Wolfgang wrote:

I chose ms word 2010 because,
like most professionals I dictate my content and dragon naturally speaking 12 works
beautifully with word.

I have just been offered a special upgrade to Dragon 12. Would you say then that it's worth upgrading? I didn't want to jump into it blindly but it sounds like you like it?

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

There were two things I liked about InfoSelect: I liked the way the tree was set up and
how it operated, and I liked the lightning fast searches. The rest always seemed
poorly designed and executed. I was especially appalled by the editor, which
provided little extended selection of text during editing. A note manager should
first and foremost be a great place to WRITE notes. InfoSelect never was in my opinion.
If it had only focused on note-taking and not tried to be everything to everybody, it
may have actually been an excellent application.

SZ

I strongly agree which what you have written. The tree and the search function were top-notch, and extremely useful. It's sort of a "life-changing" software for the disorganized person. Version 3, running on Windows 95, did the job, for those two functions worked perfectly. I am now trialing Version 10, and in my opinion, it is a mess. The calendar and address book are both untenable, and the whole programme is a little bit unstable. The editor is sufficient for my needs, using keyboard commands for the most part.

[[BTW: when I paste Open Office documents into a note, I get """""Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000168 EndHTML:0000002356 StartFragment:0000000630 EndFragment:0000002339 """" or whatever numbers, at the beginning of whatever I paste. However, only OpenOffice has that problem, so it is an incompatibility between the two programmes. ]]

Tonight, I will download and trial the 30-day version of IS 2007 (IS 9.) http://www.miclog.com/is/2007/down.htm

Dr Andus wrote:

Wolfgang wrote:
> I chose ms word 2010 because,
>like most professionals I dictate
my content and dragon naturally speaking 12 works
>beautifully with word.

I have
just been offered a special upgrade to Dragon 12. Would you say then that it's worth
upgrading? I didn't want to jump into it blindly but it sounds like you like it?

OT: Dr A, it's worth looking at the review in this forum: http://www.knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=4&threadid=14733&enterthread=y
and also some of the other threads there on DNS 12, if you haven't seen them.

Ach. UR can do everything I mentioned and more - which seems to me to be a lot better than the other outliners mentined. So if it is an anticlimax then a Mercedes truck is a disappointment compared to a weelbarrow. For some maybe.

I love it. I'm not exactly sure how much better it is, but I use Dragon all the time and having the latest seemed reasonable. The discussion at Knowbrainer is very good. Version 12 seems faster and it is easier to make corrections it also seems to fall over less frequently. I have a Fujitsu converable tablet with 8 G ram, i5 processor, 500 G HD and usually run originlab (or Matlab), Ultra Recall (definitely not a let down), dragon, Corel draw, mabe excel and firefox and thunderbird at the same time. Usually no problems unless I use Chrome or Internet Explorer and Outlook which bugger up the system and it slows to a crawl. If your daily bread depends on writing then DNS 12 is a good upgrade/investment.

Yes, it is this one:
http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/word_tip_pages/cleanup_text.html
very good. You may have to dive around the website a bit to learn how to install this sort of template, or not.
w
(Ultra Recal is not a dissapointment!)
(( I would like to see Brainstorm back - it was a great outliner (could talk OPML like UR) and played nice with lots of software including UR - any news on whether someone would like to buy it))
((( Perhaps infoselect could junk their monster, buy Brainstorm and imobilise anyone who wants to bolt an email client on to it then market it ready to run on win 7 & 8)))

WHEW! What a relief: I uninstalled Info Select 10 and installed Version 9 (IS 2007.) This version seems quite stable and intuitive (including the calendar and address book) and everything works like the old versions. I look forward to working with it.

It is hard to believe that the same person/people wrote both programmes.

Wolfgang wrote:

I love it. I'm not exactly sure how much better it is, but I use Dragon all the time and
having the latest seemed reasonable. The discussion at Knowbrainer is very good.
Version 12 seems faster and it is easier to make corrections it also seems to fall over
less frequently. I have a Fujitsu converable tablet with 8 G ram, i5 processor, 500 G HD
and usually run originlab (or Matlab), Ultra Recall (definitely not a let down),
dragon, Corel draw, mabe excel and firefox and thunderbird at the same time. Usually
no problems unless I use Chrome or Internet Explorer and Outlook which bugger up the
system and it slows to a crawl. If your daily bread depends on writing then DNS 12 is a
good upgrade/investment.

