Looking for PIM / Thesis Writing Software for the PC

Posted by Peter
Oct 9, 2009 at 07:23 AM

Thanks for posting and no worries about coming late to the party.

Point taking about aesthetics and research. I’m no fan of Vista (an example of aesthetic design gone bad). I’ve stuck with XP. Nevertheless, I suppose I’ve become accustomed to an increasing degree of let’s say ‘aesthetic sensibility’ in interface design, even for the Windows platform, over that last decade. Something like Evernote may not be your cup of tea, or even mine for that matter (I’ve decided it’s a little too gimmicky for my purposes). Still, if I have the choice, I’ll choose a piece of software over another if I think the interface aesthetics is better (cleaner, more intuitive, easy to look at, attractive) provided that the functionality is equal.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve found my PIM answer for pdf markup and note management: Atlas.ti (http://www.atlasti.com/). It’s not cheep but it was sitting under my nose all the time. I already had a copy sitting on my machine for coding and sorting interview transcriptions. The latest version can even import PDFs as well as a range of other media. It might be overkill for some though. Other competitors in the CAQDAS (Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software) family are Nudist and NVivo.

Still, the actual paper writing process is not facilitated very well (although you can export memo notes into one doc). Hence the search for a Scrivener-like app continues….