Zoot XT and Evernote

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Sep 30, 2013 at 01:36 AM

Interesting discussion here. OK, so what about Zoot XT and Evernote?
Well, they are two of my “favourites”.
Since using Lotus Agenda on MS-DOS PCs in the late ‘80s, anything which had a similar potential for usefulness as a PIM (Personal Information Manager) has been of great interest to me. That that includes anything that can be used to collect, analyse, sort, search and extract information/knowledge for use in *thinking*. By “thinking” I mean the activity involved in assembling information and knowledge and synthesizing it into something new - (say) maybe new (to me) thoughts or rational arguments - and articulating those in structured rational form into *written English language* or numbers in tables, with visual graphs/illustrations where useful. I do not mean to suggest here that things like (say) Powerpoint presentations are a substitute for thinking. What I mean is that the act of articulating your synthesis in structured form into written language or numbers IS the act of thinking, and when someone else reads it then that is a completed communication of your thinking. (The sad thing about this definition of the act of thinking is that one realises that when one is saying “I think that such and such”, one is probably not actually thinking very much at all, but merely regurgitating a jumble of possibly related concepts and metaphors through the filters of one’s paradigms/beliefs/opinions.)

So I have been experimenting with, trialling and using various PIMs, including, for example, Zoot, InfoQube, InfoSelect and Evernote in their respective progressive incarnations for years - as well as many different “writing tools” and “distraction-free writing tools” and RSS/Atom feed aggregators or “feed readers”.
One PIM in particular that seemed to have impressive potential for use was Evernote, and when they added the ability to detect, search for and find text in images (e.g., photos), I was sold. However, when it became apparent that the full ball of wax was only going to be made available via the online service and was not to be allowed to be duplicated or function on the desktop client, I was rapidly unsold. I could see why they did that - it was to lock-in and protect their main source of revenue, which their business model dictated as being online resource usage. However, my requirements mandated that I be able to access and manage my PIM information database and tools online and offline on a PC, with the PC database being the main/primary as and when I needed it to be.

As a result of having access to Microsoft’s superb corporate Home Use special deal for MS Office (full corporate version) for $9.95, I have had the opportunity since about 2008 to experiment with and trial - and I now use - MS OneNote. This was for versions 2007 and 2013. I am pretty ambivalent towards M$ Corp. I have been critical of them for years, mainly because of their cuckoo-like and monopolistic practices and their tendency to strong-arm competitors, suppliers, and customers alike. However, I have been favourably inclined towards them because of the constantly-improving and now arguably brilliant quality of their software - e.g., including the successive versions of Windows operating system(s) and applications like MS Office (Word, Excel, Access, OneNote, InfoPath), MS Security Essentials, SharePoint, disk compression, and TS (Terminal Services).

As far as my current understanding goes, Evernote is entirely eclipsed by Onenote, and seems unlikely to be able to catch up unless they seriously redevelop EverNote and the Evernote business model. That would seem unlikely to happen in the short term.

OneNote is sold as a note-taking application and seems to be aimed mainly at the corporate and student users/sectors. The public praises of OneNote seem to be subdued for some reason, but I suspect that may be because OneNote is a bit like Zoot in the sense that it can do so much and can seem so complicated that no-one is entirely sure exactly what it can do and what it is for.

Discussed elsewhere in OutlinerSoftware are some of the useful OneNote features, including those for coping with text automatically OCRed and indexed from images, text automatically detected and indexed from audio recordings (including mp3 songs), and synchronisation with audio transcripts. No other commercially available system that I am currently aware of can offer such a comprehensive set of useful functionality as OneNote, so I have moved to becoming a confirmed user of OneNote as opposed to just trialling it.

In a discussion: Strategy for capturing and retaining OCRed text (“Alternative Text”) from images, at http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=36230.msg338880#msg338880 , I describe OneNotes thus:
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“This would seem to be consistent with OneNote’s being organised something like a huge and complex wiki - it hyperlinks everything it holds in rather clever ways. Everything you do in the Notebooks is linked to date, time, and author, and material in OneNote is cross-linked internally within OneNote itself and externally to sources of material from across the internet and the client PC. Thus, if you copy anything from OneNote, the copied content will include all the relevant links related to where it was located at the time it was copied. If you move stuff around, the links are tracked and dynamically reassigned as necessary, so there is continuity and you don’t easily get dead/broken links.”
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That discussion is about how I accidentally discovered how to effectively bulk collect what OneNote calls “Alternative Text” (which includes automatically OCRed text) from several text-containing images at a time - rather than the tedious default piecemeal approach in OneNote of collecting the AltText from one image at a time.

If you have been following what I have said here and elsewhere, then you might be able to see that:
(a) it provides some substantiation for the argument that Evernote has already been eclipsed in functionality by other technology (e.g., OneNote), and

(b) that because OneNote is now cloud-centric AND client-centric, then Evernote’s lead in that regard seems to have been lost - OneNote Notebooks can be stored in the Cloud (i.e., SkyDrive) and distributed on client devices - all for easy access by different collaborative users - with parts of the Notebook able to be locked or encrypted and made accessible to either public and/or specific users only.

MS designers seem to have achieved this by designing OneNote Notebooks such that they are a database of disparate, discrete, relatively small and organised pieces of information (.one files). Since only ONE piece of information (i.e., a .one file) is being changed at a time by the user - e.g., messing with text, a copy of a web page, an image, or an embedded document, audio or video file (I didn’t mention OLE with MS Office files, file embedding/linking, editing images, or the video aspects did I? Sorry.) - the bandwidth required to update/sync across the Cloud is minimised, and the elapsed time for that is also minimised. The Notebook itself could be HUGE though.
It has taken MS a while, but I think this might arguably rather be a slam-dunk for OneNote AND MS Office, with Evernote outclassed and made obsolete, and the excellent Zoot already disappearing down its own peculiar evolutionary dead-end.

Interestingly, Evernote and Zoot will probably be just innocent casualties - marketing collateral damage - blown away as MS manoeuvres, redefines, captures, consolidates and controls the market for corporate information processing worldwide, with a scaled product approach. I say this because the increasing dovetailing and integration across all MS systems/products (e.g., including especially Sharepoint, Lync, Skype, InfoPath, Excel, Word, Access, Project, Outlook, Internet Explorer, NTFS, the Windows OS) is now so successful that it seems to leave little or no room for competition, by default. Maybe just some niches is all.
For a while there, it looked as though Google’s Cloud initiatives might have been able to make some inroads into MS’ corporate market share, but I think Google maybe have pushed MS out of their complacency and encouraged them to sharpen their wits - which they did by producing a whole slew of new and now much better-integrated versions of their existing product range, capped off by SkyDrive and Outlook.com.