Hugh & Wolfgang,

thank you for the link and for your thoughts. There seem to be some conflicting opinions out there about DNS 12. Some say it's a cosmetic upgrade and that it actually slows down PC performance after a few weeks. I don't use DNS for everything, just some particular types of writing. I've been fairly happy with DNS 11.5. I have Win7 64-bit, Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM but some people on the forum talk about 18 and 32GB RAMs, which I didn't even know existed... So I'm a bit worried that it would make my system obsolete more quickly. Thank you anyway.

Slartibartfarst wrote:

Oh. Wot an anti-climax.

Not at all; I don't know what you expected but I personally found the whole story very interesting. It confirms that in this forum (a) we know just about every information management software out there aimed at personal use and more, and (b) there are still uses of much of that software that we haven't considered.

UltraRecall's ability to use an external editor for its embedded content is perhaps not the kind of feature that would stand out in a comparative overview of information managers. Yet in Wolfgang's case it was very important, as it was in Pavi's case for working on complex documents. I also found the concept quite similar to Traderclee's use of the OPML editor via Text Editor Anywhere to edit content kept in Resophnotes described very recently in this thread http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4275

I think most of us can think of quite advanced ways of using the particular information managers of our choice; as we get to know specific tools more, we find uses that even their developers might have not considered. At the end of the day some solutions may not come just by selecting the right tool, but actually using the right tool right. And this forum is a treasure chest of such examples.

I also found Wolfgang's experience with Apple vs Microsoft systems at the level of a big lab quite insightful. It confirmed the reasons for my own dislike for Apple's products and it explains why --as much as Macs may be the choice hardware for individuals- Apple is unlikely to win a government bid any time soon. Governments --local, national and transnational- are moving towards more open systems, and I look forward to the day that Linux will be used at the EU level.

razorboy wrote:

WHEW! What a relief: I uninstalled Info Select 10 and installed Version 9 (IS 2007.)
This version seems quite stable and intuitive (including the calendar and address
book) and everything works like the old versions. I look forward to working with
it.

It is hard to believe that the same person/people wrote both programmes.

The feature list for IS 10 also had this gem:

By request of our customers to simplify Info Select, we have removed the following rarely used features: font search, closed file search, image scanning, inserting text in images, web based data, spreadsheet, generating DB from deliveries, ODBC, import / export (doc, xls, Outlook, Auto mode, HTML), thesaurus, palm sync, presentation mode, keyword auto-color, programmer edit mode, space mapper, compressed files, file archiving, replace by style color font, dialer, NNTP support, secondary backups, external files, intra-topic shortcuts, alt+n key shortcuts.

FYI Brainstorm works just fine in Windows 7. There are other issues with the software that reveal its dated roots and lack of recent development. Of these, the main problem for me is the lack of Unicode --or at least multiple codepage support.

If you want to discuss more on Brainstorm, a program I keep coming back to regardless of the aforementioned issues, we can start a separate thread.

Wolfgang wrote:

(( I would like to see
Brainstorm back - it was a great outliner (could talk OPML like UR) and played nice with
lots of software including UR - any news on whether someone would like to buy it))
(((
Perhaps infoselect could junk their monster, buy Brainstorm and imobilise anyone
who wants to bolt an email client on to it then market it ready to run on win 7 & 8)))

gunars wrote:

>It is hard to believe that the same person/people
wrote both programmes.

The feature list for IS 10 also had this gem:

By request of
our customers to simplify Info Select, we have removed the following rarely used
features: font search, closed file search, image scanning, inserting text in
images, web based data, spreadsheet, generating DB from deliveries, ODBC, import /
export (doc, xls, Outlook, Auto mode, HTML), thesaurus, palm sync, presentation
mode, keyword auto-color, programmer edit mode, space mapper, compressed files,
file archiving, replace by style color font, dialer, NNTP support, secondary
backups, external files, intra-topic shortcuts, alt+n key shortcuts.

