http://blog.ideamason.com/

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

Sorry for the typos. The most egregious one: "combing" should be "combining".

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.

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

Hi,

I suggest to give a chance to ConnectedText (www.connectedtext.com). For those who want to migrate from IdeaManson or any other discontinued software to ConnectedText, we can offer a discount.

Hi Eduardo.

I suggest to give a chance to ConnectedText (www.connectedtext.com). For
those who want to migrate from IdeaManson or any other discontinued software to
ConnectedText, we can offer a discount.

Nice offer. I am an ex-IdeaMason user interested in moving over to ConnectedText. So. What do I do?

Greetings from Munich (Bavaria), Franz

In order to not pollute the forum, please send a message to sales@connectedtext.com.

Thanks Eduardo.

I sent you an e-mail.

Franz

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

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.

Sounds familiar to me,

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield CT USA

Eduardo,

As an extension from another post (re InfoQube and UltraRecall) I would personally consider it a marketing opportunity for software such as yours and Pierre Paul's to offer an easy way for users of discontinued products to migrate their data. I know that many of us have hung to defunct software because we simply had too much in there to consider re-entering to some other program.

An example from the webware world is Evernote, which when Google announced that it would no longer develop Notebook, provided an easy way for Notebook users to migrate their data to Evernote. I'm sure there's other examples.

I understand that the philosophy and data model of different software can be largely incompatible but I imagine that some kind of tool could be possible.

Alexander

When there is crisis, every penny counts, so if you as a developer are facing employment uncertainty, you wouldn't cut off any source of income no matter how small. Particularly if it requires near zero time to maintain that business (given the assumption no coding was in progress).

The authors are software professionals (=working in industry for real money and not making living of pennies from shareware development) , and IdeaMason seemed like something they did for their own need (writing computing books). IMHO they just found this to be the right time to cut off a project.

I was watching the website traffic for over a year occasionally, and yes the traffic estimates are very unreliable, but still, the traffic seemed extremely low, and other software developers that I know that actually ARE struggling have many times higher traffic (same traffic data source) than ideamason.com had.

Too bad, I too was hoping for further development.

Hi Alexander,

Thanks for your remarks. I see your point and agree. Currently CT can import Text, HTML and RTF. Each file is imported in its own topic. Some editing may be required after importing information. Text and OPML files can be imported into Outline view. Other formats can be included in the future but, as you said, the internal data model can be largely incompatible with them.

If you transfer your data to a bunch of text files CT can import them very easily.

I do not want to use the forum to promote my software and if you think that those messages are inappropriate let me know but I will happily discuss any matter related to CT if you are interested.

Eduardo

Sad to see ideamason go. A good idea. And a great pitch.

I remember the excitement as the company rolled out the videos prior to launch, the features galore. I bought a license when it launched on the strength of the marketing, really.

Thirty days isn't long enough to evaluate a writing/research manager.

After spending most of the evaluation period putting together ideamason in a way which suited me, and learning a lot about how I should work in the process, I realised soon afterwards that ideamason was slow, too slow for my average laptop. Irritating to have to wait five, ten seconds to place a comment in a field. And yet the ideas behind it were sound enough.

Much of this larking around, crimping with software is down to method. In my case, a lack of method. I want the 3x5 card file system. I'm forced to use a computer.

Certainly ideaMason, its flexibility, its videos too, inspired me to think more carefully about how I should organise my notes. And so Evernote followed and then Zoot...

Now, since late last summer, ConnectedText has proved to be excellent. Thanks Eduardo!

I use it to store work in progress.

The actual writing is done in WhizFolders.

The two applications complement each other extremely well, I think.

Just a matter of getting rid of WhizFolder's garish toolbars. And learning its keyboard shortcuts.

Links work from one to the other so the two applications form a seamless writing/researching environment, what ideamason promised.

Ike

Ike, have you or anyone here done a comparison between Connected Text & InfoQube aka SQLNotes?

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield CT USA

Folks:

Just a note regarding the shutdown of IdeaMason. FYI, NdxCards is in the process of starting a Beta on a version 2. Thus there is some indication that it is under development and thus will continue to be available. It would be in their best intrest to look at a tool to migrate IdeaMason data, but at least there is a similar alternative.

Charles

Jan Rifkinson wrote:

Ike, have you or anyone here done a comparison between Connected Text & InfoQube aka
SQLNotes?

I haven't checked out InfoQube properly yet. Everything and the kitchen sink... Well, yeah, it looks mighty formidable. Too much tech for me to take on just at the moment.

I'm sure it starts making sense once you dive in and start chucking data in.

The developer's enthusiasm and drive plus the community make it very attractive. The same over at ConnectedText.

ConnectedText's learning curve, particularly for anyone familiar with wikis, is pretty gentle. Autocompletions make the markups easy to do - not quite WYSIWYG, but not a hindrance. It's very easy to customise - like ideamason in this regard. Start simple and then ramp up the complexity as required.

Ike

I have recently moved to a mac, so I have not looked at the new version of biblioscape, which was released within the last week or so. To my mind, that is the serious software for academic research and writing. The program has really developed over the last few years and now has a composition module that might well do what IdeaMason promised to do . . . but was too slow. Definitely worth giving it a look.

Matt

Thanks for pointing that out, Matty. I hadn't realized Biblioscape 8 had come out of beta. The documentation about the new features (particularly the 'Composition Module', which is what I'm most interested in) also appears to be more complete now, and I am much more intrigued than I had been. In fact, Biblioscape appears to excel beyond Ideamason in allowing compiled drafts (collections of notes) to be edited directly, whereas in Ideamason the compiled view is read-only, and the editing must be done on a note-by-note (or idea-by-idea) basis. In this sense, Biblioscape seems to have appropriated a feature of Scrivener. The only issue, of course, is that Biblioscape Professional (the cheapest version that includes the Composition Module) costs $199 (at the Educational Discount price). But the software does appear to include a rather generous 99 sessions of free trial use, so I'll give it a whirl.

Thanks again for the heads up,

Lucas