Forum Posts Feed
Zoot 6 - the solution ?
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by maties
Aug 4, 2011 at 06:59 AM
Yes Yes Yes, I ABSOLUTELY AGREE WITH MARK!!!
>Another thing that discourages
>me is that the developer, Tom Davis, is building in all these hooks to web services like
>Facebook and Twitter, which I think is a mistake. Given how long it’s taken him to
>produce this latest version, that says to me that an inordinate amount of his future
>development time will be spent trying to keep it operating with those constantly
>changing APIs instead of on Zoot’s core information-handling tasks.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 4, 2011 at 10:50 AM
Yes, I’m afraid it would also take a lot to get me to look again at Zoot 6.
The time it’s taken to produce in unbelievable (I think it’s now more than 2 years beyond its initial published release date). It’s not so much the speed of release a the constant posting of dates which then get left behind - I’d rather not know than be constantly kept on tenterhooks like that.
I also found data being lost in Zoot, even in the stable previous versions. In Zoot 6 (when still in beta) I couldn’t get all my data out of it. When I’d get any response from Tom (unlike some other people I found the support really poor - often there’d be not response at all) it would be put down to some hidden and undocumented feature. With hidden features messing with my data and my head, I decided to stop wanting to get Zoot to work for me and to move to more stable, understandable alternatives.
Graham
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 4, 2011 at 11:32 AM
I can understand the frustrations with Zoot over the past few years. But I have to say that through the endless updates—minor and major—Zoot has worked seamlessly for me, at least in terms of my information. Sometimes it has done some funky things, but I have never lost data and I have found the core functionality remains powerful. I tried switching to UR and MyInfo when I began to lose faith that we’d ever see Zoot 6, but neither of those fine applications has been able to replicate what I can do with Zoot. It may help that I don’t rely on Zoot for all my information management (see comments on PersonalBrain from previous posts). I agree that the addition of cloud-type integration is probably problematic, and have no interest in using those functions (although, I may use the Dropbox sync at some point).
Anyway, I am looking forward to the official release, which I hope will include a comprehensive help file. Then I’ll be able to make a more informed decision about my future Zootiness.
Steve Z.
Posted by Ken
Aug 4, 2011 at 03:29 PM
Mark wrote:
>And finally,
>I’m now suffering from IAF—information-app fatigue.
Yes, I have felt this way for the last few years, especially when there is a device/OS change in my life. Having access to data on many devices comes at a price. And, having new apps popping out left and right can give CRIMPing a bad name. There was a certain comfort to using ECCO on one machine, and some days I am tempted to go back to doing just that, although my new laptop is running Win7-64,and I am not certain if the stock ECCO program will install without serious modification.
—Ken
Posted by Slartibartfarst
Aug 5, 2011 at 10:01 AM
This is an interesting thread. I enjoyed reading all the posts.
I am new to this forum (this is my 2nd post today), but I have been reading it in my feed aggregator (Google reader) for quite a while. I rarely visit the forum.
I have trialled/evaluated lots of PIM tools and started to suffer from the abovementioned IAF (Information-App Fatigue) a couple of years back.
I have recently again been reviewing various client-based PIM and Wiki tools, but still am unable to find any single one that meets my peculiar requirements.
I have been a user of the excellent IS (Info Select) for years, but stopped upgrading it at version 8 as the developer seemed to have the software not on a systematic developmental path (e.g., providing improved functionality to meet users’ defined requirements) but rather on an ad hoc change-thrashing path that was focussed on *features* rather than requirements.
At the time I started using IS, it was my first choice (after evaluation) instead of Zoot - which I also evaluated and which was my second choice. I have occasionally re-evaluated Zoot over the ensuing years but never had a sufficiently compelling reason to overcome my IS-inertia and migrate away from IS to Zoot.
Zoot was(is) a superb piece of software, IMHO, but the comments in this discussion thread seem to indicate that its development might have an unclear path/purpose - same as IS, I guess. This is a pity, as I had always through that Zoot would probably be the best tool for me to move to.
I am currently indexing/searching/finding, storing and managing my information (knowledge base) using various disparate tools:
- IS8
- Google Desktop (and Indexing/Search).
- Windows 7 Indexing/Search.
- ScrapBook add-on (and indexing/search) in Firefox
- CHS (Clipboard Help and Spell) from Donation Coder.
- Lotus Agenda (for DOS-based storage of legacy data only).
- Qiqqi (a reference management and OCR/index/search tool for text in PDF document/image files). I am trialling this.
- xplorer?
- Google docs and Google docs Sync.
- Gmail (integration of email and Google docs).
- MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) + MS Project.
- MS OneNote. I am trialling this.
Though I have assiduously avoided using the proprietary MS Outlook unless obliged to do so by clients (I work as an independent consultant), I have recently started trialling Jello Dashboard, which is not a standalone application but is built rather like an add-in to Outlook. Looking through the Jello-Outlook functionality, I figured that not only might Jello-Outlook provide a partial replacement for Info Select, but it also seemed to have some of the capability to automatically dynamically filter/categorise information items in the same way as Lotus Agenda, and in a similar way that can be done in the CHS database.
*@Mark*: re your post above about Zoot and Facebook/twitter.
I had always rather hoped that Zoot might be the ultimate PIM for me and could be taken by its developer in a direction that would eliminate the unavoidable and inefficient overlap and duplication that is inherent in the above set of tools that I am using. However, if it now seems that his greatest worry (?) is to keep it in step and integrated with the dynamically changing APIs for “social networks”, then I fail to comprehend the rationale for this.