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Have you tried Ecco lately? you really ought to, you know.
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Posted by Slartibartfarst
Dec 17, 2012 at 06:24 AM
@Daly de Gagne: Thanks for taking the time to make your comment above.
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@razorboy: I was interested in what you had to say above. I have been a member of Yahoo Groups in its various forms since 2000, and a user of various InfoSelect versions since 1997. You may have received no response to your request to joining the group because the moderator has apparently abandoned the group.
As a general principle, user groups would usually be independent of the supplier, and the InfoSelect user group had been independent of InfoSelect until the moderator role was taken over by Miclog CEO - James (Jim) Lewis - per his post announcing this, in the group forum, dated Mon Sep 21, 2009 11:02 am.
Quote: “...With the upcoming release of the long awaited Info Select 10, Micro Logic is pleased to take over moderation of this forum.”
Unfortunately, under Jim’s stewardship, through 2010 and 2011, the general tenor of the forum seemed to enter a period of dismaying and progressive deterioration, with issues/difficulties in development and collecting/matching user requirements seeming to be the cause. Quite a few of the users seemed to become seriously disenchanted with it all and vociferously (some acrimoniously) critical of Jim and/or IS10ß, and some even split off to form a separate splinter user group in protest. None of this seemed to achieve much in terms of ameliorating or addressing whatever might have been the root cause of the issues raised, which continued to fester.
Then, at some point, the moderator (still Miclog CEO Jim Lewis) seemed to have abandoned the forum without prior notice/comment. He went “off the air”, did not reply to forum posts, or return emails, and Miclog Tech. Support apparently started to advise enquirers that “...they have nothing to do with the forum” - as they did with you, it seems.
I don’t understand it. There seems to have been an apparently churlish disregard for existing users, and that sort of behaviour would seem to be unlikely to inspire confidence in the support for the InfoSelect product, for existing and potential future users - e.g., such as yourself.
The forum itself still has its members and discussions (though certainly not so many discussions recently), and the membership includes/included longstanding members such as Daly de Gagne - also a member of the outlinersoftware forum and a self-professed longtime critic of Jim’s - and myself. Sadly, Daly’s criticical stance seems to have been proven to be well-founded.
If you search and read this (outlinersoftware) forum, you will find posts on the subject of InfoSelect/Info Select - e.g., more recently I posted a bit of a comparison of InfoSelect versions, from my experience as a user with IS5, IS7, IS8 and as a trialler with IS9 (“2007”) and IS10beta and final release. I am a fairly proficient IS user, and have stayed with IS9 as it best suits my peculiar needs.
So don’t let the moderator’s abandonment of the forum dissuade you from trialling InfoSelect. The software has always been very good (in my experience), though I cannot speak for IS10, and you may well find a version that suits you if you take a “suck-it-and-see” approach - which I would always recommend. Paper-based reviews will only be able to tell you so much.
Bear in mind that, if you get an older version, then some of its functionality will likely have been defeated or made obsolete by changes or newer technology in the Windows OS - e.g., in IS8 and under WinXp and Win7, the ability to display HTML/web pages in the IS viewer pane no longer seems to work (I think that may have been dependent on the interface to a now deprecated/obsolete version of IE).
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@jimspoon: many thanks for providing the Dropbox link to those files. Very responsive and helpful of you. I shall commence trialling the “new” ECCO.
PS: Sometime inbetween commencing writing this post and changing my son’s nappy and now, I received an email that the ECCO Yahoo group moderator had “...approved your request for membership”.
I went to the group and have added its RSS feed to my feed aggregator (Google Reader).
http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/ecco_pro/rss
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Posted by razorboy
Dec 17, 2012 at 04:15 PM
Thanks for that.
I did the trial of IS 10, quickly got rid of it, and did the trial of IS 9, which is good. However, I see no point in using software which has no forum, not when there is competing software available.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 17, 2012 at 07:02 PM
Jim,
Thank you for the instructions about how to get EccoPro working on a new Windows machine. I tried installing it a few months ago without any luck. Now I’m back up and running again.
Steve Z.
Posted by jimspoon
Dec 17, 2012 at 10:59 PM
Ecco is very feature-rich and can be a bit overwhelming. To get a feel for the outlining features, just use the File/New command, and a file will be created with sample data. You’ll be put into a “Notepad” view called “How to Use this File” - the notepad title is shown in the tab at the bottom of the notepad. A “notepad” view is where outlining is done.
You can move items around with drag and drop. I rely heavily on keystroke shortcuts. Use tab (or alt-right) to indent, shift-tab (or alt-left) to outdent. You can double-click an item to collapse/hide items. Ctrl+number is used to collapse/hide all items to a specific number of levels. For example, Ctrl+1 shows only top level items. Ctrl+2 shows all first and second level items, and so forth. Ctrl+Shift+number works only on the highlighted item. For example, Ctrl+Shift+1 collapses a particular item to a single item; Ctrl+2 shows the item and all items on the next level down, etc.
Ctrl+Shift+S splits a single item at the cursor location, into two separate sibling items. Ctrl+Shift+J joins multiple highlighted items into a single item.
Two very nice features added by the Ecco Extension are filter-as-you-type, and highlight as you type. To use either or both of these functions, just type something in the search box directly above the notepad, and click the “filter” or “hilite” buttons.
These commands should be enough for you to get a feel for the outlining in Ecco.
The eccoext.eco file contains a detailed description of the features added by the Extension, with screenshots, and the changes added to each new version of the extension.
Also - the file eccoext.eco gives a lot of information on the features added
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Dec 18, 2012 at 02:06 AM
So, this is EccoExt thing is pretty neat. Though, it claims to add hoisting but doesn’t explain how one does this. Anyone know?