WhizFolders and Graphical Front Ends

Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 14, 2006 at 04:53 PM

Hi Daly,

As I was mentioning to Ian, I’m thinking of standardizing on a Zoot/Net Snippets/dtSearch solution as my answer to the data integration problem at the moment. I struggled for a while with Contentsaver’s (now Web Research) URL-type links, but just when I got Zoot to work with them, they’ve broken again.

This means using Zoot as the central data-gathering point, with links to other programs. As Zoot has a proprietary dB - albeit as ASCII one that can be directly indexed and searched by dtSearch - a better method is to export the contents of Zoot to html first, as one (very large) file. This gives much clearer search results.

This combination is not perfect, of course, as it leaves outlining out. Graham Smith (somewhere) suggested using Brainstorm, partly because it can be easily linked to Zoot:

“The *.brn files used by Brainstorm can be incorporated into Zoot using the Zoot File Folder sync action, which automatically then adds any new brainstorm models to Zoot as they are created. This means that any Brainstorm model can be searched from within Zoot, inspected from within Zoot and then Brainstorm launched with the selected model from within Zoot.”

Presumably this might work with other outlining programs…

For me the only remaining problem is getting Biblioscape to work with Zoot. So far Biblioscape’s URL addresses - e.g., biblioscape://RefID=28 - don’t seem to work in Zoot yet.

I had thought of moving from Zoot to Ultra Recall, but the latter just is not nearly flexible enough on the searching or “notes” sides to act as a data HQ.

I see that you are homing in on InfoHandler these days. What advantages do you see it as having over Zoot?

Derek