Forum Posts Feed
ultra recall on bdj today 1/12 $19 standard $39 pro
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by jimspoon
Jan 12, 2013 at 06:05 PM
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/ultra-recall-2
Posted by quant
Oct 28, 2013 at 10:12 AM
today as well ...
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/ultra-recall-2
Posted by 22111
Oct 28, 2013 at 12:29 PM
Oh yes, and I call this squeezing the last drops out of the market (as had been doing the askSam people for some years with their doomed version 7).
There’s some Brian-not-connected on bits who declares UR “the best (...) in its class and is better than One Note, Evernote and similar offerings by a long way.” - of course, this is so outrageously wrong that you could establish a long list of points proving that 1) it always comes down to your individual priorities - what am I willing to give up for some feature I’m in absolute need of, and that 2) the above assertion is a big lie, UR in fact, by its absence of real development, sharply diving from “best in its class” to the bottom of its class, its competitors recouping its formerly strengths element by element.
And of course they don’t give any hint WHEN the new features they advertize there will be available, so you’re basically purchasing vaporware.
Non-destructive (!) sorting of tree parts would have been a good features, years ago, and will even be if it’s introduced in 2020, but perhaps there is a chance to get similar flat lists from some competitor’s search function (searching for an asterisk, “in this subtree”), and then sorting the entries within the search results list, in the meanwhile. Some of us need functionality now, not in some distant future.
As for Brian-not-connected’s lies, that might be a problem for the respective developers of MyInfo, myBase, Treepad Business/Enterprise, Notecase Pro, InfoQube, Whizfolders, Info Select, Zoot, Connected Text and The Brain - in fact, it would be their business to silence liars like Brian-not-connected on bits, by listing all the missing elements that today make UR inferior to their products, after years of UR complacency, instead of further development.
Btw, people “answering for the developers” on bits ain’t even able to make the difference between destructive, and then non-destructive sorting. Bits is for marketing purposes; software users trying to get some knowledge out of it will just get blah-blah they then take for facts.
I’m happy for the longtime UR user quant that UR always meets his demands; mine have developed over time, and one of them being a minimum of “responsiveness” from the side of the respective developer - cf. what I said about secondary content panes, and then what Pierre Paul Landry promptly promised for InfoQube.
So it might be time to not try to bring new users to UR anymore - they would be in for too many deceptions after becoming that UR is not the leader of its class anymore, and has not been anymore for at least 5 or 6 years, but if it misses a feature today, standard is you’ll have to live without that feature even in 2020, which is, fortunately, not the case for all of its competitors.
Posted by quant
Oct 28, 2013 at 12:48 PM
22111 wrote:
>So it might be time to not try to bring new users to UR anymore - they
>would be in for too many deceptions after becoming that UR is not the
>leader of its class anymore, and has not been anymore for at least 5 or
>6 years, but if it misses a feature today, standard is you’ll have to
>live without that feature even in 2020, which is, fortunately, not the
>case for all of its competitors.
>
if some other PIM soft manages to catch up (by 2020 maybe?) and then adds on top some features to make up for the hassle to transfer all the info, I’ll hapilly switch ;-)
Posted by 22111
Oct 28, 2013 at 01:54 PM
Correction: So it might be time to not try to bring new users to UR anymore - they would be in for too many deceptions after becoming ___AWARE___ that UR is not the leader of its class anymore, and has not been anymore for at least 5 or 6 years, but if it misses a feature today, standard is you’ll have to live without that feature even in 2020, which is, fortunately, not the case for all of its competitors.
Data transfer: As said before, whenever data transfer seems to get “impossible”, have a look at Treepad, of which even the trial version can flawlessly do lots of “translation” tasks, even though it has never been intended to serve just as an almost universal, free data shifting tool. Of course - and I have this mentioned on several occasions in the past - there is always the problem of what you will possibly lose in that “translation” process: Proprietary links (that’s why I’ve said use your own coding and have your own macros process those codes then, very simple technically), and then, clones (which are a big, big subject in themselves, cf. my writings here and over there in this regard); and yes, today it’s wishful thinking only that some of these tools would be able to import competitors’ trees, processing clones correctly, when in fact, from the technical side, this would be rather easy!
They use standard databases which could be scraped for cloning coding, too, as well as for any attributes, btw. And then, you need this functionality ONCE, and just for ONE such competitor (but which is not the same for all users. So, with regards to TCO - I’ve spoken about this aspect, too, elsewhere - the price range of Info Select is not that wrongly chosen (cf. The Brain’s models), only its pr/treatment-of-customers/taking-away-of-features/crippling-the-expensive-tool and so on is desastrous.
