Now that I am using Zoot for my only PIM, I am getting happier and happier, and getting more done.

I am convinced that I and many other people have been wrong in thinking the initial learning curve is all that hard.

By printing out the manual, and keeping it by my recliner, I have gone through it several times.

Except for making rules -- for which I may always need help because of the way my mind works -- I find Zoot has increased my productivity, and got me better organized. Sure, I miss colour. Haven't missed RTF yet.

I find Zoot more user friendly than UR. It's rock solid.

I would love to see examples of how peoplehave set up Zoot for running offices, private practices, etc.

Daly

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Now that I am using Zoot for my only PIM, I am getting happier and happier, and getting
more done.

Do you include MDE InfoHandler among the PIMs? At this point, how would you compare Zoot and InfoHandler?

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Haven't missed RTF
yet.

I find Zoot more user friendly than UR. It's rock solid.

it might be true, that if you need only plain text, Zoot might be the best (I never tried it). However, it's 21st century and one simply cannot store info as a plain text only anymore ...

I have to agree with quant on this one. Zoot would be a fine information manager if information was only to be found in text form. My information isn't, so I can't use it as an information manager. Equally, UltraRecall, with its "quirks", doesn't square up for me to OneNote, which is where I have now stored my complete non-structured information archive (scanned documents, web page snippets, photographs, graphics, articles etc.). UltraRecall is useful for me for structured data, such as customer data and purchase history. I could put this into Zoot, but the item pane in Zoot is tabular and this (as far as I know) cannot be changed - UltraRecall allows item data-entry to occur in a form, which suits me better.

That said, I am trying Zoot32 beta as a replacement to my current task manager (ITSD, which proved very unstable on my machine and not supported, though its design was ideal for my purposes). UltraRecall won't do in its current form because of its lack of proper support for recurring tasks (I know that this, like so much, is on Kinook's todo list, which, in my opinion, needs re-ordering!).

Zoot is useful task manager for me because of its ability to absorb data (new tasks) easily through its "zooter" task bar add on, and it is a very flexible piece of software, with a help system which is far more useful and accessible than UltraRecall's (though not exhaustive - a lot of experimentation is required for us newbies). The beta versions for me have proved very stable - it has never crashed, though there are some errors and some error messages. On the same machine I use UltraRecall for about 30 minutes per day for data entry and have at least one crash per day when the program terminates entirely and two of three error messages when the program does not exit (though I have never lost data in UR, to its credit - it doesn't attempt a roll back when it crashes).

I hope that Zoot does develop beyond a simple port from 16-bit to 32-bit with RTF as an extra - html support would be very desirable, for example.

Graham

Graham Rhind wrote:

I could put this into Zoot, but the item pane in
Zoot is tabular and this (as far as I know) cannot be changed - UltraRecall allows item
data-entry to occur in a form, which suits me better.

Graham,

You can set up the columns in Zoot to be delimited text, which means you can actually enter the data in the item editor, instead of the tabular item grid. That is, you can have a column for due date and then put the following text in the item itself --

Due Date: 8/31/07

And then the August 31 date will appear in the Due Date column. I know this isn't the same as having a form, but wanted to make sure you were aware of it.

Steve Z.

I can definitely live with plain text. Beyond bold and italics, I've never used styled text in an information manager. I have a separate database and tagging system for PDFs, full documents, and images. I use an information manager for storing "dense" information: important snippets, thoughts, answers to questions, items to act on, etc. That's all fine as text. I link to full documents as appropriate.

I don't particularly understand the allure of RTF for storing individual information items. What I find much more useful is *outlining* in individual information items. Most RTF implementations in PIMs are pretty cumbersome for outlining unless attention has been specifically paid to this. I'd prefer plain text with outlining to RTF. Perhaps this is why I prefer single pane outliners.

Thanks Stephen. I was aware of this (i.e. read about it in the help file), though I haven't yet got my head around it enough to try it!

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Graham Rhind wrote:
>I could put this into Zoot, but the item pane in
>Zoot is
tabular and this (as far as I know) cannot be changed - UltraRecall allows item

>data-entry to occur in a form, which suits me better.

Graham,

You can set up the
columns in Zoot to be delimited text, which means you can actually enter the data in the
item editor, instead of the tabular item grid. That is, you can have a column for due
date and then put the following text in the item itself --

Due Date: 8/31/07

And
then the August 31 date will appear in the Due Date column. I know this isn't the same as
having a form, but wanted to make sure you were aware of it.

