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What's so great about Zoot?
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Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 26, 2007 at 02:45 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>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’?
A lot of Zoot features are tucked away in menus or dialogs. Much of the power is hidden away from the main interface, in that there isn’t a button or visual indicator for everything you could possibly do. Actually, hiding features until needed is good interface design - it makes for a cleaner interface since you don’t have to see fifty buttons on a toolbar when a keyboard command or popup menu will suffice. And every user will have a different idea of which functions are important.
I think there is also something about Zoot where the combination of core features when added together become functionality not quite expected from the start. In other words, a few abstracted tools, when used in tandem, allow functionality that may not be evident when just examining each feature by itself.
Perhaps “stealthy” wasn’t quite the right way to put it; it might be better to say that Zoot’s power unfolds over time as you become acquainted with all the features that aren’t front and center and the usage of all those features in concert.
Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 26, 2007 at 03:03 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>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?
I don’t use clip managers, but since I am a programmer, I do have text editors running all day (my favorites are Notepad++ and e). Zoot does not massage text to the level that a dedicated text editor does, and I don’t use Zoot for the same kinds of text manipulation. Manipulating text items in Zoot is mostly about making the information more useful to me within the world of Zoot - getting a grid view that I want or being able to set or retrieve field values from the text. It’s lightweight text manipulation that’s usually focused on other Zoot-related stuff.
For extensive text manipulation features, you can’t beat a dedicated text editor. And, in fact, it’s nice to have several.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
http://www.e-texteditor.com/
http://www.editpadpro.com/
Zoot doesn’t support regex, but most text editors do (although each may use slightly different syntax). I would say learning regular expressions is probably beyond the purview of most non-technical users, though.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 26, 2007 at 06:59 PM
Zoot has neat little twists that shows he admiral knew what he was about.
For example, the-pre-selected columns, and the way the first line of a note also becomes the subject or title if not otherwise changed.
The Zooter—even in 16 bi form—was one of the most reliable ways to get material from A to B.
The interface ain’t pretty, but neither is a Humvee—both get the job done. And I kinda like the interface now—probably for the same reason I liked ADM’s—it doesn’t have the typical Windows look. Zoot, of course doesn’t have colour—or much, anyway,—to speak of.
Daly
Chris Murtland wrote:
>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 Stephen Zeoli
Aug 26, 2007 at 08:15 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>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’?
In most cases the stealthy features are not essential functions of the program. They are simply handy tools. For instance, the “rename” function which allows you to make selected text the new title of the item.
Steve Z.