Again, with respect to NoteMap

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
May 15, 2009 at 03:31 AM

I wouldn’t recommend _buying_ it, but the problems you mention aren’t necessarily a bar to using it. (I must grant, you were right previously and now when you say all development has stopped. This was tacitly confirmed by a sales representative when I e-mailed them about correcting the “screen full bug.”)

If one is never tempted to write screen length notes or to rely on the Comment function for anything nontrivial, the program works well. Anyone who has spent money on the program shouldn’t feel unable to use it, unless he really is. Other than the problems mentioned (which are serious), I find the program is completely stable. In design it’s probably the best conventional outliner ever made, but it is only a conventional outliner. Nor does it incorporate the big advances of Brainstorm and Maxthink. (And maybe Grandview, for all I know.)

You know, it isn’t like there’s a plethora of wonderful programs to choose from. In desperation I recently tried Inspiration 8 again. I was struck by how a program that’s been around so long has so few outlining usability enhancements, like a toolbar. Particularly vexing is the inability to customize shortcuts, which intensifies the discomfort from lack of other enhancements. That isn’t why I put it away again, which instead was due to its simple incompetence at using the selected screen font..

Cassius wrote:
>I WAS an enthusiastic user at first, but now I must strongly recommend against it.
> >1.
>Development has ceased. Even the simplest of bugs has not been fixed.
> >2. After you
>have entered about a screen-full of material, weird things can happen, including
>PERMANENT LOSS OF MATERIAL. I started using MoteMap to write a book, much as I had done
>years before with GrandView. It was not long before I started having problems, such as
>displaying subtopics. Then several paragraphs of material disappeared, never to be
>recovered.
> >All this was with the latest version.
> >-cassius