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Not-Standardized Project Management : IQTELL, Directory Opus, etc.
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Posted by JBfrom
Nov 2, 2011 at 03:22 PM
You’ll forgive me if I respond to your thesis on the limits of simultaneous cognition: 3-4 vs 7-8, because I find the topic fascinating.
First of all, I agree with pretty much all your insights. We agree about how the brain works. I just disagree with part of your conclusions about how this impacts PIM design.
What’s actually happening when a brain interacts with a software presenting interacting information is far more complex than a simple attempt to simultaneously apprehend all the elements on the screen, as you acknowledge.
What you don’t mention is that in almost all situations simultaneous apprehension is overkill. Let’s say 3-4 is a practical limit. In a list of seven, it only takes a few passes to consider all groupings. And you can cut the number of passes down further by applying common sense heuristics.
Now I agree with you that deep nested outlines of 7-or-less are pretty useless for PRESENTING information.
However, the use case that you don’t address is the initial ORGANIZATION of that information.
For that, I think organically built nested outlines of 7-or-less is the ideal.
Reason being, you can gradually build a complete structure by making decisions involving no more than 7 on-screen elements at a time.
Once you’re done, you’ll need to distill it into a longform text to be human readable by someone who didn’t learn the material by building the outline himself. And you’ll need to distill it further into general principles or “hooks” and action points if you want to remember it and act upon it.
But the nested outline approach is by far the best way to bring structure to a big mess of text info.
And it can also be handy for refreshing yourself on specific topics, by diving deep into the outline branch that you need. Assuming you’re the one who built to outline.
Posted by JBfrom
Nov 2, 2011 at 05:04 PM
Well, I have to disagree with Dana. After reading Fredy’s latest posts, I think I understand what he’s asking for, and he’s right: it doesn’t exist.
Cyborganize is sort of a patchwork attempt to create this, along with some workflow innovations that are unrelated to what Fredy’s asking for.
What he’s asking for would be cool, but the great challenge is accomodating different working styles while maintaining a non-programmer friendly experience.
To be clear, Org-mode can accommodate a lot of this, and a lot more depending on how technical you want to get, but yeah I think there’s no way to get all the way there.
Posted by JBfrom
Nov 2, 2011 at 05:24 PM
Lol Fredy, the language and expertise barrier is driving me nuts. I see vast amounts of concepts flying by without being able to fully grasp them.
If you want to Skype, I’d love to hear your opinions on the major flaws of Cyborganize and how they might be addressed, beyond the obvious “too hard for people to use.” I’m interested in design concepts. Basically I’ve had nobody to talk to about those issues, ever. Doesn’t matter if you disagree with me, I just want to understand what you think.
To answer some of this in a limited way - I rejected 3d interlinking as too complex and potentially limitless for current software and interface and users. I just accept the loss, and make up for it with rich longform text and “best fit” 2d outlining. I think you might need AI or intelligence augmentation to make comprehensive 3d interlinking practical.
The exception being T1 wikis, which are already rich longform text, so there’s lots of conceptual interlinking handled there. And managing the wiki links is not that onerous since you typically don’t produce that much volume at such a highly polished level.
The whole “interlinked nuggets” concept was something I explored in different ways, but it just seemed they were too slow and cumbersome to manipulate. Pop open a nugget, read it, see that it’s not really what you want, repeat, etc. That eventually evolved into a T3 blog devoted to longer posts with multiple tags. But I still don’t rely heavily on that except as an archive, because manipulation is cumbersome. It’s mainly a resource for writing T2 posts.
For now I mostly accept the limits of the subconscious brain to form a richly interconnected map, and of course whatever you manage to distill into T1 form.
And yes, managing the evolution of those nuggets is a whole ‘nother absolute nightmare. Yeesh. Frightens me just thinking about it.
Posted by JBfrom
Nov 2, 2011 at 05:40 PM
Cool man, take your time, no hurry.
Sorry Dana, I didn’t realize you were only talking about the program launching aspect.
