is unuseable :-(

So although I think I prefer the overall feel of MyInfo, the lack of bugs, the lower use of resources and the more versatile clipping options, have swung me towards MyBase, and I shall be buying a copy.

Thanks to everyone who offered program suggestions. Bear in mind that I had a very specific use for the program: clipping and collating graphs, programming code and statistical print out from several statistics programs into one place.

Graham

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