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Whizfolders Deluxe
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Posted by Matty
Jul 12, 2007 at 07:54 PM
In case anyone is interested, I just emailed with Sanjay about the prospect of hoisting in future releases of WF and he assured me that this is something he is actively working on. This will make the program that much more powerful by allowing the user to temporarily focus in on a specific part of the outline, while blocking out the rest.
One of the reasons I find this program so powerful is that you can copy a large text into a single note (say all your notes on a single book or the transcript of an interview) then you can simply select chunks of that text and drag it to different spots on your outline and WF will create a new note from that piece of the text. You can also drag notes from one outline to another. So, for instance, after gathering your notes for an article you can create a separate outline of the article and then start dragging and dropping notes from your notes outline into your article outline. Simple and powerful. These kinds of operations are much slower on many of the other programs I’ve experimented with. I realize that programs like zoot can automate some of these kinds of tasks (a la James Fallow’s article organizer template in zoot,) but damn that program is complicated! It made me feel like a total moron. Whizfolders is exactly the opposite, it may not do a lot, but what it does it does in an intuitive way. I still wish I could have figured out zoot, but time commitment was just too great, and I suspect that Whizfolders is better for my purposes (organizing research notes) anyway.
As for single pane outliners, I love brainstorm. The problem is that Whizfolders and Brainstorm, while very different, are pretty redundant. However, since I own a license for both, I’m going to have experiment with importing outlines from Brainstorm into Whizfolders and see if there is any value added there.
Fun to finally be posting here, I’ve been reading this forum (somewhat obsessively) for months.
Cheers,
Matt
Posted by Matty
Jul 12, 2007 at 09:13 PM
>One of the reasons I find this program so powerful is that you can copy a
>large text into a single note (say all your notes on a single book or the transcript of an
>interview) then you can simply select chunks of that text and drag it to different
>spots on your outline and WF will create a new note from that piece of the text.
I just realized that you can do this with text from any program. So, if I am working on a draft of an article in MS word, and I realize I have written something that doesn’t belong in the article, but I might want to save as a note, I can simply select the text and drag it into WF. I’m sorry, but that is pretty cool. Likewise, files dragged into the outline become hyperlinks to those files…
Posted by Wes Perdue
Jul 12, 2007 at 11:19 PM
Matt,
Thanks very much for the information. A couple hours ago, I went to the WhizFolders site and used my GoogleBar to search the site for the word “hoist”, with no results. I’m glad to know it’s on the developer’s to do list.
I evaluated WhizFolders 5.x a while back, but it didn’t feel right for me at the time. I’m anxiously waiting the 6.x evaluation—$80 is too much to pay for software sight-unseen, even with a 30-day guarantee.
Welcome to the site!
Regards,
Wes
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 12, 2007 at 11:58 PM
Matt,
It’s always very interesting to read about how other people are using the software discussed in this forum. I think Whizfolders has a lot of potential for writers. It’s more a question of how much it can be made to do and whether it can be made to fit comfortably in with one’s ways of working.
As you say many outlining tasks can probably be done in two-pane outliners like Whizfolders just about as well as in single-pane ones. In some ways I think it is a question of how much outlining one wants to do or, perhaps, how far along one is with one’s thinking and drafting. For example, I still do my outlining largely in Grandview. I also use Grandview as a place for developing the outline into a semi-draft, putting relevant thoughts and so on under appropriate headings and sub-headings throughout the outline, and developing the argument. When I’ve got a well-established and very detailed outline - the beginnings of a rough draft really - I move things out of GV section by section.
I have recently taken to switching to a text editor at this point. First I used EditPad, but now I use NoteTab Pro because it has a very simple outline view - more a combination of table-of-contents and file navigator - and a few additional features. I reproduce the bare essentials of my detailed outline in this (just the basic headings as a table-of-contents) and build up the draft in self-contained modules, using GV (and Zoot) as resources. I find this the least distracting way of doing things.
Currently Zoot figures mainly as an initial and continuing repository of haphazardly entered notes and ideas, though I also reproduce my major outline categories and logic in it once they become clear in my head. How much and where Zoot figures in the workflow also depends on how big the project is and how far along I am in getting a grip on things.
It seems to me that we are working in very similar ways, it’s just the software that is different. That’s why I’m interested in Whizfolders. Clearly I could do a lot of what I now do in WF - certainly the Notetab stage of things, and moving to Word’s outline format for the inevitable final phase of things would be much easier. I think I’d miss GV for the earlier detailed outlining, however, and Notetab for its simplicity. I know I’d miss Zoot :-).
Derek
Posted by Cassius
Jul 13, 2007 at 02:40 AM
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
CRIMP ATTACK!!!
I have looked at the WhizFolders Web site, gone thru the screenshots and read about the new features. Other than using a new version of Rich Edit and a possibly faster interface, I see little different from many other 2-pane PIMs.
I expect that other major PIMs will be updating to the latest Rich Edit within a few months. I wonder: Will the new Rich Edit work properly with older versions of Word, say Word 2000?
Should one replace one’s current PIM with WhizFolders? Personally, I think not.
P.S. Doesn’t the full-page editor mimic the function of a hoist?
-c