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What outliners should be able to do (on inherent features and interoparability)
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 12, 2012 at 12:21 PM
From Fredy:
>When I’m speaking of outliners, I’m speaking of the 2- and 3-pane variety only (I’m not interested in the notion that “only 1-pane outliners are real outliners - that might be true, but then donate us with a term for the 2/3-pane things, and I’ll never speak of outliners anymore).
I call them free-form, hierarchical databases… however, that’s an awkward phrase and I don’t expect it to be adopted by anyone else. What if we call them InfoTrees?
SZ
Posted by jimspoon
Aug 12, 2012 at 01:33 PM
Regarding Scriptability -
A fellow with the handle “Slangmgh” (in China) has written “Ecco Extension” which is sort of a wrapper for the venerable Ecco Pro. It really is remarkable how far it extends the interface and capabilities of the original Ecco Pro. It is very scriptable - here is a part of the description -
“Enhanced Auto-Assign Rule(Regexp/Cumulative function/Depends relationship/LUA Script/JavaScript/Python/Perl/VBScript/Ruby)”
The users in the ecco_pro@yahoogroups.com group swear by it.
For a reasonably-sized outline - I think Ecco is unbeatable. As a “personal information database” - for me it fails because it can handle only 65K total items, and only 16K items in any one data field, and in practice the error messages start popping up when you’re around 10,000 items in any one field.
I have not gotten very far into scripting Ecco, because (1) I haven’t wanted to invest the time needed to learn it, given the limitations on the total number of items; and (2) the documentation is Chinglish and hard to decipher.
Also re scriptability - Infoqube has got Visual Basic built into it in some way, but I have not tried it out - again for lack of time.
jim
Posted by Fredy
Aug 12, 2012 at 06:48 PM
Stephen, an acceptable term for more-than-1 pane outliners would distinguish those from the 1-pane variety, “info-tree” unfortunately doesn’t do that; we must search further. And, I don’t try to invalidate 1-pane outliners, it’s just that I, personally, never went warm with them: I continue to be lost in hyperspace in them as I’m lost in broad texts within text processors (there were many of them in the eighties / nineties, as we old men know), whilst in the 2-3 pane variety, my mind functions well.
Stephen, the immediately above explains why I didn’t get to any valid knowledge of Ecco, all the more so since I never succeeded with installing Ecco. When I tried to install those bits that can be found within the web, years after Ecco was discontinued, it invariably crashed. So I was happy that at least I didn’t fetch a virus, and went on.
Re Infoqube, I was put off by marketing quirks, and in fact the developer doesn’t seem to have real interest in marketing his program for individual use. Last time I checked the site was as sparse as it ever had been, the prog was in (free) beta as it ever had been, and it’s said he does marked it for corporations (with, in view of what I said here in the last days, is exactly the strategy a developer of such a program should apply) - and here in this forum, he exclusively participated in the form, “no, InfoQube CAN do what you’re asking for”, in threads no mention was made of InfoQube, which is to say had he constantly, “manually” monitored this forum, but participated only in order to tout his prog. (An even more exclusively marketing-only participation briefly showed up here in the second part of 2011 from somebody else who often had rather childish ways of speaking here but who, I said that once, did ask lots of right questions on his own site, at the same time.)
So I avoided Infoqube for the wrong reasons I must admit, and your double info, on Ecco and on Infoqube, is of high interest. I wasn’t aware of these details up to now, and again, I developed ideas as “new”, out from not knowing others had had the very same ideas before me. This being said, there was another reason I wasn’t interested in InfoQube: It seemed to be a “complete” prog that aimed at “doing it all”, whilst in the meanwhile, I had been looking out for a hybrid system where with only a basic outliner (2-pane), and scripting, I could supply myself for the missing functions - but you are right in reminding us that there’s no such dichotomy as “very basic outliner here, with lots of scripting”, vs. “rather elaborate outliner there, with no scripting”, but that it’s perfectly possible and reasonable to do lots of additional scripting on top of an outliner that’s rather “complete” in itself to start with.
