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Zoot Grows on You
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Posted by Thomas
Aug 21, 2007 at 09:43 PM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 23, 2007 at 10:23 AM
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
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 26, 2007 at 07:59 AM
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.
Posted by David Dunham
Aug 26, 2007 at 05:25 PM
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.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 26, 2007 at 06:54 PM
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?
>
>