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Ideamason abandoned
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 11, 2009 at 09:51 PM
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
Posted by Thomas
May 11, 2009 at 10:53 PM
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.
Posted by Eduardo Mauro
May 11, 2009 at 10:55 PM
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
Posted by Ike Washington
May 11, 2009 at 11:38 PM
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
Posted by Jan Rifkinson
May 12, 2009 at 01:29 AM
Ike, have you or anyone here done a comparison between Connected Text & InfoQube aka SQLNotes?
—
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield CT USA