Just want to let folks know that Miclog has released the next version of Infoselect.

I've been testing it for a day, and it seems to have some interesting new features.

You can check it out at http://www.miclog.com/is/9 .

Kenneth,

Thanks for the heads up.

How do the smart folders seem to work? How do they compare to smart folders in Zoot?

I swore I would never again pay $99 to upgrade my InfoSelect, but smart folders and a few other of the new features might be enough to convince me... okay, that's just the CRIMP talking, but still...

Steve Z.

There are a couple of improvement that I really like: smart folders (it works pretty well) and context tabs. So, I think all in all, it's a worthwhile upgrade. There are still a few things that are "annyoing," such as not have the toolbar buttons for bullets and numbering and inability to select quicktext without entering the first letter, etc. So far, I've enjoyed using the upgrade.

Kenneth,

Having abandoned Infoselect many years ago, can you say what it is you like about it? I would also be very interested to know what other info management programs you run along side it.

With the latest tweaks it seems to be approaching one of the best "all in one" programs around.

Thanks,

Graham

I've had a love and hate relationship with Infoselect since it was released first (Tornado was the DOS version).

Over the years I found a few things that were lacking or some of its idiosyncratic maddening, but with the latest version, I think I can at least live with some of these, and most of the issues I had with the outline selectors, editors, etc. have been fixed.

The new features such as smart folders (although primitive compared to Zoot) and context tabs are great additions in my book.

Is this perfect? Not quite, but I think it's good enough for me to use if full time now.

My other favorites have been ADM, Infohandler, Asksam Pro, ConnectedText, Treepad X, Zoot, etc. There are too many others I have bought and tried in the past to mention here.

I use Notabene 8 for my academic research exclusively and Inspiration 8 for outlining and concept mapping.

Kenneth

Is this
perfect? Not quite, but I think it's good enough for me to use if full time now.

That is good to know, it does seem to tie up several loose ends, enough for me to have upgraded, but I still wait patiently for the new version of Zoot.

I use Notabene 8 for my academic research exclusively and Inspiration 8 for
outlining and concept mapping.

These are also two of my favourite programs.

Thanks for your comments,

Graham

Kenneth Rhee wrote:

Just want to let folks know that Miclog has released the next version of
Infoselect.

I've been testing it for a day, and it seems to have some interesting new
features.

Well, its looks very promising, indeed, but why it is so expensive? Besides, is there any trial version? Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't notice.
W.

Wojciech,
I haven't found a trial download either. To give InfoSelect a try you have to buy a licence. I would suggest to buy the yearly subscription. If you don't want to use the software after your testing period you can kindly ask the developers for a refund.
You ask: 'Why it is so expensive?' - this is exactly my question! I really don't know why and my imrpession is that InfoSelect is overpriced even I know how complex and time consuming it is to develop software.
I won't buy or test IS now because I am satisfied with my current software portfolio (ADM, Word, Excel, ProjectCards) and I don't want to add another piece of software to just make my life more difficult. But I am very interested to hear from other users about their experiences using IS 9. The SmartFolder concept and the context tabs are very promising.
But my overall question is: When do the developer of InfoSelect hire an interface designer?

All the best,
Dominik

Dominik,

Thanks for your comments. Do you mean ProjectCards from http://www.projectcards.com/ ? As I can see, it is intended mainly for project/time management? And how would you compare it to ndxCards - I am thinking about buying them, I like the old "analog" idea of "cards"...

W.

Wojciech,

ProjectCards (http://www.projectcards.com/ has its focus on project and time management. ndxCards is perhaps the best sofware based representation of index cards. If you need a system to enter information and knowledge on index cards then you should use ndxCards. If you want to use index cards for project management then you should use ProjectCards.

Please note that ProjectCards is quite pricy ($100.00) and is basically intended for use in a team (I do use it just on my own and it works).

Further, ProjectCards has its foundation in agile programm development what makes it a bit strange on the first sight as it is not based on the usual project mangement paradigm.

