Wezinc - Mindmap based Information Manager

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Jun 21, 2015 at 02:33 PM

@jperlman: Thanks for posting about Wezinc - it’s something new to me.
I downloaded and installed it and have left it running all the time it seems to successfully miontor Clipboard activity - an excellent feature).

My notes:
* Test system: is a Toshiba laptop with OS Win8.1-64 PRO.
* Installation: No difficulties experienced in accessing and using the website (http://www.wezinc.com/), nor in downloading the file. Installation was straightforward and apparently harmless (Malwarebytes indicated no CANDYWARE or PUPs). No options for the location of the installation folder though.
* Costs: File is available as “currently FREE”, with an implication that it won’t be free for too long. I wondered why that was.
* Then I figured out why. Wezinc is definitely in Beta state at present - e.g., it is unstable - in the first 30 minutes or so of use, I managed to crash it 5 or 6 times with database errors. Each time it tries to write home with an email report about the crash, with the report containing full details of the specification of the user’s system and a small dump of Wezinc RAM values/settings. It does not recover from a crash, and the Wezinc process has to be expunged and then restarted to ensure a clean start. On restarting, Wezinc so far seems to have lost little - if any- of the user data that was being changed when the crash occurred. Failing “safe” like that is usually a sign of good development practice.
* One vital missing ingredient that immediately struck me was a lack of good ergonomics in the UI. For example, the UI feels decidedly unintuitive - even sometimes kludgy - and perceptually is visually glary as all heck. For the former, I presume the developer needs feeback so that he can get it right, whereas for the latter, there needs to be some form of user adjustment of background colours and text fonts/sizes/colours.
* The UI also seems to be somewhat idiosyncratic, and may reflect that there is only one main developer/designer dogmatically dominating the paradigm and the direction of the design, and also reflecting his/her lack of experience in developing software with an ergonomically usable and intuitive “user-friendly” UI - e.g., similar problem to, for example, Windows Metro/8 OS and the InfoSelect10 PIM. If that is the case with Wezinc, then it may eventually kill the product - as it did for the aforementioned 2 examples.
* Having said the above, Wezinc would seem to have tons of potential. Whilst it’s navigation across the 2 or 3 panes is currently nowhere near as slick ergonomically as (say) InfoSelect8 (including the clever HotSpots feature), for example, and whilst its RTF capability is miles behind (say) MS OneNote 2013, it is moving towards those directions. However a major differentiator is the mindmap functionality, which looks like it might be in an early stage of development, but if it continues then it could match, or even outclass (say) The Brain in that regard.
* Wezink also has hyperlinking (Ctrl-K) to Internet URLs, though it does not seem to have Wiki-like internal hyperlinking - e.g., similar to InfoSelect8 (good) or MS OneNote (very good indeed).

* Having migrated to a new laptop, I am about to install/update WizNote (which some people have described as a potential killer app. amongst PIMs) and will see how Wezinc compares with that. Refer: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=36909.msg345599#msg345599

* A remaining hurdle for PIMs seems to be the ability to capture whole web pages intact - html text and embedded images - as-is, and incorporate that text/images into the KB index/search, and also for Windows Desktop Search - just like any other data. The Firefox extension Scrapbook currently does that, but that is all it does, and it does it very well. WizNote is getting there, and even allows editing of the material in the captured pages.