Thanks to everyone who responded to my various posts about the Mac and my experiences with the software.

The Mac will be history by the end of the week; I am going to Staples this afternoon to look at PC laptops running Windows 7. If anyone has suggestions, I will gratefully receive them.

When push came to shove, I have neither the time nor the money to invest in learning Mac programs, most of which seem to be less than what is available on the PC. Mac's reputation is overstated in some ways, and it looks to me like some developers are coasting on Mac's past successes.

With the exception of DevonThink, the software available on the Mac in terms of outlining and information processing does not justify the premium in price to buy the Mac, or the decreased functionality. I was somewhat taken aback that DevonThink overstated the number of free hours before a 30-day registration was required (I had not even had the Mac for the number of hours of free run-time DevonThink offered), and that when this little fact was brought to their attention, no apology or explanation was offered. On the other hand, the 30-day free license was provided very quickly.

Yesterday I spent many hours comparing and contrasting MyInfo and UltraRecall with the various Mac outliners I had downloaded. I have also looked again at Infoqube - which I believe has a positive, and profitable future.

In terms of intuitive functioning, range of features, and features actually doing what they are purported to do, My Info and UltraRecall outperformed the Mac products.

In raw power, UR probably has an edge over MI; however, in ease of use, clarity of help files, and responsiveness of the developer, Petko, MyInfo has an edge as fas as I am concerned.

This week, also, Petko confirmed to me that the next service upgrade of MI will allow for multiple open windows. This feature in itself is fairly rare among information and outliner programs, but is very valuable to anyone doing writing and research.

Having set up an information structure in NoteBook, I have replicated the headings in an MI Topic, added to it, created appropriate columns, utilized MI's task features, etc. Working within MI is faster than NoteBook.

I agree with a writer on the MI forums who made the point in recent days that MI is under-rated among PC information/ouliner programs.

I will miss the opportunity to use Scrivener, learning about its features. I took a quick look at it, and was interested. But I am told it is coming to the PC. I realize that for the writing I am doing now, I do not need its power.

Similarly, I do not need all the power of DevonThink - though at some future point I may. EverNote and Surfulater can, and will hold my web-based material. One hopes EverNote will get the point, though, that there is more to information management than collecting data and working on every operating system.
Surfulater has a neat way of handling items with more than one tag, and Neville is talking about syncing to the cloud.

So that's where it's at. Thanks again for the feedback during the last week.

Daly

Thanks for the update, Daly. I'm glad you were able to come to satisfying conclusion that works for you.

I agree that MyInfo is underrated. My only real quibble with it -- and a main reason I do not use it -- is that the editor is not very user friendly, in my opinion. In fact, that's a strength of the Mac platform. Almost all the programs use the Apple word processing engine, so they all work well and all feel like word processors. There's no reason that should be an important consideration for you, but it is for me.

Steve

Daly,

If you save a lot of Web pages or snippets from them, you might be interested in the myBase/Web Collect combination. MyBase is basically a 2-pane outliner/PIM with the ability to open a couple of other panes for special purposes. The main right pane has two tabs. One tab displays the saved Web page the other tab is an rtf editor in which you can enter text, paste graphics, etc. Occasionally, it cannot save a Web page, but that seldom occurs, and the saves are rapid-only a couple of seconds. Also a page's URL is saved.

I would, however, not recommend myBase as the best authoring environment. (My favorite for that was the now moribund GrandView single pane outliner.)

-c

Steve, you're welcome.

In terms of word processing, though, I found the Mac outliners/information managers actually behind the Windows programs. For example, list features were sometimes not included, or the spacing was not attractive, to say the least.

For me, both UR and MI feel more like word processors than do DevonThink or OmniOutliner or NoteBook.

But back to the point - I think this resolution will be more workable.

Daly

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Thanks for the update, Daly. I'm glad you were able to come to satisfying conclusion
that works for you.

I agree that MyInfo is underrated. My only real quibble with it --
and a main reason I do not use it -- is that the editor is not very user friendly, in my
opinion. In fact, that's a strength of the Mac platform. Almost all the programs use
the Apple word processing engine, so they all work well and all feel like word
processors. There's no reason that should be an important consideration for you, but
it is for me.

Steve

Thanks, Cassius.

I have tried out, sometime last year, MyBase. I prefer both EverNote and Surfulater.

