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Ideamason abandoned
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Posted by Thomas
May 11, 2009 at 12:58 PM
Posted by Lucas
May 11, 2009 at 03:56 PM
Ideamason will be missed.
Apparently the latest betas of Biblioscape offer some similar functionality, but the screenshots don’t really entice me.
I had purchased Ideamason about six weeks ago and begun a writing project in it. I sort of had a hunch it was on it’s last legs. So either my timing was poor, as I paid for dying software, or my timing was good, as I go hold of it just before it became unavailable (it seems that it can’t be downloaded anymore).
Scrivener is all the rage for writing (I’ve used it on my Mac), but I haven’t found anything besides Ideamason for drafting text in a format of rearrangeable and reusable chunks of ideas that can be structure in an outline. I particularly like the distinction between outline “elements,” which are simply things like headings, and outline content, which comes about, for instance, when one inserts “ideas” under “elements” (ideas can abe arranged hierarchically as well). And, of course, combing these outlining tools with citation management is enormously useful, even if Ideamason remained rather clunky. Anyway, I do hope something emerges to fill the void left by Ideamason.
Lucas
Posted by Lucas
May 11, 2009 at 03:58 PM
Sorry for the typos. The most egregious one: “combing” should be “combining”.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 11, 2009 at 05:09 PM
It is too bad that Ideamason will no longer be developed or supported. It is a beefy piece of software with loads of functionality. I think the implementation isn’t entirely user friendly, which is why the developers had trouble selling such a capable application.
On another note, I’m not entirely sure I buy their excuse that the economy caused them to close their doors. My impression for the past two years has been that development was stalled. At one point they had mentioned on their blog that some new features were going to be added to the next version, but the next version never materialized and when I went back to look for the reference in the blog, I could no longer find it… that was six months ago. I guess it makes it easier, however, to blame the economy, which, undoubtedly didn’t help matters.
Steve Z.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 11, 2009 at 07:22 PM
Lucas wrote:
>I haven’t found anything besides Ideamason for drafting
>text in a format of rearrangeable and reusable chunks of ideas that can be structure in
>an outline.
I have the impression that this can be done by some of the (fiction) writer’s tools discussed here, such as
http://www.supernotecard.com/
http://www.storymasterpro.com/
though I don’t use any of them.
These are however unsuitable for academic work, as they don’t provide referencing tools. An alternative that does (again, this is not something I myself have tried) is
http://www.ndxcards.com/
Alexander