By the way: I have implemented part of the ProjectCards concept in ADM. Thanks to the great metadata system and the outlining feauture.

Dominik

Dominik, I have a cynical answer to the question of why it is so pricey: Because they can get away with it. I believe that Micrologic built up sufficient customer base, starting with the days when the product was callled Tornado and continuing on with corporate sales of InfoSelect, that there is no worry about the competition.

Unfortunately, if you read the InfoSelect Yahoo group, posters -- even long-time loay users -- make it clear that Micrologic also has no worry about customer service. It is perhaps the most arrogant and unresponsive of any software company.

The really sad thing is that many IS users appear to be unaware of how many alternatives there are in the marketplace.

Having said that, IS 9 does look interesting, but it seems not to be the extensive revision of the product that was being rumored some months ago.

Daly

Dominik Holenstein wrote:

Wojciech,
I haven't found a trial download either. To give InfoSelect a try you have
to buy a licence. I would suggest to buy the yearly subscription. If you don't want to
use the software after your testing period you can kindly ask the developers for a
refund.
You ask: 'Why it is so expensive?' - this is exactly my question! I really
don't know why and my imrpession is that InfoSelect is overpriced even I know how
complex and time consuming it is to develop software.
I won't buy or test IS now
because I am satisfied with my current software portfolio (ADM, Word, Excel,
ProjectCards) and I don't want to add another piece of software to just make my life
more difficult. But I am very interested to hear from other users about their
experiences using IS 9. The SmartFolder concept and the context tabs are very
promising.
But my overall question is: When do the developer of InfoSelect hire an
interface designer?

All the best,
Dominik

Daly,

I upgraded my copy at the weekend. The temporary password didn't work and I emailed Micrologic to complain expecting a long wait for the reply, but within an hour I had a new (working) password sent.

I also rather stupidly upgraded to IS8, realised my mistake and followed the FAQ by putting in second order for IS9 with a note in the comments field to say that this earlier order on the same day was a mistake.

I got an email today to say that only the second order had been charged to my credit card.

This is a reasonably good start, in terms of customer service, but I too have been following the mixed views in the Yahoo groups

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Unfortunately, if you read the InfoSelect Yahoo group, posters -- even long-time
loay users -- make it clear that Micrologic also has no worry about customer service.
It is perhaps the most arrogant and unresponsive of any software company.

Graham Smith wrote:

Daly,

I upgraded my copy at the weekend. The temporary password didn't work and I
emailed Micrologic to complain expecting a long wait for the reply, but within an hour
I had a new (working) password sent.

I also rather stupidly upgraded to IS8,
realised my mistake and followed the FAQ by putting in second order for IS9 with a note
in the comments field to say that this earlier order on the same day was a mistake.

I
got an email today to say that only the second order had been charged to my credit
card.

This is a reasonably good start, in terms of customer service, but I too have
been following the mixed views in the Yahoo groups

To be fair, I have to say their customer service for me has been excellent over the years. They are rather prompt in my request for answers and even refund requests. Technical support on the other hand hasn't been consistent in my book. However, they do respond to my queries eventually. Whether they listen to the customers' responses or not, you have to make your own judgment. There might be certain limitations (programming software, etc.) that might limit what they can do with the program, but I do agree that they have been slow to respond to customers' request.

Having said all that, I found version 9 to be "superior" to many program I've been using of late, and hence my transition to it as my main information storage program besides Notabene.

Kenneth Rhee wrote:

To be fair, I have to say their customer service for me has been excellent
over the years. They are rather prompt in my request for answers and even refund
requests. Technical support on the other hand hasn't been consistent in my book.

I shall wait and see how I get on with technical support, if and when I need it. :-)

Graham

Daly,

Just a episode of corporate business:
I have requested to buy 5 licences of one of these applications for a specific project:
- Info Select 9
- ADM 3
- Ultra Recall 1.4

What is the answer of the software purchasing department?
'Dear Dominik,
Our company allows you to buy five licences of Info Select 9 because it is in our official software portfolio.'

