Snippet/archive/library tool

Posted by Graham Rhind
Jun 12, 2007 at 04:08 PM

I felt it was time to summarise some of my findings on this search and the related one for a task manager in case they prove useful to the group members.

I looked at masses of programs and short-listed a few for both document management and task management.

On the task management side:

- The release date for the new beta of TaskPilot keeps slipping, so a review of that one is on hold.
- Priorganizer is very buggy, and though the developer is very quick to answer support requests, the waiting time for a new version is too long in my opinion. I found the little pop-up window for notes and to show “next tasks” useful, but as I couldn’t use it as my main task manager with its current bugs, I’ve sidelined it until a better version is released.
- FusionDesk: ditto. It’s a great concept, but given its bugs (some of which cause data deletion, such as when syncing to Outlook), if I were the developer I’d be producing a new version for release every day, but the developer has taken the “wait until everything is resolved” path, which is not to my taste. I also find the support patchy (I am of the opinion that if you host a forum on your site, you should answer all of the questions posted there).
- UltraRecall: I have given up on UR except to keep a client database in it. I think it suffers terribly because its developers are too technical and don’t really (in my mind) understand how many end-users, except technical ones, would use such a product. It is unnecessarily complicated - it could be so much better - and, although technical myself, I don’t want to waste my life fighting with software. It has power, but that power needs to be more easily harnessed ...
- ITSD: this is the software I went with, though it is clearly no longer being developed and it contains some really annoying bugs (such as reminding of tasks which have already been marked as complete). However, it’s fairly stable and useful in its current form, so it will do until something better somes along :-)
- ListPro: marvellous. Simple, useful, mobile (on the Palm) - just what I needed for my lists (but not for my todos).

On the document management side:

- PaperPort and eDoc plus both give errors when reading/indexing some documents, but neither give the name of the document giving the problem so they tend to force the user away from them in terms of document management when one has as many documents to manage as I do. I continue to use PaperPort as a scanning manager.
- IdeaMason: just gives me the eebie jeebies each time I look at it, so if I can’t bring myself to test it, I think I’d probably never get the most out of it if I were to use it for resource management!
- Whizfolders Deluxe: my main notation tool at the moment, but it’s lack of power when it comes to things like inserting graphics are limiting to workflow.
- OneNote2007: listen up good people at Kinook: THIS is what you should be producing. And, given UR’s base and its additional features, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. OneNote is hardly more expensive than UR, it’s simplicity itself in use and it hides great power. I’m no Microsoft basher, and this is a good reason why. Make no mistake - I do NOT like the Notebook/Sections/Tabs paradigm - tree organisers are common for a good reason! Microsoft seem to have realized this to some extent by allowing multiple notebooks/groups of sections in this version, but it still tends to hide information more than I’d like, and it smacks of digging themselves into the paradigm that they’re not too keen on any more either. Getting data into it from existing documents is very time consuming, and I miss being able to set an automatic directory sync like one can in UR (though it has never worked properly in UR for me, and if it can’t be trusted it’s useless for me).

However, by keeping the contents of each tab as a separate file on the disk, OneNote doesn’t get as sluggish as programs that store everything in a single database (such as UR and Surfulator). Printing a document to the notebook is an inspirational idea. Basically, though I’m a long way from giving up on Whizfolders, the power of what can be thrown into OneNote means I shall be using it more and more. I am almost through reading all my documents into OneNote, and the proof will then be how easy data is to find in it - but it’s useful to see the contents of the document when searching. Oh yes, that reminds me: OneNote does slip up sometimes over importing documents, but closing and restarting it tends to resolve any problems.

So, there we are. My ideas. Doubtless by next month I’ll be on to my next set of programs, but this is it for the moment ....

Graham