A ramble about various note-taking applications

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Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 20, 2023 at 12:50 PM

I’m always curious why the appearance of software is enough to almost instantly repel, before probing the depths to see the possible fitness of that software to serve one’s needs.

Dormouse wrote:
With all the praise for TheBrain, I thought I’d try it again.
>Uninstalled it in less than five minutes. No decent dark mode,
>antiquated interface.

Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Jun 20, 2023 at 01:56 PM

Paul Korm wrote:
>I’m always curious why the appearance of software is enough to almost instantly repel, before probing the depths to see the possible fitness of that software to serve one’s needs.

>Dormouse wrote:
>>With all the praise for TheBrain, I thought I’d try it again. Uninstalled it in less than five minutes. No decent dark mode, antiquated interface.

————————

I agree 100%... Form over Function or Function over Form? An age-old dilemna:
https://www.boardandvellum.com/blog/form-over-function-or-function-over-form/

I try to achieve the best form that meets all the desired functions. Users are the judges, not me (but as a user, I’m also a judge of course)

Pierre Paul Landry
InfoQube IM Designer

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 21, 2023 at 08:11 AM

Hm. This is an interesting question, and I’ve mused on it for many years. I think the answer is actually quite simple. You’re using software that’s genuinely useful to you every day, for large parts of the day. That means it has to be enjoyable to use. Not just functional, not just “efficient”, but actively enjoyable. This means a couple for things:

a) it needs to do what it does in straightforward, uncomplicated ways that are easy to fathom and quick to turn into user habits
b) it needs to look nice, so you smile when you open it and keep smiling as you come back to it – over and over again.

I think “form over function, function over form” is a false dichotomy. Form is a part of function – if form makes the software user-friendlier, then it’s fulfilling a vital function. I suspect many of us have had to use – some of us no doubt still have to use – corporate software that is clearly the result of some function-focused programmer’s high-speed and rather disinterested efforts to “fill the brief” without attempting to make the software user-friendly. And we’ve all experienced the nightmares that result.

Software that looks good while also doing what it’s supposed to do efficiently does much more than just “fill a brief” – it makes users actively want to use it, which is (from a corporate viewpoint, too) highly desirable! All companies depend on users following proper processes. One of the reasons users start to smuggle their own preferred software into offices or onto their work machines, leading to entire subcultures that are essentially unobserved/unmonitored by IT, is because they don’t enjoy using the in-house software they’re supposed to be using. It’s confusing, doesn’t have the functions they want (or does, but goes about performing them in all sorts of arcane ways), and it looks horrible – instantly depressing. So they rush away and find nice, friendly software instead – and do things fast and furiously with it, in ways the corporate software doesn’t really allow, let alone encourage.

A classic example, for me, of software that’s not fully realised the importance of genuine user-friendliness (or rather, user happiness, which is why savvy programmers now speak about UX rather than just UI), is computer-assisted translation (CAT) software, which continues to follow the kind of blocky, 1980s grid-based approach that is now found almost nowhere else. How translators put up with it I really don’t know – except that all the major players in the market have followed the same approach. I remember discussing this with one of them (MemoQ’s very amiable programming director): he was genuinely unable to see my point, which I found rather fascinating in itself. And yet it could have enabled him to drastically differentiate his software from his main competitors’.

Paul Korm wrote:
I’m always curious why the appearance of software is enough to almost
>instantly repel, before probing the depths to see the possible fitness
>of that software to serve one’s needs.

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 21, 2023 at 01:05 PM

Quite agree, in the main. For instance, I like MindNode but would like it a lot more if it supported some PKM-like features. It’s handsome enough I keep using it when I want to reach for a mind map.

Vim is another interesting thing I’ve thought about in this context. It’s ugly and I hated vi when I had to use it on Solaris systems - I wasn’t allowed to install emacs - but when I got up to speed on windows and tabs in text-mode vim, all of a sudden vim was a powerful ally. I still think I should do everything in emacs but I haven’t used it in a long, long time.

Vim is ugly. It’s also very powerful once you get your fingers programmed, but most importantly, it’s open. What vim won’t do is usually still possible.

For instance, you have a comma delimited file and you want the third field. You could do that with a regex, but why bother?

:%!cut -d, -f3

Drop to command line mode in vim, select all (%), pipe to external program (!), run cut -d, -f3 (cut each line into fields split by commas and keep the third field).

The ! pipes selected text to stdin on a script or program, and replaces the selected text with whatever comes out of stdout on the external program.

If you don’t like what you got, the undo function will pop you back to where you were before running the external program.

The only use I have for vi, I’m afraid, is as a symlink to vim. Vi is an antique.

‘Course, me calling anything an antique is the pot making aspersions about the kettle. Oh, well…

MadaboutDana wrote:
Hm. This is an interesting question, and I’ve mused on it for many
>years. I think the answer is actually quite simple. You’re using
>software that’s genuinely useful to you every day, for large parts of
>the day. That means it has to be enjoyable to use. Not just functional,
>not just “efficient”, but actively enjoyable. This means a couple for
>things:
> >a) it needs to do what it does in straightforward, uncomplicated ways
>that are easy to fathom and quick to turn into user habits
>b) it needs to look nice, so you smile when you open it and keep smiling
>as you come back to it – over and over again.
>

Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 21, 2023 at 03:22 PM

Interesting analysis. I’m not sure how it plays out in reality—at least in my experience. (I am always grateful that I only have my own experience to deal with.) Of the top five apps that I use almost continually during the day (ignoring calendars which are a necessary evil), three of them have been pegged “ugly” in many forums over the years, but I still really enjoy using them: Tinderbox (wins the ugly award according to some popular forums), DEVONthink (ugliness runner up), and Tana (too new to have many users, but their own forums and developers agree: “ugly”). But all of these I really delight in using and so I return to them over and over. But they are not enjoyable because they are easy to use—none of the three is easy to use at all. Tinderbox seems like it dropped into our dimension from a Klingon class project. DEVONthink has more features than any software should be entitled to have. And Tana is a blank page with no clues as to what to do next. Yet, I’ve used at least DEVONthink and Tinderbox for thousands of hours over the past couple of decades, wrestling away with them, and I get back my investment ten-fold every time.

If I had just dismissed each of these as “ugly, stay away”, my work would be greatly diminished.

I think I’ve gone off topic on this, however.

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