What does this mean: The company I am working for allows me to buy the most expensive application.
This is my contribution to the topic 'Strange corporate behavior'!

To be fair: Info Select is perhaps the most appropriate application for this project even I have favoured and pushed ADM.
We have to integrate E-Mail sending and receiving and we need to share the same file on a network. Info Select 9 is used to organize software tests and to track the bugs.

I have to make one correction to my previous post in this thread:
I don't consider the interface that bad anymore. It is more useful than I have expected. The big advantage of having such a low-tech interface is that it makes the application stable and not too slow. I had many issues with OneNote and other Windows XP styled apps.

Regards,
Dominik

I would caution people about the subscription purchase. I consider it a rental model rather than a subscription model. At the end of the year, if you decide not to re-subscribe, the software stops functioning as intended. It will only allow you to look at existing notes in read-only mode, but will not allow you to add, change or even export data. When I first got the subscription to IS8, this wasn't even mentioned on their web site. Only after my repeated complaints, they added: (Upon expiration data is accessed in read-only mode.). See http://www.miclog.com/company/purch_vs_subscr.htm

I personally refuse to use software that will drop dead if I stop paying (or if the company drops dead). I may or may not get a regular upgrade to IS9, but I will most definately not get the subscription.

Hi all

I bought and used InfoSelect 8 about 2 years ago then never used it much. When V9 was introduced here - thank you Kenneth - I thought about it for about a day then CRIMP got the better of me.

Without going into too much detail at this point - being totally afflicated by CRIMP - I have used and tried everything. The latest was InfoHandler which is a very well engineered piece of software - yet I found its interface too -- well claustraphobic is about the best term I can think of.

I have since been using IS 9 intensely since early yesterday - I am even experimenting with its email function, albeit using MS Outlook in parallel before I go the whole way. I have to say I'm extremely impressed - it somehow is just easier to work with than everything i've tried. For me, about the only major thing missing is the ability to add properties, like pick list tags, categories whatever to topics/notes (and then use such as alternative filters), like with UltraRecall or InfoHandler. Oh, and perhaps some of the advanced internal hypertext/hyperlinking as per AskSam, or WhizFolders.

Overall I'm really excited - its a proverbial Information Management junkie's sweet shop!

Ian

Ian and others,

You are often using the word 'crimp' to describe the difficulty to find the best application for your personal information management. English is not my mother tongue and I don't really understand 'crimp'. I have found this explanation on the web: Weak; inconsistent; contradictory. Is this correct? Is it what you mean when you are crying CRIMP?

Sorry for this off-topic question but I thought that it is time to really understand this word and not just to guess what it means.

Thank you!

Regards,
Dominik

To any sometimes or regular users of InfoSelect:

I just also posted the following to the InfoSelect Yahoo Group. I would really appreciate any insight from any of my fellow info managment addicts:

I am wondering if what I perceive as a limitation in IS (I am using IS
9) is just my own limited understanding at this point?

In IS, the principle means for categorizing a topic or note, or email,
or file or whatever is to nest it in a single parent topic. Aside from
linking, which extends this a bit - in IS we seem required to choose
one and only one parent topic (category or category group) for any
item. In reality though, the information contained in any particular
item can easily mean it should belong to many parent topics (categories).

The search function, and the new (search) Folders in IS are very
poweful and fast - which mitigates this somewhat, but is not a
substitute. Why not? Because the content or subject of a
data/text/web/file/email item only sometimes contain content that
enables you to limit a search result set to an effectively precise
result. Which is why its so powerful to add (if possible) multiple
categories to ones data items - and such categories are typically made
up of terms that are NOT contained within the content or subject of a
data item.

