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Posted by jimspoon
Oct 28, 2013 at 05:04 PM
What steams me about UR is how earlier versions won’t work in the next version of Windows. That is, to continue working with UR when you’ve upgraded to a new version of Windows, you’ll have to pay more money to Kinook for the latest version of UR. Every other PIM I’ve ever had continues working happily in new versions of Windows. It seems that Kinook is putting some kind of “time-bomb” into UR where it will work only in the current and earlier versions of Windows.
It’s a shame, because UR does have some interesting features. I’d have to say the most interesting feature is how you can sync your UR database with external content. Say you have a folder full of text files - you can sync them into your UR database, and you can edit them in UR. Changes you make to those items in UR will be synced back to the text files in the file system folder. And if you edit those text files with some other tool, the changes will be synced into UR. This is a great feature IMHO. I think I’ve asked this before - what other PIMs can do this? I need to search earlier threads for the discussion we had on this.
Outwiker is interesting in this respect: “OutWiker is designed to store notes in a tree. Such programs are called “outliner”, personal wiki, or tree-like editors. OutWiker’s main difference from the other similar programs is keeping the tree of notes in the form of directories on disk, and encouraging changing the base by external sources and programs.”
http://jenyay.net/Outwiker/English#description
Unfortunately there have been no new versions of Outwiker since last December.
Posted by 22111
Oct 28, 2013 at 08:36 PM
Time bomb: They would be able to do this, but UR heavily relies upon MS programming environment (that’s what makes it rather pleasant to look at), so this could be another reason, and so what if there was real development, but there isn’t! When you ask them if they are willing to introduce global search and replace, they will answer you “no, just open your whole UR database with an SQLite frontend (which btw is, if it’s a good one, more expensive than UR), do the changes, and reopen your UR stuff in UR again” - well, do you imagine any secretary doing this, in your office? Do you imagine what will be going on in that same office IF she did, and if she did something wrong, but without her boss discovering this immediately? In particular for outliner files, back-ups are NOT so useful when after the problem, you did lots of work within the database!
Sync with folder: Don’t be too much impressed here, they don’t “open it within UR”, they just display another of their free components within that same frame in which milliseconds ago they had displayed their free and awful rtf editor, or a pic viewer (which is also a point FOR UR). The difficulty lies in the synching not of the content, but of the file name, and of the file position, and here, UR fails. Yes, it can “import” some file list from your file system, but then, don’t touch those file “names” anymore (rename, move, both of those files and of their folders or parent folders), “synch” being one-way, and if I see it correctly (could be mistaken here), one-time: What about “new arrivals” in such folders? What about such entries not sorted anymore, in a jointed list, as they were when imported together? What if you disjoint that list, and spread those entries over a whole subfolder in UR, let alone over several such subfolders there? What about “checking for new arrivals” then? Will UR build up a list of those files in your directory that is has already imported, and now just import the “new” ones?
I think these problems cause the fact that many UR users don’t use this feature in any systematic way, and manual maintenance of such link collections become easily horrible - that’s why I think today that your file system, not your outliner, should be the central part of your “work set”, your “work flow”. Whenever coding becomes really difficult, UR doesn’t make that second step, so don’t be over-impressed by the first one. Because of COURSE, perfect monitoring of such things would be possible, and just yesterday, another of the really good synching tools, “PerfectlyFlexible” or what they call it now, “Syncovery”, was on sale on bits, and it does this everyday.