There must be something weird going on over at Micro Logic. The forum is dead, the owner doesn't reply to forum registration, tech support knows nothing about any of it, and Version 10 is more or less dysfunctional, and inferior to the previous version, IS 9, also called IS 2007... I wonder if we will ever see another new version.

In fairness, it must be said that one of the problems IS has/had, is that its user base is more or less split between those who want it to do the basics - organize a lot of fairly simple data and instantly sort and recall it - and those who want IS to be The Muther Of All Software, ie., save 88 zillion gronkobytes of infomration, convert everything to everything else, do all the internet and email stuff....... and they want it done on their telephone. Lots of people are using Evernote + other software to get that done.

Fortunately, I am in the "basics" group. For that job, IS is very very effective.

Returning to the topic of InfoSelect: I have noticed a few recent posts in the Yahoo! InfoSelect User Group, and in two of them, 2 separate users say they had actually bought and paid for IS10 (the latest version, with which some users seem to be quite unhappy - per the forum), yet had reverted to IS9 (called "InfoSelect 2007").

I have been a happy IS user for years, currently using IS8 - which admittedly has some limitations/constraints. I have trialled both IS9/2007 and IS10, but have elected to stay with IS8 as it better suits my requirements.
I find it very interesting that someone would buy IS10 and then return to an earlier version. It looks rather like they may have not evaluated the New Thing terribly rigorously before buying it. In my experience, this can tend to happen if you do not have a clear idea - e.g., including a comprehensive checklist - of the functionality (your requirements) that you need to test for.

When Jim Lewis (President/CEO of Micro Logic, the developer of InfoSelect) was leading and engaging the IS User Group to get their feedback preparatory to making final amendments and releasing a ß version of IS10, I suggested in the discussion threads that a classic approach focussed on user requirements might be useful, and that he could take advantage of the opportunity to ask the tame/collaborative users in the forum (an ideal resource for any developer) to tell him what they thought their requirements were, and then develop to meet those stated/published requirements. Everyone in the forum would have been more likely to buy the new version under such circumstances.
Of course, it never happened, and I really have no idea of the methodology employed in arriving at the end result, except that it seemed to be overly concerned with features rather than the functionality needed to meet defined user requirements (there was little such definition). Again, in my experience, it is characteristic of software that has been developed in a relative vacuum - as opposed to being focussed on user requirements - that resultant user satisfaction will tend to be low. That is what seemed to be the case here - e.g., though I have participated in several user groups over the years, I don't recall ever having before seen such a collection of disgruntled, critical and generally pissed-off users. Not a few of them seemed to feel that their requirements had been ignored in Cavalier fashion, so some of the users became vociferous and criticism was pretty strong and a separate user group was even formed in protest.

Quite extraordinary really. I don't understand it. It needn't have happened. It was avoidable. Things could have been so much better. The IS versions up to IS8 seemed to be seriously good PIM software. IS9/2007 seemed to have but marginal improvements, and IS10 seems to have had a lot of good/useful functionality hacked out of it (regardless of user requirements), and to run in less than ideal fashion - even from an ergonomic (GUI) perspective.
I feel rather sad to see IS end up like this. It was *such* a good product.
Talk about wasted opportunity. Users buying the new version and then reverting to the older one. How much worse could it get? OK, maybe it could be a lot worse, but it still seems to me to be pretty high up the scale as things stand.

2014-02-04: FYI, I was just reviewing the Yahoo! InfoSelect User Group forum and noticed two posts by Jim D. Lewis (InfoSelect CEO), made subsequent to the above discussion:

(By the way, the RSS feed to this group used to be: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/InfoSelect/rss
- but it has been changed. The group is now at: http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/InfoSelect/conversations/messages
- if anyone can give me the rss feed to subscribe to that, I'd be grateful.)
__________________________________________________
jimdlewis
Jan 23, 2014
Please update to the current version since the update detection in version 10.00.99 does not work.
If you do not update you will no longer receive update notices.
Download at http://miclog.com/software/Download/info-select-10-download.html.&#160
As always the list of changes is available at http://miclog.com/software/Beta-Invitation/is10releasehistory.html.&#160

Jim
From
__________________________________________________
Jim
Jan 29, 2013

Hi All
I just thought I would share some exciting news with our IS customers.
We are beginning beta of a new web service called EZGURU.
EZGURU helps businesses run better and grow faster by managing "micro-knowledge".
If you are interested, please visit http://www.ezguru.com .