InfoHandler is the most sophisticated exponent of this. You
progressively create multiple category groups - each with as many
categories/sub-categories as you like. Then you assign any combination
of those to any data item. Then when you want to find any item or
group of items, you can either use a traditional search function, or
select any combinbation of categories as a means to create a category
intersection and thus a very precise filtered list of items.

In InfoSelect - there is something like this, but it seems only
available in Forms. You can create something like the analogue of
category groups with a Field using the List format. So that in any
Form you can have multiple Fields, each potentially with a List Format
- and thereby assign multiple 'categories' to any such Form.

So ideally then, what I want to do is assign any selector item to
multiple topics. It wouldn't be a good thing just to clone items
(clones are like virtual items or shortcuts - not copies) - because
clones just totally clutter the tree or selector. What would be really
nice would be to have columns - not the kind of grid columns that
currently exist, but where each column is like a Field in a Form, and
could have different properties - the most important one being a list
from which you could assign one value from each different column to
any item. And then any item, or group of items could be filtered by
selecting an intersection of values from multiple columns.

OK, so any InfoSelect users familiar with ADM, MyInfo, UltraRecall,
InfoHandler will be VERY familiar with all of this.

Anyway, my final point and question is, to anyone nutty enough to have
read all of this - :-) - is have you found any cool creative
techniques where you can do this kind of category intersection
filtering thing in InfoSelect?

Thank you very much!

Ian Goldsmid

Hi Ian

The search
function, and the new (search) Folders in IS are very
poweful and fast - which
mitigates this somewhat, but is not a
substitute. Why not? Because the content or
subject of a
data/text/web/file/email item only sometimes contain content
that
enables you to limit a search result set to an effectively precise
result.
Which is why its so powerful to add (if possible) multiple
categories to ones data
items - and such categories are typically made
up of terms that are NOT contained
within the content or subject of a
data item.

But nobody says that you cannot enter category names inside a note.

To be able to use the fast Search feature to filter out notes belonging to a particular category, I type the category name(s) at the end of each note. The new autocomplete feature helps you in doing so (up to vs9 I had a note in the tree containing all the category names so I could copy and paste them).

Franz

Ian,

What I do with Zoot, as I don't like wasting time assigning keywords or categories, is when the key words aren't already in the text, I add them at the beginning of the text. So if I have a bit of text that refers to project "xyz" but project xyz isn't mentioned in the text. I simply write "xyz" at the beginning of the first line.

It then appears in the Zoot virtual folder that is set up to gather all records that mention xyz. the same approach could be used with the auto assign rules for folders in IS.

The only problem I can see is that pysically you seem to be restricted for space in IS as to the number of folders you can set up. Not a problem with Zoot, but this has given me a bit of a problem as I try to work out how to setup IS.

Ian Goldsmid wrote:

linking, which extends this a bit - in IS we
seem required to choose
one and only one parent topic (category or category group)
for any
item. In reality though, the information contained in any particular
item
can easily mean it should belong to many parent topics (categories).

Ian,

This is a very good question!
I have stopped to categorize my topics in ADM with Keywords and have found a much more pragmatic and low-tech approach which could help you to find a solution in IS 9:

First, I create a template for notes where the following items are listed (on top or at the bottom of the note - this is up to you). I am using small letters only to simplify the typing:
category:
date:
author:

Then I create a new topic and choosing the template.
The next step is to add the necessary information. To make sure that the search works properly I add the category right after the : without a space. This looks then like this:
category:outliner
date:11.05.2006
author:dominik

Now you can capture all your notes with this template and add all necessary categories.
In IS you can now create a new folder called 'Outline by Dominik' including this searches:
[OR] category:outliner
[AND] author:dominik

Whenever you click on that folder you get all items listed matching this query.

I am not a supporter of categorizing or tagging systems anymore. Why? First, it takes me a considerable amount of time to keep the category or keyword list up-to-date. Second, I ended up having an equal amount of categories in a picklist like having topics in the same file. Or another example: In Gmail, the E-Mail system of Google, I have a very long list of lables to tag the incoming emails. The longer the list gets the more lazy I am to choose the right lables for an email.

