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Data - In & Out
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Posted by Jan Rifkinson
Jan 31, 2007 at 02:41 PM
Like many of you I’ve probaby tried in excess of 2 dozen ‘data” programs, from note takers to data gatherers. What amazes me about many of these programs is that developers/programmers—although very talented & inventive when it comes to options within the programs—forget that getting the program into the data base should be as painless & inventive as possible.
If the user has to go thru several steps of copying opening/switching/pasting, blah, blah, blah… the workflow is interrupted. The most talented programs in this regard, i.e. getting data into the database(s) is Zoot & ADM. MyInfo is gaining ground for v4. But take an interesting (IMO) program like Connected Text. While I could see how easy it was to link things to each other & visualize them a variety of ways, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out an easy way to get data into the program. Even common importing strategies like csv format seems to be forgotten, likewise for exporting data.
Exporting is the other half of the problem, i.e. allowing you & others to use the data you’ve collected w/o owning your same program(s)..
A slight digresssion is the use of date/time. For some reason many developers associated w this kind of software seem to equate data/time/reminders/popups, etc as PIM functions that they want to stay away from. I don’t understand this reasoning because it seems to me that the more data you gather/organize, the more important it is to be able to prioritze & schedule it as much as possible otherwise you get overrun by (drown in) data. This is especially true when it comes to gathering/organizing data for a specific project, be it an article you are researching/writing or a construction project or gathering info for a website, keeping records of your gardens, photography. The list is endless.
What programs have you all experimented/use that have good data in/out functions w some kind of calendar/time functions besides Outlook which I refuse to use.
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Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 31, 2007 at 07:39 PM
Jan,
I’d say that Zoot is the best choice for an app that gets info in and out easily, and has time scheduling features—even though it lacks a genuine calendar function. The only other program that comes to mind with these abilities is Info Select, which does a pretty decent job moving data in and out, especially in, and has a calendar/schedule function which is superior to Zoot. I wouldn’t recommend IS, however, as it suffers from feature bloat and is way overpriced.
I seem to recall that the guys at Milenix were working on some sort of schedule/calendar app that would work with MyInfo… I wonder what happened to that?
Steve Z.
Posted by Jan Rifkinson
Jan 31, 2007 at 09:25 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>The only other program that comes to mind with these abilities is Info Select, which >does a pretty decent job moving data in and out, especially in, and has a calendar/schedule function which is superior to Zoot. I wouldn’t recommend IS, however, as it suffers from feature bloat and is way overpriced.
To be honest, I would pay a hefty lic $$ if I could find the right program. I’m going to take a look @ IS although I think I did this once before.
>I seem to recall
>that the guys at Milenix were working on some sort of schedule/calendar app that would
>work with MyInfo… I wonder what happened to that?
I mentioned something about this to them & Petko responded that they had carefully thought about this sort of thing & decided against it. As I say, however, I think, they imagine a PIM which is not what I have in mind suggesting that kind of ability.
I think you are right about Zoot (I’m a licensed user since v1…. I think) but I need RTF & graphics functions.
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Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA
Posted by Chris Murtland
Jan 31, 2007 at 09:38 PM
Jan, I’d suggest taking a look at Ultra Recall if you haven’t already - there are a lot of options for importing various file types and exporting from the database as well.
Chris
Posted by Al Cantley
Feb 1, 2007 at 01:25 PM
UR beta 3 was just released with some nice usability enhancements…
http://www.kinook.com/UR/beta.html
Al
Chris Murtland wrote:
>Jan, I’d suggest taking a look at Ultra Recall if you haven’t already - there are a lot of
>options for importing various file types and exporting from the database as
>well.
>
>Chris
>