Mindsystems Amode

Posted by dan7000
May 13, 2009 at 05:16 PM

I downloaded Amode and Themereader and MindManager.

First the download saga:
I originally planned just to download CiriLab’s knowledge engine on which Themereader is based, but I discovered that CiriLab requires MindManager. The documentation says you can use ThemeReader without MindManager—just using Amode. So first I downloaded Amode and ThemeReader. Themereader kept asking me where MindManager was. So finally I downloaded Mindmanager too.

Now the reviews:
Themereader is a big disappointment. I was excited because what it claims to do is so impressive and difficult: to accurately read and summarize documents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver. It appears to merely pick out the most common words, and put them at the top of a MindReader hierarchy, with slightly less common words organized underneath in a tree structure, linked to each other based on proximity of words in the original document. So it has nothing to do with the meaning of the document - it’s just a word counter. It has a summary function too, that generates a shorter “summary” of the document. This works about as well as MS Word’s summarize function.
I tested this with a number of legal documents, where it failed miserably. Then I downloaded some stories from CNN.com and tried it. The MindReader tree that it generated was useless in all cases. The summary was quite good for some of the CNN stories, but was about half as long as the original story. In the time it took to generate it and read the summary, I could have easily read the entire CNN story. Indeed, it makes me realize that ‘skimming’ a story yourself is basically the same thing as what ThemeReader is attempting to do—except that your brain is a lot better at skimming a story for keywords and concepts than the computer is. Still. Maybe next year.

Amode seems to be a pretty great 2-pane outliner information manager. As a former ADM devotee, I have been longing for something that lets you create multi-line topics in the outline tree, add properties to the topics, store multiple attached files with each topic, and associate a rich text note with each topic. Amode does all of the above really well and really simply.
Yes, I know IQ does the above too, but every time I’ve used it I feel like there is too much set up to get the layout and functionality I am looking for, and too much complexity that obscures simply entering my topics, my files, and my rich text.
In Amode, I did not see a web page clipper, which it definitely needs. Also, I have recently become a huge fan of tags and am a little less into outlines. I didn’t see tagging in Amode, which would be a big plus.
I tried viewing my data as calendar and gannt chart, which worked like a charm. It’s a good idea, but at the same time, I am not sure that I would ever want to see the same data in all these views: why not have different data sets for each view? This is one of the things that I can’t get past with IQ, either: it seems like the same data is appearing in different views, and it only makes sense in one view. You can set properties to say what types of views an item should appear in - but that is a complex extra step that you have to take every time you enter data. I want to enter data in one place, and see it there and only there, exactly as I entered it, the next time I come into the program.
Finally, I did not see a way to link topics to each other in Amode. That was surprising, but maybe I missed it.
Overall, the price, and my current infatuation with EverNote, will keep me away from Amode, but it has a lot to offer.