Just stumbled across this one ... I searched the forum archives for comments about it, but only found a few posts, nothing too much ... Dominik posted a German feature list. There is now an English website.

Anyway I am wondering whether any of you have given this one a try.

http://www.jbsoftware.org/memomaster/screenshots.htm

I just downloaded MemoMaster, and got the free version - not the trail version. There are many features not available in the trial version, so there is no way for me to adequately test MM to see if I might purchase it.

Daly

jimspoon wrote:

Just stumbled across this one ... I searched the forum archives for comments about it,
but only found a few posts, nothing too much ... Dominik posted a German feature list.
There is now an English website.

Anyway I am wondering whether any of you have given
this one a try.

http://www.jbsoftware.org/memomaster/screenshots.htm

Hi Jim,

I tried MemoMaster 4 and liked it very much. There are a lot of excellent features - however, in the end I decided not to use it and opted for UltraRecall 4.2.

It has been a few months, but some pros included: nice tabbed interface, excellent tagging system and favorites, great search in sidebar, integrated spreadsheet calculations. The sidebar use for finding favorites and particularly the search (upper half searches, bottom half shows results including text around the result that can be scrolled through) is really the strength of the application. Export to PDF is very handy as well.

That said, a key weakness is that an item has to be a folder to have children. This is an inherent part of Memomaster, as export to a folder structure is a key feature. Also, there is no import of web pages, and Outlook items must be individually dragged and dropped (ie. no sync like UltraRecall). Attachments are also not handled very well, and you need the professional version to embed files.

In the end, UltraRecall provides a more robust structure. There are many things UR can do that MM cannot, whereas MM has only a few additional features (export to PDF, spreadsheet integration). If you want to write an e-book, for example, Memomaster would be ideal for this task. For a general knowledgebase,UR wins.So as always, it depends on how you want to use the database, and please do consider Memomaster if you don't need some of the bells and whistles of UR.

Best, /Pavi

jimspoon wrote:

Just stumbled across this one ... I searched the forum archives for comments about it,
but only found a few posts, nothing too much ... Dominik posted a German feature list.
There is now an English website.

Anyway I am wondering whether any of you have given
this one a try.

http://www.jbsoftware.org/memomaster/screenshots.htm

Thanks, Pavi, your description is very helpful.

Pavi wrote:

That said, a key weakness is that an item has to be a folder to
have children. This is an inherent part of Memomaster, as export to a folder structure
is a key feature.

Interesting. I recall reading some years ago at the UR forum, somebody saying that it is conceptually wrong for any item except folders to have children. So in the case of Memomaster it may indeed be a conscious choice.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Interesting. I recall reading some years ago at the UR forum,
somebody saying that it is conceptually wrong for any item except folders to have
children. So in the case of Memomaster it may indeed be a conscious choice.

Scrivener makes a big deal out of the fact that folders can be converted to documents and vice versa and that both can contain children. So there seem to be some advantages for such flexibility (although I kind of forgot now what the difference is between a folder and a document in Scrivener).

There may be good reasons to allow only folders to have children in some applications, but any application that does so is definitely NOT an outliner. I personally prefer being able to make notes with sub notes. When you are limited to using folders to create hierarchy it inhibits the ability to move items around, to play with the organization.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between a folder and a document in Scrivener is the icon. I think it is really just a conceptual idea.

Steve Z.

Hi,

This was absolutely a conscious decision on the part of the makers of MemoMaster. I actually emailed them about this, and they stated as much. The reason, as they explained, is that a large part of MM's functionality is to export entire trees as directories/files, with the structure preserved. They mentioned that a lot of customers use MM this way, and it is important to remember that they have a lot of business customers who want multi-user access to the db. The way around this would be to have an extra document file called "Nodename_header" for text of the main folder.

I personally strongly prefer the ability to have children from a text node, since often you don't know that a node will require children until well into the future. UltraRecall gives you the flexibility to use folders either with or without text, and in the latter case you could also put information about that node in the "Notes" window.

Memomaster was very intriguing to me, especially due to the PDF export, which puts together a professional document with automatically generated linked table of contents. Outlook support is not well handled (MM tasks are sent to Outlook as icons, without text visible), and the tables/forms were not to my liking. Hence, my choice of UltraRecall. This is one to watch for the future, though.

Best, /Pavi


Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Interesting. I recall reading some years ago at the UR forum,
somebody saying that it is conceptually wrong for any item except folders to have
children. So in the case of Memomaster it may indeed be a conscious choice.