InfoQube versus UltraRecall versus Zoot 6

Posted by Graham Rhind
Feb 10, 2010 at 05:47 PM

OK, I know I’m going to open up a whole can of worms, so let me just throw this out and see what happens.

I have given up my long search for the perfect knowledge management program, and I’ve been gradually hiving off parts of my work to different programs that do the job for me - tasks to the dreaded Outlook, document archiving and web page content storage to OneNote, certain web page functions to The Brain, my diary back into a trusted Filofax, my authoring in Whizfolders (or The Brain for web publication) and so on.

What I am left with are a set of structured data sets which have been in UltraRecall 3.5 and are now in Zoot 5 because I can text mine very easily with Zoot.

I am, however, getting disillusioned with Zoot - it is full of idiosyncracies, and Zoot 6 looks like making the whole spaghetti a whole lot worse.

I desperately want InfoQube to be the answer to every prayer I have ever had, but I am finding it frustrating to learn and completely counter-intuitive - everything I think is logical, like tabbing between items or clicking a URL to open it, doesn’t work the way I expect it to. And though I understand that IQ is item-based and works on creating grids to view data, maybe I’m just a tree man at heart and need some structure that IQ can’t provide.

I had a look back at UltraRecall today and it felt immediately right, and I understand (after some digging in the past) how it works. But I remember also all the niggling annoyances of it, poor documentation, unfriendly support (unlike Pierre’s) and so on.

And I wonder which way I should be looking. So I thought I’d ask the experts: how would you ladies and gentlemen compare IQ, UR and Zoot 6 - what do you feel are the strengths and (remaining) weaknesses of each? I’d love to be reminded.

Thanks a lot!

Graham