askSam vs. Zoot? and vs. others

Posted by 22111
Oct 6, 2013 at 04:43 PM

Armin, thank you for this overview.

Some software chokes with large databases, AS for example: Its users who use it for specific, well-rounded tasks don’t encounter too many problems, in general. On the other hand, new AS users would be lost since they don’t have its (excellent) search language codification available anymore that makes the strength of AS but is not contained within the help file, and that old forum in which you could find all the “tricks and tips” is long gone. With Zoot, it’s the other way round, effective help is not available YET - so this is a might brighter perspective.

But as some other such programs, Zoot seems to offer it “all contained in one big database”, and it’s evident its strenght will play then, for example mail integration and then dividing up your stuff into several databases is not really a good idea.

But I’ve become wary of data monsters, so my question is: How many items? How many problems?

I’ll give an example: TheBrain - they give examples of “brains” with 6-digit figures of items, and lots of interconnections, and it doesn’t seem to present any problem. But then, real users say that even with just 3- and 4-digit numbers of items, IF they systematically have text within the content fields of those items, TB chokes, and some people even lost almost all their content, not speaking of response times multiplying.

On the other hand, UR seems to be very stable, even with big data, which is a reason even people who don’t like it anymore, stay with it.

Also, UR has very good management of external data just linked to it, for example pictures, which are separate items in the tree, but which in fact are just linked to, and if you browse your tree, response times are so good you will not become aware that here, UR shows internally-stored rtf text, and there, it switches to a picture browser, within the same frame, in order to display the external picture, and if you have many such pictures (for example for a home-made real estate application or such), every such picture is about zero data in the UR database, but easily 2 or 3 million bytes within Maple or Jot+ (because of their importing pictures, and “translating” them into a very bad pic format, so even 30k jpg’s become blown up to more than 1 million bytes).

In the end, it’s details like these that make you decide upon this outliner or that one: quite specific info but which in your everyday life with the application, will make your workflow smooth, or make you look out for the next outliner out there.

My looking around being caused by UR’s non-availability of formatting for tree entries - this might appear ridiculous, but I too much crave for this formatting in order to become ever happy with UR.

That’s why more insight, user experience detailing strengths and less good points are so helpful.