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Zoot Grows on You
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Posted by jimspoon
Sep 5, 2007 at 03:42 AM
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”?
Posted by Hugh Pile
Sep 5, 2007 at 11:07 AM
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.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 6, 2007 at 12:12 AM
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.
Posted by Cassius
Sep 6, 2007 at 12:42 AM
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.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 6, 2007 at 06:56 AM
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?