Whizfolders Deluxe

Posted by Matty
Jul 12, 2007 at 07:54 PM

In case anyone is interested, I just emailed with Sanjay about the prospect of hoisting in future releases of WF and he assured me that this is something he is actively working on. This will make the program that much more powerful by allowing the user to temporarily focus in on a specific part of the outline, while blocking out the rest.

One of the reasons I find this program so powerful is that you can copy a large text into a single note (say all your notes on a single book or the transcript of an interview) then you can simply select chunks of that text and drag it to different spots on your outline and WF will create a new note from that piece of the text. You can also drag notes from one outline to another. So, for instance, after gathering your notes for an article you can create a separate outline of the article and then start dragging and dropping notes from your notes outline into your article outline. Simple and powerful. These kinds of operations are much slower on many of the other programs I’ve experimented with. I realize that programs like zoot can automate some of these kinds of tasks (a la James Fallow’s article organizer template in zoot,) but damn that program is complicated! It made me feel like a total moron. Whizfolders is exactly the opposite, it may not do a lot, but what it does it does in an intuitive way. I still wish I could have figured out zoot, but time commitment was just too great, and I suspect that Whizfolders is better for my purposes (organizing research notes) anyway.

As for single pane outliners, I love brainstorm. The problem is that Whizfolders and Brainstorm, while very different, are pretty redundant. However, since I own a license for both, I’m going to have experiment with importing outlines from Brainstorm into Whizfolders and see if there is any value added there.

Fun to finally be posting here, I’ve been reading this forum (somewhat obsessively) for months.

Cheers,

Matt