Posted by Fredy
Nov 2, 2011 at 09:02 PM
@ Madaboutdana & JB Re Program Launchers
I’ve spent the last 6 hours or so reviewing about 70 program launchers, many of which I had had reviewed early last year if I remember well (I had made the usual clippings, but without doing a time stamp - that’s a thing I’m up to integrate in my macros.
Unfortunately, Madaboutdana, your optimism wasn’t justified ; my not having looked into these things for about 18 months or so made me hope you might be right, but I didn’t find a SINGLE decent of such tools that might load a group of files, let alone any “management” like checking for and updating after deletions, renames, moves : none.
I couldn’t trial all those applics, but I did not content myself with the info within the downloading sites, but went to the respective homepages, then to the respective product pages, incl. “features”, “screenshot”, etc., in order to “search” for any indications they might load file groups.
About 60 of these progs didn’t seem to do so ; for some, I was / I am in doubt (MadAppLauncher, LaunchBar Commander, CodySafe, StartMenu XP, etc., Unlimited Menus), for some I thought they offered the feature (Quick Cliq, Executor, True Launch Bar, Fast Launcher), even if none of them seemed to offer any of the above “management” features, thereby offering any advantage over my macros.
So I trialled these latter sw’s, and one was even more awful than the other, you’ll have to manually enter whole command lines, at best, for every given file to load, in awkward dialog screens, and then - I haven’t even been able to try them all since I didn’t understand the awful GUIS / “help” files - some didn’t even allow for what they promised.
I’ll give an example : Fast Launcher, a very neat applic at first sight, and it says, “This item launches one prog or doc” vs. “This item launches several other items” : Cheerio, or not ? You can’t enter any file there, but you must click on “Add”, and then you’ll be presented with a short list of possible commands : “System - Explorer”, “System - Sound Volume”, “Tools - Paint”, and so on, not even a dozen ; it remains me of early MS mice that were presumable “programmable” but that could only trigger prefetched commands just like this, but no way to trigger some key combination or some other element of your free choice ; it’s buggy on top, since “System - Explorer” only brings “System - Sound Volume” (but not vice versa)...
The overall quality of these programs, free or shareware, was so awful I’m really devastated. (Perhaps some of the progs in the “perhaps they do it” category are better and do it indeed, but I’ve given up trying since, as stated, even such a prog that’d function as promised, would only do the bare minimum, and that my macros do indeed.)
You were RIGHT, Madaboutdana, in telling me, stop, look again, since my (thorough) knowledge was almost 2 years old. But you were erroneous in stating they’re dozens of such progs : There might indeed be 2, 3 or 4, and they are ugly, poorly constructed, perhaps unreliable on top, and they offer just what you’ll get in a macro, with much more fuss than creating another standardized macro line.
Hence PB being right in saying, that lack of sw is real, let alone management features… which again shows us that Directory Opus, that HAS such management features, is top-notch, if only by direct comparison to all those minor progs not being worth your time, let alone licence fees.
@ JB Re your sw : It’ll take me perhaps 3 days in a row, and so realistically allow for first days of 2012… sorry, but why making promises I then won’t be able to live up ?
@ JB Re Item / Indentation Counts : You are perfectly right to make the distinction creation / presentation / looking up of reference material, I just wanted to clarify some common misconceptions in that area, and also give some of my personal obervations with regards to my own reactions to such material :
In fact, the creation process and the presentation process is highly intervowen, since at any given moment of your (further) creational process, the context material you’ll have created up to then,
“is set in presentation mode for you”,
so to speak. And I’ve made the observation that slicing up material will allow me to “breathe”, to not feel the weight of all those other criteria out there not immediately related ; for a criterion to be taken into a account, be it a problem, be it a lack of knowledge / information (!) (and that cannot (yet) be overcome by getting the relevant information, be it aleatoric, be it a contender’s secret, be it by simply not being able to buy that info !), of course, you must do an extra item “Beware” or something, but that part of the decisional process will be treated in a fuzzy logic way : Have it in mind, even if you don’t know what to do about it !
And remember, most people abhorr outlines (even in Europa, where outlining is NOT mandatory in school! ) - and that most outlines fully take (false) “advantage” of infinite level building ! Perhaps there, also, is a co-reason for that rejection by the general public !