Daly

Cassius wrote:

Daly,

If you save a lot of Web pages or snippets from them, you might be interested in
the myBase/Web Collect combination. MyBase is basically a 2-pane outliner/PIM with
the ability to open a couple of other panes for special purposes. The main right pane
has two tabs. One tab displays the saved Web page the other tab is an rtf editor in which
you can enter text, paste graphics, etc. Occasionally, it cannot save a Web page, but
that seldom occurs, and the saves are rapid-only a couple of seconds. Also a page's URL
is saved.

I would, however, not recommend myBase as the best authoring
environment. (My favorite for that was the now moribund GrandView single pane
outliner.)

-c

Daly,

Thank you very much for sharing your Mac exprience in this detail.

Just some ideas regarding the laptop:
- Test the keyboard of the laptop. There really poor ones around especially for writers like you.
- Take at least a dual core machine with a fast processor because Windows 7 and MS Office are resource hungry
- Check guarantees and services. It's very annoying to wait for six week until a laptop gets repaired.
- Maybe you want to get MS Office installed on your laptop. Take the 2010 edition and not the 2007 edition. The 2020 edition is more stable and less resource hungry
- Check the performance of the battery. Three hours for a notebook are not good enough

Regarding UR/MI:
I personally prefer UR but mabe only because I have been using it since version 1.0 and I am used to it. It's the perfect tool for me at the moment.


All the best,
Dominik

I am going to Staples this afternoon to look at PC laptops running Windows 7. If anyone has suggestions, I will gratefully receive them.

I'm a big fan of Acer notebooks. They have a new line of thin, light 8hr notebooks:
On www.acer.ca, check out the TravelMate? Timeline 8371, 8471 and 8571, but there are other too

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Thanks to everyone who responded to my various posts about the Mac and my experiences
with the software.

The Mac will be history by the end of the week; I am going to Staples
this afternoon to look at PC laptops running Windows 7. If anyone has suggestions, I
will gratefully receive them.

Have you considered installing Windows on your Macbook? I've got a Macbook Pro, bootcamped WinXP. It runs XP better than any notebook I've owned that had XP or Vista preloaded. I've been running OSX for 7 months, but if I ever decide to go back to Windows, I'll just convert the drive over to Win7.

Domink, thanls for the post.

Good advice.

I got an Intel Core i3 machine - an Asus, with a nice keyboard, 15.6 inch monitor, 4 gig RAM.

I like it so far.

I have MyInfo up and running, and am gradually bringing my other programs over from the netbook I had used for a year, prior to getting the Mac. Staples very kindly took the Mac back, and set me up with the new laptop.

Daly

Dominik Holenstein wrote:

Daly,

Thank you very much for sharing your Mac exprience in this detail.

Just some
ideas regarding the laptop:
- Test the keyboard of the laptop. There really poor ones
around especially for writers like you.
- Take at least a dual core machine with a fast
processor because Windows 7 and MS Office are resource hungry
- Check guarantees and
services. It's very annoying to wait for six week until a laptop gets repaired.
-
Maybe you want to get MS Office installed on your laptop. Take the 2010 edition and not
the 2007 edition. The 2020 edition is more stable and less resource hungry
- Check the
performance of the battery. Three hours for a notebook are not good
enough

Regarding UR/MI:
I personally prefer UR but mabe only because I have been
using it since version 1.0 and I am used to it. It's the perfect tool for me at the moment.



All the best,
Dominik

Pierre, thanks for the advice.

I ended up getting an Asus; battery is said to be good, though not as good as the Acer you mentioned.

Cheers,

Daly

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

>I am going to Staples this afternoon to look at PC laptops running Windows 7. If anyone
has suggestions, I will gratefully receive them.

I'm a big fan of Acer notebooks.
They have a new line of thin, light 8hr notebooks:
On www.acer.ca, check out the
TravelMate? Timeline 8371, 8471 and 8571, but there are other too

Daly, thanks for the extended 'Mac in a week' series of posts; also thanks to everyone else who contributed. The Mac platform is not one I will be joining, but it is very useful to know what I am missing and what I can ask for in the two desktop platforms I use --Linux and Windows.

Regarding your new PC, I am late with my own suggestions and hope you all the best with your new Asus. For the record, the only point I would add is to go for a 64 bit Windows 7 system. In this day and age, one can envision upgrading to more than 4 gigs in the not so distant future and, as I understand, the 64 bit address mapping is more or less a prerequisite to make efficient use of such amounts of memory.