I must also say that I’m into about 600 distinct outlines at this moment, and many more to come (extensive explanations within the UR forum), after having left UR in late 2011 (but without leaving its forum), with the file system being my “3rd pane” = in fact, the very first, “project” pane of my conglomerate, which further reduced my interest in “self-contained” systems; I had explained in length why, as I saw, and see, it, raw 2-pane outliners ain’t enough. In short, I always wanted a THREE-pane outliner, without there being any productive one on the market, so I had tried to argument 2-pane developers (AS, MI, UR, and briefly The Brain) into creating one, then created one of my own, with the file system as very first one of the three.
And since this was, and is, so, I wasn’t so fond anymore of database-based outliners in general (MI, UR, IQ, etc.) since I thought, and think, that if you do a hybrid system, with hundreds of distinct files, these files should perhaps not be distinct databases, but of more simple architecture. But we’re here into the specifics of my very personal system I adopted in late 2011 and developed / refined, and in which the absence of an “alternative view” on my material is that missing functionality I cannot overcome with any possible scripting, hence my theoretical developments.
But all this being said, I acknowledge that your mention of IQ is of the highest interest within this context. (Perhaps Ecco not so much, from a pratical pov: You can run electric shocks thru a dead body, but will that revive it? Perhaps I’m undervaluing those efforts, and Ecco in the very first place.)
In fact, when I was interested into “complete outliners”, i.e. up to a year ago, more or less, I wasn’t that much interested into IQ, in the end, because I was afraid, Pierre Paul wouldn’t listen to my suggestions; Petko (MI) wasn’t too gifted for high-brow functionality I was afraid, and kinook (UR) simply wasn’t interested in anything, people in his forum outright tell “he’s got a communication problem” which I thought wasn’t nice, but in the end, with their version 5, they seem to prove to their loyal (!) customer base they ain’t interested in much more development whatsoever, hence my developments on “desktop going cloud” in that forum lately, and here - I try to understand, and I seem to have understood some bits on what’s globally going on with that incredible shift taking place at this very moment. (And IQ doesn’t seem to have been adopted by many people here; in fact, there had been some discussion years ago, and then, less and less so - thus I deducted, without really knowing it, that in spite of its excellence in sheer number of functions - it seemed to “have it all” -, its overall attractiveness seemed to be very limited.)
All this being said, I’m thankful for your hint re IQ, it’ll be worthwile to have a look, interfaces-wise and in general…
( You see, Pierre Paul seemed / seems to be a very smart guy, and voilà he’s the one to deliver some very important prerequisites nobody else is even thinking of - that’s not mere coincidence of course.)
Posted by Fredy
Aug 12, 2012 at 07:07 PM
Edit : “shift” : “paradigm shift” they call it. It’s indeed revolutionary, and whilst in the UR forum, I preached against it, knowing that we cannot stop it, I know hold that at least we should battle against that other paradigm shift within: As I explained in the UR forum, there is a very evident impoverishment, function-wise, going along with this shift to the cloud: Desktop applics ain’t transferred to the cloud 1:1, but being stripped of two thirds or more of their former (desktop) functionality, and even years later, “nothing” is done for them to regain their ancient functionality (similarly, have a look at the last version of AS DOS, then its first Windows version, and even the last version 7.1 - it never regained “programmability” it once had). It’s this too basic functionality of cloud services now and that seems to be universally accepted that bothers me most here (cf. Surfulater going cloud, cf. Alec, Daly expressing their fears; cf. Evernote stripped to its bones and more popular than ever at the same time) - this much too low good enough quality going with the cloud transfer is what really worries me - so, when I so much (over)valued desktop applics (see my UR postings), it was again partly for the wrong reasons: Yes, why not going cloudwise, but preserve quality standards notwithstanding!
But they don’t do it, which is the real problem. Have a look at that donationcoder “comparative editors review”. First, the guy says, unicode was a csqn, then he compares lots of new editors, ALL of them far inferior to any of a dozen or so of ancient editors he doesn’t even mention, and all of which don’t do unicode correctly, that’s right - but at the same time, all their superior functionality is “considered nonexisting”, all those high-brow pieces of sw, having set highest standards, simply don’t count anymore for their lack of unicode-compliancy, and giving way to a “best editor comparison” where only lessers ones compete with one another - and that very same phenomenon we’re witnessing at this very moment with all these desktop applics going cloud (or being buried altogether). End of ranting.