askSam 7 Professional will be available at Bits du Jour on Thursday 16 April. The discount is considerable:
Deal Price: $99.95
List Price: $395.00

More here: http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/asksam-7-professional/

I've never worked with askSam, just briefly tried it once long ago, so my post is not a recommendation. I'd be myself grateful for any informed opinion from people who have experience with the program.

Alexander

I would love to be able to recommend askSam. Alas, I can't.

The concept is great. Drop everything into a free form bucket and find it as needed. Unfortunately, it isn't that easy.

To be able to run reports, you need to set up fields in your records, and I've always found this process to be squirrelly. That is, I seem to have to jigger with the layouts and am never able to get them just right. The same holds true for building reports.

All and all, I've always been frustrated by askSam. At $99 it is still overpriced, in my opinion.

Steve Z.

Steve, many thanks.

I just saw that in the BdJ promotion page there is a long post (3 consecutive ones to be precise) of a certain lady who appears to be a very frustrated askSam customer. She has provided enough sordid details to make the offering quite unattractive, if what she suggests is true.

For me the main thing is that the bugs, including instabilities, don't seem to be sorted out.

You are welcome, Alexander. The one thing askSam used to excel at was searching its data. It would return results lightning fast and do fuzzy seaches. But we the advent of desktop search engines, this is no longer a big advantage.

I do feel somewhat bad for the developer of askSam. This is a database with a long history. It is too bad that it has succumbed to time and bloat and whatever else is ailing it. In some ways it reminds me of InfoSelect, another venerable info manager that also seems to have become a bloated, useless dinosaur. Both applications have their lineage date back to DOS. Both have relied upon loyal customers paying big fees to upgrade. Neither has been able to really create a "modern" information manager. I suspect when you do rely on your past customers upgrading, you may have less incentive to be innovative.

Steve Z.

Info Select began life as a sharp, fast DOS app called Tornado Notes. I loved it and used it constantly. When the braintrust decided to make it everything to everyone, it lost its lustre. I used Tornado Notes, Memory Mate and XyWrite II+ in those days, and was probably far more productive than I am now.

Jon

Jonathan Probber wrote:

Info Select began life as a sharp, fast DOS app called Tornado Notes. I loved it and used
it constantly. When the braintrust decided to make it everything to everyone, it lost
its lustre. I used Tornado Notes, Memory Mate and XyWrite II+ in those days, and was
probably far more productive than I am now.

Jon

I too used Memory Mate. It was a very handy program. I think I still have the installation disks! Hey, you never know when DOS might make a comeback.

Steve Z.

InfoSelect 1 for Windows was also quick and well-suited for the task of keeping notes. I still have a version on a Memory Stick (mainly for sentimental reasons). (I liked the way the scraps re-arranged themselves on the screen as you went through them. I don't understand why they don't update that version as a lower cost alternative to the present bloatware.

Manfred

I prefer to use UR professional as a free form text database. You can define attributes and forms much easier in UR than in askSam.
MyInfo is another option.

Dominik

A personal wiki like ConnectedText is a much better (and much more frugal) alternative to AskSam as well.

I tried AskSam years ago, and abanoned it because it was so unreliable then. It seems that nothing has changed.

Manfred

I am very glad I started this thread. I should note that I am (almost) cured of CRIMP and had little intention to take 'advantage' of the BdJ askSam discount. I mainly posted it as the program has been discussed here in the past (or mostly in the original outliners.com forum).

The discussions here brought up an interesting point for me. In the past I have witnessed several cases of PIM nostalgia, mainly by Ecco Pro and GrandView users. I am guilty of this myself, though not openly so, as I distinctly remember how prolific I was with FileExpress and A4 for DOS, but now can barely get Access to do anything useful.

The various contributions here have highlighted the great number of choices (perhaps too many) now available, as well as the different routes taken: personal wikis, 2-pane outliners and desktop search engines were mentioned, for example.

However, what I find even more interesting is that such tools are available for really very moderate prices. askSam, regularly priced at almost $400 (and actually selling at that price in the past, I imagine) has been compared with contemporary programs costing 8-10 times less --and found at significant disadvantage.

As much as I can empathize with developers finding it hard to earn a living while offering very useful products, I am very glad that I can experiment significantly (in the long term, which would not be possible through trial versions) with the various suggested methods and tools, without risking a month's earnings. I do hope that the tools mentioned will go mainstream one day; and I mean mainstream.

Alexander