Daly.

In the ADM thread, you mentioned the sorting bin in Infoselect.

>I cannot believe I am saying this, but if InfoSelect had a reliable set of metadata columns,
>hoisting, and cloning, I would probably use it. The hot spots, sorting bin (undocumented
>but a very neat feature), and ability to make forms, make IS attractive.

What's the sorting bin? The help file says it was replaced by the Hotspots feature in the latest release of IS. As you mention "hot spots" AND "sorting bin" - is there something I missed?

Greetings, Franz

Franz, please forgive my delay in responding -- an oversight on my part.

You get the sorting bin by using Control F6.

Once you have the sorting bin you can drag topics from any level of the selector outline.

Where hot spots work only for the level immediately below where they appear, the sorting bin allows you to have immediate access to a topic from any level, no matter how deep.

It is a neat feature, and I do not know why it is not documented.

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,

Daly

Franz Grieser wrote:

Daly.

In the ADM thread, you mentioned the sorting bin in Infoselect.

>>I cannot
believe I am saying this, but if InfoSelect had a reliable set of metadata columns,

>>hoisting, and cloning, I would probably use it. The hot spots, sorting bin
(undocumented
>>but a very neat feature), and ability to make forms, make IS
attractive.

What's the sorting bin? The help file says it was replaced by the
Hotspots feature in the latest release of IS. As you mention "hot spots" AND "sorting
bin" - is there something I missed?

Greetings, Franz

Daly

Franz, please forgive my delay in responding -- an oversight on my part.

No problem :-)

You get the
sorting bin by using Control F6.

Once you have the sorting bin you can drag topics
from any level of the selector outline.

Where hot spots work only for the level
immediately below where they appear, the sorting bin allows you to have immediate
access to a topic from any level, no matter how deep.

It is a neat feature, and I do not
know why it is not documented.

You're right: Really useful.
I do not understand either why they say that the hot spots feature replaces the sorting bin.

Thanks for the pointer,
Franz

Franz,

The hot spots and sorting bin have a similar function -- but not exactly the same. I think using both to advantage makes good sense.

I have a glimmer of a hope that Micro Logic may be doing more than they have in past to get IS into shape. The rumour had been that the current version would see many significant changes, in essence being in many ways quite different than it is now.

We have seen some significant changes, but not all that was rumoured. I am hoping that the next version....but I haven't heard any rumours about it, yet.

The recent move to trail versions of IS is positive, perhaps a sign that Micro Logic will see its customer base as more than a cash cow -- which is udderly ridiculous for a software company in today's market, especially with the current competitive wave of innovations in information management.

Daly

I do not understand either why they say that the hot spots
feature replaces the sorting bin.

Thanks for the pointer,
Franz

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Franz,

The hot spots and sorting bin have a similar function -- but not exactly the
same. I think using both to advantage makes good sense.

Daly, just to remind you & to inform Franz that Ariadne has many of these same functions at a fraction of the price.

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA

Jan, the hot spots in IS are equivalent to Ariadne's accelerator -- in fact, I think to a large extent Mike has been influenced heavily by IS. The new Ariadne work space that Mike developed reflects IS as well.

The IS sorting bin is not the same as Ariadne's, however. IS' sorting bin is a separate window that you can drag items to from the selector -- in essence creating a short cut.

I like Ariadne a lot, but it is again in a development hiatus, and we don't know when it will begin again. Further, one of its key features, the columns, which are advanced when compared with IS's selector grid, have serious deficiencies. Mike has agreed the columns need work, and that will be dealt with in the next development phase.

Ariadne has another deficiency -- a serious one in my view -- and that is that you can have only one file, and one copy of Ariadne. Thus when the outline gets especially long, even with hot spots and its version of a hoist, it becomes very difficult to work with.

IS allows various files, which can either be opened separately, or together. So even though IS doesn't have a hoist, it is more workable. IS does need to get a hoist, and cloning.

I have always found the spacing of the Ariadne outline a little less than optimal for my eyes, even though Mike greatly improved many upgrades ago. I have the same problem, incidentally, with UltraRecall, which unlike Ariadne, doesn't offer the option of changing size of type in the tree unless you do it at the level of Windows.

I do like the feel of Ariadne, and the comments appearing on the same level as the notes is both practical and elegant the way Mike has done. And it means that though you can't associate a note with a column record, you can use the comment. Of course in MI you get the note and the column, the way one does in ADM also.

Ah -- all these pros and cons. It is a wonder that us CRIMPERS get any work done at all.

Cheers,

Daly

Jan Rifkinson wrote:

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>
>Franz,
>
>The hot spots and sorting bin have a similar
function -- but not exactly the
>same. I think using both to advantage makes good
sense.

Daly, just to remind you & to inform Franz that Ariadne has many of these same
functions at a fraction of the price.

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA

Daly, Maybe all the nuances you mention are so but I decided -- despite my own words which I'm forced to eat today -- I would not pay +/- $250 for such a program since there are so many more fairly priced alternatives.

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA

Jan, I quite agree with you -- $250 is way too much for a program such as IS, especially considering that some of the mudules don't work all that well, and that because of that, or other equally legitimate reasons, very few people seem to be using all the features. For example, although a few people seem to like it, I would never use the email module because it is just too clunky compared with virtually any other email product -- including the free gmail which I really like -- that I have ever tried.

Yesterday, just after responding to your post, I attempted to set up a workspace grid. I set some of the culumns for dates and numbers, and the little up and down arrows appeared on the right side of the cell -- unfortunately no matter what I did, including checking with the help file, I could not get them to work.

Even though it is not aesthetically pleasing in the usual sense, I do like the visual appearance of IS because it works with my eyes. I like that I can individually change a tree item's colour, etc., which I cannot do in MyInfo, although I have asked for it in version 4, and hope it happens.

So $250 is too much. I pay the yearly subscription fee. My take is that the $250 fee is meant more for corporations -- I have been told that Jim Lewis, the developer, had got a pretty good small business and corporate client base for IS. Business has always been willing too pay too much for products on the basis that 1) they can deduct them as expenses, and (2) they can pass the cost on to customers. But that's a rant for another day (grin).

Daly

Jan Rifkinson wrote:

Daly, Maybe all the nuances you mention are so but I decided -- despite my own words
which I'm forced to eat today -- I would not pay +/- $250 for such a program since there
are so many more fairly priced alternatives.

--
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA

So $250 is too much. I pay the yearly subscription fee.

My main objection to the subscription fee is that IS stops working as a full product if you don't renew your subscription and reverts to a read-only mode (with no export capability). I ran into this with IS 8 - the web page did not indicate this restriction until I complained at great length about it. Had I known, I never would have gotten a subscription. I'd rather just buy an upgrade to a new version if there are sufficient improvements to warrant it.