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Mindsystems Amode
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Posted by Cassius
May 12, 2009 at 01:06 AM
dan7000 wrote:
>Wow Themereader looks very impressive. It is based on this product, which I’m
>downloading instead: http://www.cirilab.com/Eval_Download.htm
>
Dan7000,
Please let us know what you think of the Cirilab products. Thanks!
Posted by Lucas
May 12, 2009 at 06:47 PM
Amode is certainly an impressive and visually refreshing piece of work, although it doesn’t seem to do any particular task better than software I already use.
I recently got the 60-day trial of Microsoft Project, and although it takes some learning, I found it quite useful for mapping out my schedule and planning some projects I’m working on (it’s not really designed for personal use, but I just made myself the “resource” and tinkered with some other variables to make it work). Anyway, I tried migrating my Project data into Amode, and although the migration was easy and quick, it soon became apparent that Amode can’t split and level tasks the way Project can (unless I’m missing something). For me the jump from regular task management to project management isn’t really worthwhile without task splitting and leveling (which allows for more realistic planning of tasks constrained by a schedule that includes fixed repeating tasks).
In general, it seems that each of Amode’s functions is well implemented, and the combination of functions is relatively unique, but, based on my limited observations, none of the individual functions seems to be cutting edge.
Posted by Jack Crawford
May 13, 2009 at 03:41 AM
I downloaded the trial version of ThemeReader. On using the program (with MindManager 8) I received an error message “invalid server response”. I see that this is a relatively common issue. I tried solving the problem, as per MindSystems instructions, but to no avail.
As I do not have the time for more tweaking, I have uninstalled the program.
Jack
Posted by dan7000
May 13, 2009 at 05:16 PM
I downloaded Amode and Themereader and MindManager.
First the download saga:
I originally planned just to download CiriLab’s knowledge engine on which Themereader is based, but I discovered that CiriLab requires MindManager. The documentation says you can use ThemeReader without MindManager—just using Amode. So first I downloaded Amode and ThemeReader. Themereader kept asking me where MindManager was. So finally I downloaded Mindmanager too.
Now the reviews:
Themereader is a big disappointment. I was excited because what it claims to do is so impressive and difficult: to accurately read and summarize documents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver. It appears to merely pick out the most common words, and put them at the top of a MindReader hierarchy, with slightly less common words organized underneath in a tree structure, linked to each other based on proximity of words in the original document. So it has nothing to do with the meaning of the document - it’s just a word counter. It has a summary function too, that generates a shorter “summary” of the document. This works about as well as MS Word’s summarize function.
I tested this with a number of legal documents, where it failed miserably. Then I downloaded some stories from CNN.com and tried it. The MindReader tree that it generated was useless in all cases. The summary was quite good for some of the CNN stories, but was about half as long as the original story. In the time it took to generate it and read the summary, I could have easily read the entire CNN story. Indeed, it makes me realize that ‘skimming’ a story yourself is basically the same thing as what ThemeReader is attempting to do—except that your brain is a lot better at skimming a story for keywords and concepts than the computer is. Still. Maybe next year.
Amode seems to be a pretty great 2-pane outliner information manager. As a former ADM devotee, I have been longing for something that lets you create multi-line topics in the outline tree, add properties to the topics, store multiple attached files with each topic, and associate a rich text note with each topic. Amode does all of the above really well and really simply.
Yes, I know IQ does the above too, but every time I’ve used it I feel like there is too much set up to get the layout and functionality I am looking for, and too much complexity that obscures simply entering my topics, my files, and my rich text.
In Amode, I did not see a web page clipper, which it definitely needs. Also, I have recently become a huge fan of tags and am a little less into outlines. I didn’t see tagging in Amode, which would be a big plus.
I tried viewing my data as calendar and gannt chart, which worked like a charm. It’s a good idea, but at the same time, I am not sure that I would ever want to see the same data in all these views: why not have different data sets for each view? This is one of the things that I can’t get past with IQ, either: it seems like the same data is appearing in different views, and it only makes sense in one view. You can set properties to say what types of views an item should appear in - but that is a complex extra step that you have to take every time you enter data. I want to enter data in one place, and see it there and only there, exactly as I entered it, the next time I come into the program.
Finally, I did not see a way to link topics to each other in Amode. That was surprising, but maybe I missed it.
Overall, the price, and my current infatuation with EverNote, will keep me away from Amode, but it has a lot to offer.
Posted by Alex (Mindsystems)
May 13, 2009 at 11:00 PM
Hi Dan007,
My name is Alex from Mindsystems. I was pointed toward OutlinerSoftware.com by some members that have also been communicating with us about the newly released Amode.
I am not going to get into the game of shameless self-promotion :-) or offer subjective opinions. Of course we think it is great, but as any new product we are building and working hard to improve it (our responsiveness helps that process allot).
It is important that people realize Amode is much more than it appears to be at first glance. There are actually 4 separate apps merged into one here, and over 12 months of stability testing on that integration. We’ve done stress testing on files as large as 55Gig!! Not that anyone should EVER build a single file that big!!!
As a matter of interest, the feedback so far is extremely positive in terms of usability and overall appeal… but the message is clear, people miss the depth of functionality up front, and therefore we as a company run the risk of people dismissing the product for something it is not.
So for us, this means one thing ? we need to quickly improve the customer message and enhance accessibility.
We think we can handle this by producing a pack of tutorial videos taking people through usage, but also building some real world usage scenarios to see how Amode could apply to them.
So we are going to that ASAP and let people know when we do.
We are not trying to re-invent the wheel with this project. We have been in the info management arena for 16+ years, all we are doing here is answering a strong call to combine common tools, and we have done it using our expertise on what works for most people.
Thanks everyone!
Alex