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What's so great about Zoot?
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Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 23, 2007 at 05:20 PM
Despite the number of Zoot afficianados here, I still have trouble grasping the virtues of Zoot. Most people associate Zoot with its “smart folders,” but in discussion, one learns that what _really_ sets Zoot apart are the miraculous ways it handles text. Obviously, one would like to know what actual operations Zoot uniquely can accomplish with text. For some reason, the discussion never proceeds to this level of specificity.
Could a Zoot user fill the rest of us in on what exactly Zoot does with text that is so remarkable?
Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 23, 2007 at 05:31 PM
Here are a few off the top of my head:
1. Extract delimited text and display as column/field value: Email messages may contain standard formatting or web clips from certain sites may all have a standard or similar format. I’ve used this feature to extract property information from real estate listing email messages and showing prices of books I want to get clipped from Amazon.com, for example.
2. Manipulating arbitrary fields: Actions based on rules can modify text-delimited and other types of field values automatically.
3. Manipulate text automatically: Text can be massaged in various ways automatically; removing white space, inserting or removing line breaks, finding and replacing, etc.
There are other things that aren’t strictly about the item’s text: automatically moving items around, natural language date parsing, quick access to add and find info without having the main program window up, etc.
Chris
Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 23, 2007 at 05:35 PM
Also, I think Zoot is one of those that tends to make more sense when the details of specific usage scenarios are discussed, rather than just a summary of features. Perhaps that could be said of any software, but Zoot’s features tend to be stealthy rather than obvious.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 26, 2007 at 06:42 AM
What do you think causes features’ stealthiness? Or Zoot’s features in particular to be stealthy? Can Zoot be characterized as a program with great features but a terrible interface, in that hiding the important features partly defines ‘poor interface’?
I’ve found Clipmate 7, a clipboard manager, to have personally more useful text smoothing features than dedicated text manipulators (such as Text Monkey) or even text editing programs. ClipCache 3 is also strong this way. How would you rate Zoot relative to these clip managers for basic text smoothing?
For manipulating text in ways more related to substance, plain text programs easily do more than rtf, which seems to have to do with plain text itself having a generic relationship to a plain text file. So you can do some things I think pretty cool with plain text, although I seldom actually have used them. For example, some plain text programs easily take a file and insert its content into a clip, in one stroke. Or allow you to split a clip and create a new clip or a new text file from part of a clip in one stroke. These operations strike me as appealingly elegant, but somehow haven’t been appealing enough to motivate my using them. (Which means little, because you cannot overestimate the force of habit.) The best plain text only clipboard manager, AceText, does these sorts of things very directly and transparently. I wonder how its prowess in this particular range of functions compares to Zoot.
One other Zoot question. Has the limit on item size been overcome in the 32k version? (If so, why isn’t this a cause for great celebration among Zoot users? If not, what are the plans and prospects?)
Chris Murtland wrote:
>Also, I think Zoot is one of those that tends to make more sense when the details of
>specific usage scenarios are discussed, rather than just a summary of features.
>Perhaps that could be said of any software, but Zoot’s features tend to be stealthy
>rather than obvious.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 26, 2007 at 06:59 AM
One other thing. AceText gives you to manipulate text is the use of regular expressions. I have never used them, but they appear very powerful. Does Zoot offer this mechanism for manipulating text.