Jim
From
__________________________________________________

The group is now at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/InfoSelect/conversations/messages
- if anyone can give me the rss feed to subscribe to that,

According to http://developer.yahoo.com/rss/
"Every Yahoo group has its own RSS feed. To read it you must either be subscribed to the group, or that group must be configured to have publicly-readable messages."

Thanks @Alexander Deliyannis. Yes, I am a long-standing member of that Yahoo! InfoSelect User Group forum, and had been using the rss feed address that they provided.
It is also a publicly-viewable group - meaning that one does not need to sign in if one simply wants to read the posts.
However, the rss feed has either been changed or expunged, and I can't find it referred to in the forum any more. An rss feed may yet exist, but is not being published. Even if it is not published, one can sometimes figure out what the rss feed for a website is, but I can't figure out what the new one is - if there is one, now.
(Sigh.) In the good old days when I used Google Reader, Google had built in some smarts that would figure out a website's rss feed for you. :-(

Just picking up on an old comment that I think I had overlooked in this thread:
@Jack Crawford wrote, on Aug 26, 2012 at 02:51 AM:
...There seems to be an endless stream of tree-based note taking info managers out there.
The one that seems closest to Info Select is NoteFrog. ...
=========================
Just thought I'd point to an ongoing mini-review of NoteFrog at DonationCoder Forum:
NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review - DonationCoder.com - http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=29431.msg272865#msg272865

The review was last updated on 2013-12-16 and there is a NoteFrog version update imminent, which several DCF members have contributed to as ß-testers.
I have been a user of InfoSelect for many years now, and a user of NoteFrog since 2011, and a user of NF's predecessor, ClipGuru, since before then. As such, I think I can safely say, and without fear of contradiction, that IS and NF are quite dissimilar tools working in dissimilar ways, and that each seems to be very good at what it was designed to do. I think (but an not sure) that IS uses a relational database approach, where you can have several databases, several open at one time, and where some of the objects (e.g., images) in the database can be saved as discrete external Windows files (if you want it to and select that as an option). By contrast, NF works on a hypertext stack basis, and can have several such stacks (databases), but can only operate on one stack at a time.
I have often wished that a lot of the NoteFrog-like functionality could have been somehow embedded into InfoSelect. v8 ...

Slartibartfarst wrote:

However, the rss feed has either been changed or expunged, and I can't
find it referred to in the forum any more. An rss feed may yet exist,
but is not being published. Even if it is not published, one can
sometimes figure out what the rss feed for a website is, but I can't
figure out what the new one is - if there is one, now.
(Sigh.) In the good old days when I used Google Reader, Google had built
in some smarts that would figure out a website's rss feed for you. :-(

Well, Firefox and Internet Explorer, as well as (classic) Opera can also autodiscover non-visible feeds, but no luck here. I even found a special online tool http://www.rss-tracker.com/index.php?lang=en which after a few minutes concluded that there's no feed associated.

I also miss the yahoo groups rss feeds, but at least we can still get the yahoo groups posts via email. One could use something like http://www.mmmmail.com/ to receive the emails as an rss feed. I haven't tried it though.