Steve Z.

Plain text is definitely fine for me, too. When I do use something with RTF, I hardly ever go beyond bolding a few lines here and there.

One of the attractions of Zoot for me is that, once set up, it does a lot of the organizing for me - I don't have to manually move items around as much as I do in other programs. And the Alt-Z access to both adding and finding information while working in other apps is great. The splitting of info into an arbitrary number of databases, all quickly accessible but not loaded all the time, also seems a good approach. I tend to feel less overwhelm than in most tree-type managers where I load up a single tree with thousands of items.

UR definitely has a lot of advantages, and has a more contemporary feel. But it does end up seeming to me like a big storage bin that I have to manually organize, whereas with Zoot, I feel like I have a tool that is helping me process information and focus on smaller subsets of data at once.

I've also noticed that I'm more likely to clip single paragraphs or even sentences into Zoot, since the process is so quick and painless and I know that I don't necessarily have to go back and do any organizing of the information until I have some purpose in mind.

Chris

Chris Thompson wrote:

I don't particularly understand the allure of RTF for storing individual information

items. What I find much more useful is *outlining* in individual information items.
Most RTF implementations in PIMs are pretty cumbersome for outlining unless
attention has been specifically paid to this. I'd prefer plain text with outlining to
RTF. Perhaps this is why I prefer single pane outliners.

Full RTF is useful for including
Equations
Tables (as tables or as images of tables)
Other images, including text data that cannot be copied except as an image.

-cassius

I usually don't need RTF for anything as complex as formulas or even tables -- though tables can be quite useful. Where RTF would be nice in Zoot, I believe, is for highlighting and bulleting text.

Nevertheless, even with just plain text, I can use Zoot for about 80 percent of my information management.

Steve Z.

I have found UR way more user friendly than Zoot, but then even Zoot doesn't have as steep learning curve as claimed - I couldn't figure it originally (years ago) with the sample databases supplied, but it clicked once I have seen the database supplied by James Fallows (in files section of Zoot forum).

Agreed on rich text, plain text is fine, but at least bolding and underlining would be enough for my purposes.

I have noticed on UR forum as well that some people have stability issues with UR. I'm running it (=have it open) 18 hours a day (admittedly, little data entry, mostly data retrieval), on a fairly unstable setup (old OS, plenty of trialing new applications and occasional system crashes and other application crashes), but UR never crashes, well maybe once or twice long time ago.....

UR definitely has a lot of advantages, and has a more contemporary feel.

Well it could use some more visual appeal - custom fonts and colours for tree items, and so on. It's too "digital" in approach.

UR is useless for me for task list purposes, because of the lack of visual aspect and a bit awkward feeling in comparison to specialized task list software. Zoot would win here.

The splitting of info into an arbitrary number of databases, all quickly accessible but not loaded all the time, also seems
a good approach. I tend to feel less overwhelm than in most tree-type managers where I load up a single tree with thousands
of items.

That's achievable in UR as well, at least if we are only talking about toolbar from which you can access your databases.

A word of support for plain text from me as well. DISCLAIMER: I realise the subjectivity of all this.

I have been working with plain text for years with editors like notepad and with Brainstorm since I discovered it. I have found nothing else as capable as a writing environment, though I admit that I haven''t tried WhizFolders yet.

Some months ago I started an on-line MBA and thought I was going to need more than plain text for my assignments. I tried programs like IdeaMason and specialised bibliographic software. However, in practice, I find that I am still writing everything from within Brainstorm. It took me a while to learn Harvard referencing, but now I feel relatively comfortable with it, which I think is better than relying on software to do it. I only format stuff at the very end, through the University's Virtual Learning Environment that I am obliged to use anyway.

I do not write equations anymore but academics who write a lot of them seem to say that there's no alternative to Tech which, by the way, is edited as plain text.

Tables are the only thing miss in plain text. However, I have found that most RTF capable programs handle tables poorly. In any case, there's nothing compared to spreadsheets for working with complex tables, so that's where I end up editing them.

alx

BrainStorm overcomes the main _limitation_ in manipulating plain text: the potential for multiple discontiguous text selection seems to be a property of rtf and not plain text. MS Word has it; no plain text editor that I'm aware of does. (Maybe someone knows of an exception/)

In BrainStorm, you aren't really working with chunks of plain text but with 'paragraphs' (or however David and Mark designate BrainStorm headings). BrainStorm allows you to multiply select these with vengeance.

