askSam dead?

Posted by 22111
Sep 13, 2013 at 03:15 PM

This is not a ramble, everything is so true:

“that support was lacking.” - well, at that time there was support, but very standardized: “Send us your whole file, we try to save the most of it and don’t look at its contents”; that’s not good, but it worked, in a way. But then, people using AS for professional tasks used and use to back up their data up to 5 times a day… which is a contradictio in adiecto, meaning to do this for general purposes is ok, but having to do this for combatting the unreliability of your tool, well, it’s sort of crazy.

“Multiple posts on the support forums saved me from Ask Sam, as did its price, which was even more exorbitant than IS.” - You made my day! Explanation: I was responsible for some harsh comments there, but I was a neglected customer then, when today, they are moribund, and have never been replaced by something better, so today I defend them; I know there is some ridicule in this, though.

“and realized I’d probably be disappointed if I actually bought it” - I know perfectly well all the details for your saying this, and I convene on every one of them.

“Both programs may have been promising, good even, at early points in their history.” - Well, in fact, in their time, they were both not “good even”, but sensational; that’s why even today they have their followers, cf. my link to “late abandoners” or what we were called there: You never forget WHY you once were truly in love, and you cannot help but feel fond about.

“But unrealistic pricing, poor customer support, a myriad of problems transferred from update to update, version to version, have all brought IS and AS to the point where their future is in doubt.” - No one could have said it any better, you are on spot.

“AS still intrigues me - but it needs development in capable hands, and with an eye to the cloud - that’s a must these days.” Both points are totally correct, and, as myself explained here, AS’ development does NOT seem to be in capable hands… by which all discussion on AS, from a matter-of-fact point of view, should to be aborted (but see above, loyalty being a sentiment not to be gotten rid of so easily).

“IS limps along and, sadly, some of the people who’ve used it since its earliest day, still praise it, unaware of modern alternatives.” - Again, it’s all about sentiment; there is no technical reason whatsoever to cling to this program (on DC, one can find many details about it).

“I think Neville [Surfulater] has a much better handle on what information management entails than Evernote’s developer has.” - Right, but then, I simply don’t remember the possible search terms, very often, I need “context”; Evernote (considering its success) team seem to have grasped that most people don’t need this outlined context, but function very well with “thin files”, and get to them by searching. I don’t understand this paradigm, but it seems most people function by that. This also could be the “secret” behind the phenomenon that most people out there never even touch an outliner during their whole pc life.

“MyInfo and WhizFolders are both great programs, but I fear for their future if they’re unable to adapt to a cloud oriented world.” - 4 times true; both for their quality, and both for the risks they’re running.

“Another sign of change: while we might see software costing more than $100 as pricey, many of the newer apps for desktop and mobile are bought on a subscription basis. That may be more fair for developers, but it means we may easily end up paying more than we would have previously been willing for a single program.” - totally correct, and there is even an additional problem: Users will accept this with “big” programs (MindJet (as they call MindManager now), all the Adobe stuff, even MS…), when on the other hand, “little” developers will lose their customer base by it (it’s “image”: from those, we accept to be treated this way, from these, we don’t; and it’s “transaction costs” - for the “bigger” things, you accept to do that additional work, for the lesser important things, you want to be left alone); this being said, I would gladly accept the InfoSelect 50 dollars a year fee, were it under continuous and sensible development, which it is not.

“we could well see much better programs than AskSam or InfoSelect bite the dust.” - very true, but then, it’s a two-faced coin; all these programs we are thinking about here do not do what it takes to stay afloat. To put it bluntly, that’s also due to the fact that this web integration side is hard to program, and even hard to conceive to begin with. And also, as has been said with respect to Ultra Recall, some developers even shrink back from buying, for 500, 800 dollars, a decent editor to integrate into their program, preferring something free from MS but which, over the years, makes them lose a 4-digit figure of customers.

