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Using a PIM to catalog files and folders
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Posted by critStock
Jul 10, 2012 at 06:23 PM
And extended through today, in case you missed it and are interested.
Posted by Wolfgang
Jul 11, 2012 at 07:30 PM
OK,one program that does this really well is Devonthink, which is for Macintosh. Its power is that it not only organises and indexes files that are imported into the database but can index EXTERNAL files. I use this function to keep on top of more than 4000 PDFs dealing with articles in Neurogastroenterology and related areas as well as Word files of my published papers that applications et cetera. None of these files are imported into the database but were outside yet it worked very well to be able to retrieve information.
Of course several other programs have been mentioned here, including connected text, tree pad and so on. In the interests of comparing penguins with penguins, and to keep it honest, I assume these programs can also index external files-else, they would presumably not be mentioned were this otherwise.
The one program which in my experience totally replaces Devonthink since I’ve now moved to Windows 7 and junked my Mac book air and MacBook pros,is Ultra recall pro. My PDF list has now grown to over 5000 files and they are not imported into the programme but linked to and yet Ultra recall beautifully searches them (that is, as is the case for Devonthink, the files are outside Ultra recall). Ditto for my published work in Word files. It also INDEXES my scrivener for Windows documents although I use this less and less because Ultra recall is able to handle Word documents and I use Microsoft Word as an internal editor for Ultra recall. Although Ultra recall does not have the fuzzy logic search functions that Devonthink has, I find the nested searches and saved searches in Ultra recall service my scholarly work better. In fact Ultra recall is the best database I have ever used and I didn’t think it would get better than Devonthink. I do own licences for InfoSelect 10, and several other PIMs but have now uninstall them since don’t need them.
Ultra recall is recently been updated to be compatible with Windows 8 for a mere $50. Given that brute power of this program and the beautiful integration with Windows I frankly think it is totally insane to cavil at this and consider alternatives in any serious way. I have now used Ultra recall for 12 months since leaving the Apple empire and may still be in the honeymoon period but use it everyday and along with Word, endnote, swift to do, origin 8 pro, Matlab, Excel, and of course Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 it helps me to work more efficiently. By the way many of these programs run from inside Ultra recall.
Posted by alexxx
Jul 23, 2012 at 11:20 AM
I feel your pain… since I always kept a very careful backup of my digital life, my home dir now spans almost 20 years - and since I like to think hierarchically, its branching is huge.
I searched for a long time for some tool that could enable me to comment this mess, and found none.
Therefore I decided to write one.
After some discarded attempts, I opted for a wiki-like program, whose pages would live in the subfolders of my directory structure.
Each page allows me to write/comment that particular subfolder, with images/links/equations… Default links are added for the “children” nodes of the subfolder (it is a single-panel approach, I’m sorry: I like it better so) to allow for easy navigation.
And optionally, you can open a panel containing all the files present in the subfolder (where you can also comment each individually): a doubleclick on a file launches the associated program.
At the moment it works on Linux and OSX only, and I’d like to add that I’m not a professional dev (I’m a physicist by trade) so I’m certain you’ll find a large amount of bugs… but you can at least rest assured that I’ll keep on developing it: since I wrote it, it is the 1st program I launch on startup, and the last one to exit (now I’m working on the possibility to add outline capabilities).
If you want to give it a try, you’ll find it on http://sourceforge.net/projects/infolder/ , while its homedir is http://www.inrim.it/~magni/inFolder.htm
let me know if you’ll find it useful!
Alessandro