Greetings. I am currently using the latest version of Ultra Recall (Pro 4.2), and I have been waiting and waiting for Kinook to come out with a new version that will include global searching across databases, a much discussed and requested feature on their forum (it's been on the UR roadmap for years). Unfortunately, and perhaps somewhat due to the current economic downturn, this feature, global searching, has been put on the developer's back burner.

Since I am not getting any younger, and am tired of waiting for Kinook to get the lead out, could anyone on this forum tell me of a robust program equal to or superior to (in the eye of the beholder, of course) Ultra Recall that features a global searching function?

MyInfo http://www.milenix.com/myinfo/features is the first that springs to mind. The advantage is that its logic is near enough to the UltraRecall paradigm, so the learning curve should not be steep.

Hi,

I am also an Ultra Recall user. I debated between UR and MyInfo at great length before deciding on UR. The main shortcomings with MyInfo were few, but dealbreakers for me, such as non-searchable PDFs (which also is in their roadmap).

In an email with Kinook, I got the impression that a new version might come out within a few months, so I decided to use UR and keep all "databases" in the same .urd file for the moment. When cross-db searching comes out, I will just copy the relevant nodes to individual databases. To cut down on navigation, I simply hoist the main tree of interest. It works well since my joint database is still of manageable size.

Just a suggestion, but you can't go wrong with MyInfo as far as I can tell.

Best, /Pavi

basilides wrote:

Greetings. I am currently using the latest version of Ultra Recall (Pro 4.2), and I
have been waiting and waiting for Kinook to come out with a new version that will
include global searching across databases, a much discussed and requested feature
on their forum (it's been on the UR roadmap for years). Unfortunately, and perhaps
somewhat due to the current economic downturn, this feature, global searching, has
been put on the developer's back burner.

Since I am not getting any younger, and am
tired of waiting for Kinook to get the lead out, could anyone on this forum tell me of a
robust program equal to or superior to (in the eye of the beholder, of course) Ultra
Recall that features a global searching function?

As we all know, I post in the UR forum under schferk, pearls before Schweine and Ferkel (my tongue-in-cheek humour, doesn't matter), and just some days ago, I've been developing this subject there.

The corresponding MI functions are "search all databases" and "search all OPEN databases" ; I had left MI at the beginning of 2011, falsely thinking UR was superior in the end, and indeed, MI's distinction between current, open and all databases (in a given directory that is) is one of its finest feature, even when "search all databases" takes a lot more time than you'd expect if your data grows exponentially, and considering the fact that MI, as UR, is constantly indexing your data (which slows down its core functioning).

In the UR forum, I got to the conclusion that it's not "MI or UR" or whatever, but splitting up your data into self-contained files, and do the inter-database search by a third party program, i.e. - far superior to anything else I've trialled - Agent Ransack which is free and first-rate : It even gives you the contexts of your finds (which are very readable if you search your ActionOutline files, e.g., weird special chars notwithstanding if you've got text with UTF-8 encoding, i.e. "European chars").

The advantage of such a systems is imo that it's scaleable in two directions, you can have multiple files on your 700 g tablet comp, and a 10k staffed corp could build up the same system, all with the same ease - try to apply UR (or, worse, MI) to any, just the slightest, corporate environment, and it'll fail you by their architectural misconception.

Another big advantage of that "keeping it simple" approach to files, together with cross-files search by (excellent) third-party software, is the fact that then it's possible to build up a GTD (or any other PM) system, because an excellent third-party software's able to find many special chars you'd put into your files as action codes, whilst in MI and in UR then, I tried several dozens of special chars with their in-built search functions (all 3 with MI, just the 1 in UR), and it had been only a handful of such chars MI had been able to detect, and mostly within special char combinations only (!), whilst UR had been even worse, it only detected 2 (!) special chars out of those several dozen, and in special, unhandy combinations only, in the way (I'm not looking it up now, so this is just a take-place and not necessarily a real-world example): 5$ was searchable, whilst $ was not, nor was $5.

This being said, I'm aware that after you'll have found your find in any third party program, you'll need again search it within the given data file, whilst integrated search functions allow for clicking on the result, and you'll get to the item / find in context immediately then.

But then, neither MI nor UR (within its 1-file search now) will give, up to now, those contexts, whilst AR will give them, which is to say, in MI / UR / whatever, you'll get some / a lot of FALSE finds, to click then one by one, in order to see the context only then - and whilst in MI you'll click within a list, and again, in UR those clicks will HIDE your search, and you'll have to search anew if I understood that function well - it'll be a lot of clicking back of forth anyway.