So I'm not sure how well experiences with BrainStorm generalize to other plain text applications. I also wonder how Zoot handles the multiple selection problem.

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

BrainStorm overcomes the main _limitation_ in manipulating plain text: the
potential for multiple discontiguous text selection seems to be a property of rtf and
not plain text. MS Word has it; no plain text editor that I'm aware of does. (Maybe
someone knows of an exception/)

I know you're talking about Windows, but on Mac OS X, TextEdit (the moral equivalent of Notepad/Wordpad) does discontiguous selection just fine.

I've never used it. What I do use is multiple topic selection (like in Opal) -- select a bunch of topics and change them all to bold (or whatever). Opal supports discontiguous selection within a topic, but I'll bet almost all Mac outliners do.

Stephen, my apologies for he delay in getting back to you. I inadvertently overlooked your post.

Yes, I include IH.

I like both.

But I find there is nothing sufficiently lacking in Zoot to justify running both -- unless for some reason I need mutli keywords in a set of docs, and I would use IH.

It also means MyInfo and UltraRecall are going, and my dependence on Surfulater will decrease.

Daly

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Now that I am using Zoot for my only PIM, I am getting happier
and happier, and getting
>more done.

Do you include MDE InfoHandler among the
PIMs? At this point, how would you compare Zoot and InfoHandler?

Well, you piqued my interest enough - I downloaded Zoot for the first time in years.

I am glad to see there is a proper help file now. (Don't know how good it is, though). When I tried Zoot before, I never could get past the lack of decent documentation.

Things that turned me off Zoot before: (1) inadequate documentation; (2) lack of RTF; (3) only 255 folders? (4) development at glacial pace; (5) Ecco seemed more capable.

I see that a sample database by James Fallows was mentioned as being helpful - would that be "ArticleOrganizer.zot"?

jimspoon wrote:

Well, you piqued my interest enough - I downloaded Zoot for the first time in years.

I
am glad to see there is a proper help file now. (Don't know how good it is, though). When I
tried Zoot before, I never could get past the lack of decent documentation.

Things
that turned me off Zoot before: (1) inadequate documentation; (2) lack of RTF; (3)
only 255 folders? (4) development at glacial pace; (5) Ecco seemed more capable.

I
see that a sample database by James Fallows was mentioned as being helpful - would that
be "ArticleOrganizer.zot"?

I think so. It's designed for longform journalism of the kind James specialises in for Atlantic Monthly. It's a while since I've used it, but IIRC the template provides a set of folders for research items, and a second set of folders to structure your article. You move or copy items from one to the other.

I missed this post. In an outliner, discontiguous topic selection is more important than discontiguous text selection, agreed. What I was saying is that BrainStorm provides for discontiguous topic selection, thereby obviating the limitation of the plaint text medium BrainStorm uses. From what you say, though, OS X is ahead of Windows XP on inherently including discontiguous text selection. Of course, XP is no longer the standard, and I haven't tried Vista.

David Dunham wrote:

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>BrainStorm overcomes the main _limitation_ in
manipulating plain text: the
>potential for multiple discontiguous text
selection seems to be a property of rtf and
>not plain text. MS Word has it; no plain
text editor that I'm aware of does. (Maybe
>someone knows of an exception/)

I know
you're talking about Windows, but on Mac OS X, TextEdit (the moral equivalent of
Notepad/Wordpad) does discontiguous selection just fine.

I've never used it.
What I do use is multiple topic selection (like in Opal) -- select a bunch of topics and
change them all to bold (or whatever). Opal supports discontiguous selection within
a topic, but I'll bet almost all Mac outliners do.

Well,

for those for whom plain text or rtf sans graphics is "just fine," may I suggest reverting to Win 98 and using GrandView: Single pane outliner with many bells/whistles, PIM with user-defined categories & topic assignments and "columns;" keyboard macros & keyboard key reassignments, calendar, everything tied together, and export to rtf and other formats, etc, etc

-c.

I don't think the plain text limitation is the main privation Zoot users must suffer. I would be more put of by the 32k limit on item size (or however that precisely goes).

Has Zoot's latest beta incarnation now allow unlimited page size or not?

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

Has Zoot's latest beta incarnation now allow unlimited page size or not?

The answer is no. All the old limitations seem to be maintained in the 32-bit beta, but I think that's because Tom Davis just hasn't addressed it yet... His goal with the first beta version was simply to port Zoot into 32-bit, then he'd begin other upgrades. I don't know what the time frame for these would be, however.

Steve Z.