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Zoot Grows on You
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Posted by Chris Thompson
Aug 21, 2007 at 01:15 PM
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.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 21, 2007 at 01:32 PM
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.
Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 21, 2007 at 02:51 PM
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
Posted by Cassius
Aug 21, 2007 at 06:47 PM
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
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 21, 2007 at 07:10 PM
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.