And why not have expensive BUT REALLY GOOD software, and which then includes the possibitily to import correctly from ONE competitor, and all the worse for the additional work for the developer of the “receiving” software, the main problem here being that it’s not possible to have the developer do it with easily-adapted scripts, since if technically this would be rather simple, customers cannot accept such a scenario, but of course, these import scripts could then be built up as different add-ons, to be sold on a “main prog plus one such add-on of your choice for 250$” basis (incl. updates for 2 or 3 years, then they will be 100$, but no more than once every two years, intermediate updates being free), additional add-ons being 50$ each - this would avoid unnecessary over-complication of the main program, and many users would accept such a scheme IF there was serious development, which for UR there is not.
Claims of UR superiority, also here from quant: Look, Sir, as soon as you have a better look into the strengths and flaws of competing software, you’ll realize that UR’s almost-stalled development has given the chance to the latter to recoup what you (and I, at some time in the past) consider(ed) “unparalelled”/“unique” in UR, so today your claim has become wrong with time, and no, I won’t do the complete missing-features lists here again, I’ve amply done them on the UR side when I was hoping yet there would be some serious development.
Just three hints here: UR’s tree: free component, instead of some 500$ component, so no bolding/italicizing/coloring of entries, no formatting whatsoever (and yes, different icons are possible, but that’s not the same thing). UR’s content pane: free and buggy as hell, or you revert to something 10 years old (yes, you can replace its content pane element with an ancient version of the same, but not with something better), and with even much less functionality then (i.e. the “editor” is abysmal) - it’s so bad that you cannot even scroll text there with your mouse wheel.
But then, the real problem with UR is that by its philosophy (e.g. absence of “search over different files”, and not to speak of its absence of a “replace in whole file” function, which makes it almost impossible to do serious work with it, let alone in a “commercial” environment), it’s “one big database for it all”, which means dozens of thousands of items (which it is able to hold, thanks to its - again free - SQLite database)...
...and then total absence, from the part of its developer, of “seeing” such big databases, such “monster trees”, need some PM functionality, i.e. some additional pane (which could have been the first “tab”, as an absolute minimum of service to the customer), and in which the “main tree” would not follow any of your expandings/collapsings done in any of the other “tabs”, i.e. in “hoisted” sections of that big/oversized total data respository.
This means, UR EITHER gives you something like an “overview” of your “material”, “knowledge sets” or whatever (= by collapsing it all, and then all the worse for your details upon which you will have worked on anywhere at this given moment), OR you can work deep within your data structure (which also makes your “main tree” totally cut up in undecipherable pieces), but it’s totally impossible to have both “views” concurrently, or at least by switching back and forth, from e.g. the very first tab and then to your “details tabs”.
The problem is, coding of this independence would not be that easy… if it’s done, the additional display pane (which would be “total relief”, pun intended) would just be a detail coded within 20 minutes, but the developer says, “UR has got enough panes already as it is”, so he simply doesn’t see, or denies, against better knowledge, the problem… and of course, when you buy UR and start with some 200 items, you won’t see the problem either, for some time… ha, ha, ha!
Correction: “Non-destructive (!) sorting of tree parts would have been a good features, years ago, and will even be if it’s introduced in 2020, but perhaps there is a chance to get similar flat lists from some competitor’s search function (searching for an asterisk, “in this subtree”), and then sorting the entries within the search results list, in the meanwhile. Some of us need functionality now, not in some distant future.” - well, I’m not the guy to spread lies, so I’d like to add that UR itself does do this, today: Select any parent item, search for an asterisk, check the option “limit search to selected item”, then sort by any of the columns there, so finally, you can have a sorted flat view of all the elements of some tree or subtree, even today, even in UR: Another reason for NOT “updating” (yes, buying fresh from bits is cheaper than a real update) my ancient UR license, for foolish hope the UR developer will take some “lesson” from his begging users, even in a distant future.
At the same time, Zoot is a 3-pane outliner, so there’s at least a chance to have your mental representation of your material in a much clearer way, over there: It’s time I take a real good into this competitor and its brand-new version 6: If my TCO is better than with UR, and there’s a big chance for that, Zoot’s costing 100$ is “nothing” compared with what I’ve been enduring with UR, these last years, and what every new UR buyer on bits will have to endure for this oh-so-chep-40$ program from the moment on he’ll try to use it in a real serious way.
But then, there are the fanboys luring you into it, as most such programs have their respective fanboys.
And no, I’ll not place a link to this on the bits side - let’em make some additional $$ there.