So it is much easier for me to just type down a category each time than to dig through a picklist. I never have to think of updating a category or keyword list with this approach.
Another advantage with this approach is that I am nearly independent of the system or application I am using. This approach works in ADM, IS, Ultra Recall and even with a search engine like Coveo, X1 or Yahoo Desktop search.

It will be very interesting to discuss this topic with other members of this group. If interest is high enough we could open a new thread.

Regards,
Dominik

Graham Smith wrote:

Ian,

What I do with Zoot, as I don't like wasting time assigning keywords or
categories, is when the key words aren't already in the text, I add them at the
beginning of the text. So if I have a bit of text that refers to project "xyz" but project
xyz isn't mentioned in the text. I simply write "xyz" at the beginning of the first
line.

It then appears in the Zoot virtual folder that is set up to gather all records
that mention xyz. the same approach could be used with the auto assign rules for
folders in IS.

The only problem I can see is that pysically you seem to be restricted
for space in IS as to the number of folders you can set up. Not a problem with Zoot, but
this has given me a bit of a problem as I try to work out how to setup IS.

A couple of suggestions:

If you are using a free note, you can create a template with category headings and enter the category or keyword. For instance, this is what I have for note category:

Date:
Category:
Keyword:

You can then set up the smart folders to organize your categories or keywords. Even doing the search you can do the Boolean search, and then if you are going to use this frequently, then set up the conext tabs for it.

Of course, you can also create a database note, and enter your notes using that. In the past, I used this feature to create custom note forms.

As far as physical space limitation of smart folders, if you pull down the smart folder toolbar area, it will bring in down to the whole row. I figure I can have quite a few folders displayed in the fresh row.

Hope this helps.

Kenneth,

I think the difference between IS and Zoot in the respect of virtual folders is that with Zoot the folders are arranged vertically, and therefore in theory you can have as many as you want, with IS you are restricted to the width of the screen, and you need to think about using short names. I tend to use virtual folders in Zoot in a fairly casual manner, maybe with IS it needs structured a bit more.

The idea for categories and keywords, good as it is, was probably aimed at another poster as I don't want to use keywords or categories, but simply use the exiting text, only on a very rare occasion when I realise the text fails to include anything that would be picked up in search do I add an an appropriate key word to make sure it is found.

Having said that, I can certainly see uses for this approach where a structure to the notes would be valuable.

As an aside, IS seems to be shaping up as the first program i have tried that may prove a viable replacement for Zoot

Thanks,

Graham

Kenneth Rhee wrote:

A couple of suggestions:

If you are using a free note, you can
create a template with category headings and enter the category or keyword. For
instance, this is what I have for note category:

Date:
Category:
Keyword:

You
can then set up the smart folders to organize your categories or keywords. Even doing
the search you can do the Boolean search, and then if you are going to use this
frequently, then set up the conext tabs for it.

Of course, you can also create a
database note, and enter your notes using that. In the past, I used this feature to
create custom note forms.

As far as physical space limitation of smart folders, if
you pull down the smart folder toolbar area, it will bring in down to the whole row. I
figure I can have quite a few folders displayed in the fresh row.

Hope this helps.

Thanks to All - this has completely clarified how I can do something like MDE InfoHandler type categorization in IS 9 (if I choose). The template function in IS 9 turns out to be particularly useful here. I can create a template Note (well a Form as its officially called in IS) and put several custom fields in it - the main field being for notes, and then several other fields which are drop down lists - like a field called @Context - with drop down picklist items (values) like @Computer, @Downtown etc. I then create and save in a Folder, any combination of boolean search for specific combinations of field values.

Although as Dominik says, and I agree, it is a major commitment to assign keywords, categories whatever to items, so I'm going to try to do without it initially! It's just great to know that possibility is there if I choose to use it.

Regards, Ian