So, going down the results list "with context" in AR, finding the really relevant results, and then search again within that given target file - a macro should do the manual work here, having put your original search term not only into AR, but into the clipboard as well -, seems to be the preferable solution of these problems indeed.

As you can see here (and as I could show you with almost any other aspect of those progs), "integrated progs" like MI and UR are just not sophisticated enough to live up to their promises, and thus, combinations of simpler but specialised and faultless softwares could bring better results in more simple ways.

( It'll be the day AR's paid brother will find "European chars" I'll happily buy ; since it doesn't yet, the freeware does it for me. )

Zoot also has a global search capability. (The old Zoot was one of the first applications that I'm aware of that also had offered a search of your entire computer through its function called Agent X, which has been abandoned in recent years due to the strong search functions built into new operating systems.)

Steve Z.

Have to agree that Agent Ransack / FileLocator Lite is very capable - the Pro version is also very capable, incidentally. But even the Lite version can search through MS Office files, and supports UTF-8 text (Unicode).

Madaboutdana, following your general assertion / assumption that AR processes UTF-8 files well, and having made the last search with it yesterday, with the usual phenomenon there that it does NOT find European chars, neither in UR nor in AO, and does presents finds within their context (which is outstanding) containing the usual "chaos" chars when there are "European chars", I checked for updates but didn't find any.

So don't let us create hopes that ain't fulfilled yet, it's the finest program of its kind even without treating UTF-8 encoding well in any circonstances ; it's very well possible that it processes it correctly in SOME file formats, while not being able to do so in others. (BTW, some progs have a box to check for that UTF-8, whilst AR and its paid brother don't have such boxes yet ; and btw, it's not the UTF-8 format the important thing, but the correct rendering of "European chars", or the other way round, why UTF-8 if "European chars" ain't correctly processed ? Again, in UR and in AO AR fails for that, but in your files it certainly does well with this format.)

so, "and supports Unicode THERE" - agreed. They all run after the industry leaders, whilst we poor "other prog users" are left behind... ;-)

Fredy wrote:

it's not the UTF-8 format the
important thing, but the correct rendering of "European chars", or the other way
round, why UTF-8 if "European chars" ain't correctly processed ?

I haven't tried Agent Ransack, but I will. However, I use some European character sets all the time and can say this, without becoming too technical (which I can't): UTF/Unicode is becoming more and more the standard in anything from documents to HTML to email; if a program can't read it (it uses two bytes per character instead of one as in ANSI) then that's that. If a program _can_ read it, then there may still be issues in displaying, but at least the program 'comprehends' (processes) the info correctly.

For proper display, a Unicode font like Arial Unicode Ms must be used. Now, here's the catch: for aesthetic reasons, a program may have hard-coded a font which is not Unicode, and then that's that once again.

I can think of several programs all the way back to Idealist (long before Unicode) that I was never able to use because they assumed that knowledge in this world is written exclusively in the latin character set...

Hi Fredy,

Sorry, just caught sight of your post about UTF-8: interesting point. And in fact, to an extent, you're right - Agent Ransack doesn't "see" European characters correctly in e.g. RTF files (despite the fact I've got iFilters installed, as recommended by the developers). I'm not sure if that's still true when you use the FileLocator Pro version, which appears to have its own preview (hence presumably also filtering) facility.

BUT Agent Ransack DOES see/find European characters correctly in HTML files (I've just run searches across e.g. Spanish, French and Russian), which is why I was pleased, because I hold 99% of my important foreign-language material in HTML (or PDF) files, but by no means all search engines can find them properly (due to various encoding issues).

So yes, Agent Ransack/FileLocator Lite CAN find Unicode - but so far I've only absolutely confirmed it can in HTML files. I'll need to run more tests to find out how well it handles other files - or indeed if changing to an alternative font (such as Arial Unicode) might make a difference (yes, Agent Ransack does support that!).

FWIW, I've never had any difficulties finding European characters in either UltraRecall or Smereka TreeProjects: both of them have very powerful search engines which appear to be fully Unicode-compliant. However, just because it works for me doesn't necessarily mean it works for you ;-)

Another very promising application I've just found is MetaProducts Inquiry, which appears to have a very good search engine (there's a nice free version for those who wish to try it out).

Apart from Agent Ransack, another really very good - and free! - search tool you could look at is DocFetcher (a sourceforge project). This handles European and other characters very well in its preview screen, highlights search terms, and can be set up with multiple indices which can then be included or excluded from searches.

Sorry - not exactly outlining, I know, but in the general "information management" ballpark!

An alternative concept that may appeal to some people is Planz (already mentioned in various threads in this forum) - tightly binds together files, e-mail, notes and other stuff. I've never really got on with it, but it's quite clever.

Cheers,
Bill