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WhizFolders and Graphical Front Ends
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Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 14, 2006 at 04:53 PM
Hi Daly,
As I was mentioning to Ian, I’m thinking of standardizing on a Zoot/Net Snippets/dtSearch solution as my answer to the data integration problem at the moment. I struggled for a while with Contentsaver’s (now Web Research) URL-type links, but just when I got Zoot to work with them, they’ve broken again.
This means using Zoot as the central data-gathering point, with links to other programs. As Zoot has a proprietary dB - albeit as ASCII one that can be directly indexed and searched by dtSearch - a better method is to export the contents of Zoot to html first, as one (very large) file. This gives much clearer search results.
This combination is not perfect, of course, as it leaves outlining out. Graham Smith (somewhere) suggested using Brainstorm, partly because it can be easily linked to Zoot:
“The *.brn files used by Brainstorm can be incorporated into Zoot using the Zoot File Folder sync action, which automatically then adds any new brainstorm models to Zoot as they are created. This means that any Brainstorm model can be searched from within Zoot, inspected from within Zoot and then Brainstorm launched with the selected model from within Zoot.”
Presumably this might work with other outlining programs…
For me the only remaining problem is getting Biblioscape to work with Zoot. So far Biblioscape’s URL addresses - e.g., biblioscape://RefID=28 - don’t seem to work in Zoot yet.
I had thought of moving from Zoot to Ultra Recall, but the latter just is not nearly flexible enough on the searching or “notes” sides to act as a data HQ.
I see that you are homing in on InfoHandler these days. What advantages do you see it as having over Zoot?
Derek
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 14, 2006 at 04:56 PM
Steve -
> But I do think Whizfolders is a contender as a writing tool, because of all the tree-based PIMs, its editor seems to me the strongest. It has almost all the features of a genuine word processor.
Oh bother - crimped again! I’ll have to download it :-)
Derek
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 14, 2006 at 08:24 PM
Derek Cornish wrote:
>Oh bother - crimped again! I’ll have to download it :-)
Sorry, about that, Derek! I’ll be interested in hearing your opinion about WF.
Steve Z
Posted by Kenneth Rhee
Jul 14, 2006 at 08:49 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>As an information manager, I think Whizfolders isn’t all that strong… although its
>new, more powerful hyperlinks might help. But I do think Whizfolders is a contender as
>a writing tool, because of all the tree-based PIMs, its editor seems to me the
>strongest. It has almost all the features of a genuine word processor.
>
I would agree with this. I’ve been using Whizfolder for several years, and it has been a great place to hold all my miscellaneous writing. The latest alpha makes the wordprocessing component even better. However, there are better information managers out there.
Ken
Posted by Kenneth Rhee
Jul 14, 2006 at 08:56 PM
Let me throw in my two cents here. I think the best rendition of note-taking, information manager, and writing software I’ve seen so far is Circusponies Notebook. It’s rather eloquent in its integration and rendition. Unfotunately, I don’t use a Mac, and they have no intention to port their program to Windows. They cite MS Onenote as the main reason, and I had to laugh since Notebook is so much “better” than Onenote 2007 in my book.
Perhaps now that Mac’s can run Windows XP parallel, my next laptop might be a MacBook Pro.