@Alexander Deliyannis and @jimspoon: SOLVED - the mystery of the disappeared RSS feed for the Yahoo! InfoSelect User Group forum.
RSS feeds to Groups seems to have been silently (without prior announcement/warning) removed by Yahoo! sometime in July 2013. This is according to the Admin's post in the discussion thread "Is RSS gone", here: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-groups/suggestions/4240849
=======================
Completed · Admin Product Support (Admin, Yahoo) responded · Sep 1, 2013
Hi John , The RSS feature was retired in July 2013.
- Yahoo! Groups Product Team
=======================

Words fail me, but I am not surprised.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Ed.) defines "yahoo" thusly:
-------------------
yahoo:
* n. informal a rude, coarse, or brutish person.
– ORIGIN C18: from the name of an imaginary race in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
-------------------

Oh no! Eyes hazing over with red...anger...must destroy...cannot stop...nooooooo!...not that!...not a rant!...
START OF RANT=================
Though I tend be highly critical and analytical, I do try to be positive about most things, but, after observing the Yahoo! "marketing" methods, I came to the conclusion many years ago that Yahoo! was detestable and to be avoided. So I made a deliberate decision - I steadfastly blocked *any* advertising links to, or feeds from them in my browser, using JunkBuster and, later, AdBlockPlus, and when my ISP tried to force me to migrate my email account to an inferior and less secure (QED) Yahoo! email account, I steadfastly refused and to this day I still use the old email account.
However, I did nevertheless periodically (every year or so) review this decision and examine what Yahoo! currently seemed to have on offer, and whether they had improved, but nothing indicated that my original decision was not the right one for me.
I grudgingly only used Yahoo! for this *one thing* - the InfoSelect user group. I avoided going to the detested Yahoo! user group site unless I felt I had something useful/helpful/informative to contribute, and I kept-up-to-date on the discussion threads via RSS feed - as I do with OutlinerSoftware.com and the other forums, blogs and news sites that I wish to keep updated by.

Anyway, now that I know for sure that Yahoo! have deliberately expunged RSS feeds in the forums - presumably to force users to go to the blasted things (clicks and eyes on pages presumably being the all-important drivers), I can use an alternative that I always use for sites that do not have an RSS feed but that I want to keep informed by (and no, email alerts don't cut the mustard as far as I am concerned) - a Firefox extension called UpdateScanner - http://sourceforge.net/projects/updatescanner/
END OF RANT=================

Since I consider myself as an IMS "expert" - the quotes are there bec. I don't know enough yet about corporate solutions -, you might ask yourself what's my stance about IS. Well, I too I am lazy as most people are, and my trial of IS was brief: I was deeply impressed by its developer's taking away numerous functions from loyal users/customers, and also by everything I heard about his ways of treating customers in general, and all this "abbreviated" my experience with that prog.

I'm not sure, but it could be possible that the developer not only sells ancient versions of his prog, but also exterminates any possible bug within those ancient versions, without forcing customers to "update" to newer - by many aspects inacceptable - versions, and if my wishful thinking is founded (in fact, I don't know anything about it), this would be a stance unique world-wide, and then, why not start to seriously consider IS 7, for the time being, and attending something better ?!

This being said, IS is the eponym of sw whose own developer has, in time, become its premier undertaker, by stance, by politics, by the worst marketing you could ever imagine.

Now consider the comparative quality of IS about 10, 15 years ago, and you realize to which extent developers can become their fiercest enemies, and that of their own "child".

Btw, the IS developer has been offering some other, cloud, product, which I consider to be complete rubbish...

Arnold wrote:

Arnold -
When you install the program do not accept the default directory, place
it in c:\apps\ Win7 does not allow writing to the c:\Program Files\
directory. This will solve most problems (including asking for your
'key').

I run InfoSelect8 on Windows 7. When I ported it from XP I ran into the above problem and found a different workaround:

1. Put the data file (Overview.wd2) in your Documents folder, or some other folder you can write to.
2. Made a shortcut to that file, not the exe. Use that shortcut to run IS8.

I find IS8 indispensible after 12 years. I use other tools for everything except saving info in text. But I use it for that all day every day.

I haven't seen anything that comes close:
- create and name a new note and start typing or cut/pasting in 4 seconds (with no mouse)
- nest notes in trees to unlimited depth, rearrange instantly and easily (with no mouse)
- search shows note count (how many still match) as you type. backspace and try again. Very powerful.
Hit enter when done and the whole app now sees just the matching notes. (still no mouse)
- backup is a single file to a USB (mine is 2.7 MB after 12 years)