Anyone else unable to save their work in MaxThink?

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
May 14, 2009 at 11:51 PM

Cassius wrote:
>Steve D: This won’t directly help you, I’m afraid, but my experience suggests that
>MaxThink, or at least the current version, has problems. In my case, I tried
>installing a trial copy, but when I ran it, I was “told” there were 0 days left. I
>contacted Neil and he modified the program to make it a 60-day trial, but the problem
>continued. I informed him of this, but it’s been about three weeks later & I have had no
>reply.

I’m thinking my own query to Neil about any ideas concerning this problem was presumptuous. A developer selling a product so underpriced isn’t obligated to include technical support on possibly exogenous issues. Except, Neil has said he wants to resolve the bugs that took years to resolve on DOS because some bugs affect only certain systems.

My tenaciously held view is that MaxThink in concept is *the* state of the art in pure outlining. But the glaring idiosyncrasies create a learning curve worse than any other program I’ve stuck with besides Microsoft Word. Unlike Word, which I recall was incremental, in MaxThink I go through plateaus and spurts depending on insights on how to check my reflexive responses. For instance, without giving the matter attention, I found I couldn’t check my motor “belief” that clicking an arrow is the way to move an item to a subordinate position. (Now, if you think about it, the more “modern” procedures are convenient, but they aren’t very close to paralleling the mental operation of subordination to another topic. A long time ago I posted on mental versus physical ergonomics in the other forum.)

It might help others if I relate some of the mental shortcuts that helped curb one’s motor generalizations.

1. Don’t press F10 or anything else ending a topic until you have decided where the topic that follows will go.

2. Learn the ways of accomplishing commands that come easily and forget the others. MaxThink’s alternative routes to the same objective is to accommodate different habits or styles, not to suit different individual purposes.

3. Familiarize youself with what MaxThink can do, but then learn to use them as the need arises. It isn’t necessary to master the program in advance. (But, unless you’re very different from me, you do need a strategy to inhibit malaptative generalizations from orthodox Windows.

Still, have I have to do a save as whenever I save, that’s a bit much. What’s next in line. To me, NoteMap and Brainstorm are each one-half of an outliner. I’m leaning toward Brainstorm, because it has the more important half.
>I assume you’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling the program, or
>reverting to an earlier version.
> >P.S. Since you are running XP, may I suggest that
>you and others try to find a copy of Norton GoBack 4. (Symantec bought an earlier
>version from earlier developers, but has not updated it for Vista.)
>GoBack allows
>you to restore your hard disk to an earlier time. So, if you suddenly have problems, you
>can restore it to before the problems occurred. There are limits based on your hard
>disk activity and disk space allocated to GoBack storage. In my case I can usually go
>back 2 to 3 days. It has saved me many times.
> >(I recall that you tried another type of
>“restore” program, but was unhappy with it.)
> >-c