I know there are printed scientific works that go into 2-digit indentation levels, which imo is just ugly, and will, most of the time, fractionize matters of subject into too many separate pieces too far away one from the other ; a flattening out up to the higher levels of the tree system seems to be a very elegant way of doing thing ; whenever I see a scientific work not constructed in the way “2.4.3.7.4.9.6” (or worse than that, and that’s the usual way, if you use Arabic digits or alternate between minor / major Roman / Arabic / a-z chars / etc., etc., no importance) but in the way “? 1”... “? 48” and then, within those “flattened-out chapters”, just 2 to 3 indentation levels at a max, I’m highly interested in reading, since I suppose the author’s a smart guy knowing in which way to present his material.
The same goes for outlines and such, and I didn’t want to be understood that such list should be kept short ; in fact it’s a psychological problem only since a lengthy list with 3 divider lines is technically identical to another indentation level superposed, with 4 subtrees - but reading, BROWSING, thinking things over, for me, is much more easy, fluent, unrestrained, than when I’m being presented with
hardcore indentation
, even when it’s me the “author”, and people fleeing outlines must feel the same way, I suppose. BTW, AO’s trial isn’t crippled by total amount of items, but by allowing only for 7 siblings at any given level, and it’s the most horrible experience for anybody, I suppose, to be confined to such an artificial system - at least it had been for me, so I didn’t wait for the trial month to have passed, in order to pay for my licence, but did it after a very short week, being relieved then to be able to flatten out my outlines, finally.
You say, in a way, thinking is a little bit more but just contemplation of the elements that a screen presents to you ? Are you sure ? What is thinking, then ? Isn’t it
rolling over, over a GIVEN “mental representation”, and your IQ deciding how many elements that (always preconscious if not totally inconscious) mental representation will contain, some elements being replaced by others, any time ?
And isn’t a computer screen but an external source for such elements, and when it’s getting crowded, you’ll have stack overflow, with no results, with poor “thinking” not being rightly fed ?
If I speak of, here and there, lengthy lists with divider lines, I’m speaking of browsing the different parts of that list, one by one, easy-going, not of trying to ingurgitate the whole list in one shot ; if the list is broken up into a second indentation level, there’s a psychological barrier to let your thinking flow (= to replace those 5 elements of 8 within the chunk, some floating elements continually replacing others in order to stay within the 5 (or the 4, or the 3…), by the next chunk, going back again…, from one such sub-level to any other.
It’s the universal acclaim of those (highly reductional) business graphic progs that made me think our brain’s presented with some elements, then considers them, subconsciously.
Re PB/TB / 3rd dimension / arrows : Well, in its current realization, PB produces chaos, on-screen and within your head, imo. But then, many a programmational effort would be asked for in order to realize the (very good) basic idea behind that prog in a way that wouldn’t produce chaos anymore, but, on the contrary, would trigger
new order
, completely other views of your material, other perspectives as they call it. For that, there must be uncompromising (virtual) slicing off of many parts of the material in any such given situation : when you’ve got 5 key elements within 50,000 related together, you cannot hope presenting their connections in any useful way if you think that current PB mean will do for that.
(There are other such graphics progs, beyond PB, all experimental software developed within university institutions ; they all fail when it comes to slicing off the IR-relevant elements.)
(My approach would be, present sub-webs-to-be-possibly-cut-off in intermediate screens, for your manual yes/no decisions, and for your possible decision, “I’ll snap off manually (= subtrees at any indentation level, that is), store these intermediate sets, for further processing here, for making the AI system “learn”, and for making pre-sets that will be presented by preference at any further such occasions ; that way, further (sw-assisted but more or less) manual hitting your way tru the jungle will get more and more easy, with each (simlar) further such making your way(s).
I asked them for integration of AI into PB, and offered my help ; as said, they didn’t even answer me, and of course, there IS AI in PB, with for the spatial reproduction of all that chaotic staff, not for any new re-arrangement in order to get rid of the chaos… ;-)