“it’s extremely convenient to glance at my files on the phone and tablet. When I’m walking around in a library, it’s helpful to have on my phone a list of the books and periodicals that I need to consult” - I very much hope Windows tablets will get better (more battery power / less battery consumption; less weight…): at the end of the day, it would be much simpler to just get your original files with you, everywhere (and especially into the library, to the customer…), than to have (even good) interaction between your main hardware, and some “hardware for the road”. My vision of this follows that age-old concept of notebooks and their “docking stations” connecting them to the rest of your hardware, but not entirely:

Why not have powerful hardware (including the “desktop”) in your office, but leave your data within your slate? So your desktop equipment would just access the harddisk in your slate… and perhaps even use it as an additional keyboard for special keys, for readily-available macros of all sorts here in the office?

“It is a very robust database” - it’s the same database as in Ultra Recall and in many others, free, robust, good search capabilities, and so on, but as in Ultra Recall, some people admire the program when in fact they are just fond of the qualities of the database brings to the product; UR is a fine example of “sophisticated” software where almost all of the relevant power comes from the database itself. (This also means that the developer of UR did much less in programming work than most people admiring his end product would assume, and this also explains why further development is so slow: Even at the beginning, he did not that much but just translated the power of its gratis database into some gui access for the layman.)

“I know, compulsive note-taking is a sickness” - no, it gets sick when you don’t find them speedy, later on, that’s why I so much need “context”, and that’s why for most people searching is so important, or then, tagging, the concept relying both.

“and general searches in that notebook will then find words or phrases in those files” - I envy you, I don’t have the memory any more for knowing what I could want to search (800 hits for your main search term… then you add some other, but not all of them, so you leave out important things, and even more so if you exclude some search terms… and in the end, you have got 400 hits, but in which some 10 or 12 important ones are missing: this is a nightmare; unfortunately, just google and so on perfected their search technology, when in applications we can buy, almost nothing has been done here within the last 15 (or even 20) years (where “semantic search” was put into some applications that later died: almost incredible; and yes, this would have been one thing that would have made AS roar to the limelight, but the opposite is true, AS “killing” some competitors that had semantic search, in its prime time).

“When I am reading a printed book or periodical (I’m not talking about digital versions here) and I come upon a passage that interests me, I photograph the page with my iPhone and pop it into Evernote.” - This is fantastic; no comparison with my scanning with a flat-bed scanning machine (which is so much trouble that most of the time, I type those passages by hand).

“I photographed a page of a book I was reading—in the living room, under not especially good light—that was published in 1722. I sent it to Evernote via CamScanner, all quite effortlessly, and the image was then easily searchable in EN” - the casual reader might be reminded here that both paper and type are both to be assumed to be far from today’s standards: fantastic!

“Sorry, I seem to have strayed rather far from the subject of askSam” - that’s not even true, since AS and EN have a very important thing in common, their lacking of a (native) outline structure, and for that reason their need for very good searching; but there is not the slightest doubt that for importing things, a paramount need today, EN does very well, when AS is one of the poorest contenders in this respect.

I explained why AS is really good for some tasks, in another thread here: You can search for number ranges (!!!) within the text, if you do it by (simili) “fields”, and this for 100 dollar if you buy the prof. version on bits. This is unrivalled to my knowledge. This being said, except for this special task, its numerous faults make AS use almost unacceptable.

The only problem here is, in so many workflows, having this unique capability, number ranges within text, comes extremely handy. And this is a fact totally independent of my fondness for AS for their spectacular quality in their very early years.

(And here we are again at our original problem: Why such spectacular, unique capabilities of just some, otherwise rather bad programs don’t make their way into better programs? Just remember, to replicate this capability, you either must buy dtSearch, or you must export your data into something like KEdit, when in AS, and in AS alone, you are able to select “records” from numeric ranges in specific “fields”; and remember we are always within a “text processor” here, not in a dedicated database, so this is really unique.)