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Against Everything Buckets
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Posted by David Dunham
Feb 10, 2009 at 01:05 AM
Interesting post here http://al3x.net/2009/01/31/against-everything-buckets.html that I suspect many of the people here won’t agree with (I certainly use Opal for as much as I can, but it’s not intended to be an everything bucket and I don’t try to use it as one).
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 10, 2009 at 04:00 AM
Interesting and provocative, but ultimately I think the author is wrong. Not entirely of course. I think most of us have come to the conclusion that there isn’t a holy grail application, one that handles all our information management needs. But the best of these applications do things that make information gathering and organizing much more efficient than the system described by the author of the article. First, they help us clip and collect information quickly and efficiently. How many steps would it take to capture this paragraph by the method the author suggests? Several—copy the block of text, open your text editor, create a new document, and save the file after you’ve navigated the file system to find the proper folder. With Zoot, for instance, I can clip this paragraph and save it in an appropriate Zoot database in less than 10 seconds—and even more quickly on my MacBook using Yojimbo.
The best of these programs allow you to view your data in different ways. Again, talking about Zoot, I can see my information as a table sorted on various attributes, and I can view individual entries.
There are efficiencies with multipurpose applications as well. With Zoot I can clip an e-mail message, add it to a project database and assign a tickler alarm to it so I do not forget to attend to it. You can’t do that using the file system.
I also think his basic premise is wrong. That is, he implies that applications like DevonThink, Yojimbo, etc… promise to handle all your information, and I don’t believe that’s true. Just today I was reading the forum for Curio, and the developer encouraged people to use OmniOutliner for long lists and outlines. In fact, I rarely see any developer claim that you can put everything in their application without need of other programs.
Steve Z.
Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 10, 2009 at 04:15 AM
Many of his arguments are off the mark.
I do agree that proprietary database “everything buckets” are probably not a good idea—we’ve seen enough PIMs die that this argument makes sense. However, the trend among PIMs is clearly to use the filesystem rather than a proprietary database. Together, EagleFiler, DevonThink 2, etc. all use the underlying filesystem so you’re not locked in.
The other big problem with his argument is that you could do everything just using the filesystem, which is true (e.g. you could do DevonThink-style “tagging” using Unix symlinks), but so what? The user interface is what matters, and symlinking as a form of tagging just takes too many clicks to bother dealing with. These programs add value through their interfaces. Those with artificial-intelligence algorithms for classification, etc. also add value in other ways.
That said, I do agree that using the filesystem together with filesystem metadata is a valid alternative for information management for many people and is worth considering.
—Chris
Posted by Hugh
Feb 10, 2009 at 09:19 AM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>
>...I do agree that using
>the filesystem together with filesystem metadata is a valid alternative for
>information management for many people and is worth considering.
>
>—Chris
On the Mac there is a number of applications that specialise in tagging within the filesystem, based on the Open Meta standard, with few other bells and whistles. One of the most recent but simplest is called - appropriately - Tags: http://gravityapps.com/tags/overview/
This site, for those who don’t know it, is a very good way of keeping up with Mac tagging developments, by the way: http://tagamac.com/
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 10, 2009 at 03:29 PM
Here’s a freeware file tagging program for Windows, currently in beta:
http://lunarfrog.com/
I haven’t tried it or tagging in general yet, but am warming up to the concept.