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Ultrarecall - Help!!!
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Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 2, 2013 at 10:49 PM
Actually, Ecco had pretty good synchronization in the 90s (both network-based in real time and for a single user via file export/import), although its approach to it seems a little dated now and cumbersome in comparison to the seamless, quick, online synching a la Workflowy.
However, I think it’s the proliferation of mobile devices and multiple operating systems that has really brought sync to the foreground - if I only needed to work on a bunch of different Windows machines, I could just copy my entire Ecco file (or any other “legacy”/desktop info manager/outline) of only a few megabytes around between each machine very easily - which is exactly what I did do for many years.
I think the current tradeoff is between power (desktop software) and ubiquitous access (cloud services). However, I assume (hope may be more accurate) that eventually these things will converge - either desktop software will become much more cloud friendly with multiple native clients (along the lines of Evernote) or cloud services will become more powerful.
22111 wrote:
>But the mention of WorkFlowy is of interest here, and it seems to be
>obvious that with the advent of cloud-based services and their
>integration with pc software, there will be more and more of such real
>synching being introduced, which is a very good thing. But in fact, all
>those “powerhouses”, of those traditional, powerful, feature-rich
>outliners, none of them ever tried to program such functionality, or at
>least did not tell users they failed with its implementation
Posted by Dr Andus
Aug 2, 2013 at 11:08 PM
Chris Murtland wrote:
> However, I assume (hope may be more
>accurate) that eventually these things will converge - either desktop
>software will become much more cloud friendly with multiple native
>clients (along the lines of Evernote) or cloud services will become more
>powerful.
I’m rather worried about the future of desktop software. PC and laptop sales seem to have entered a long-term decline. The hundreds of millions of consumers around the world who didn’t really need a PC but had to buy one because there were no cheap tablets or smartphones or smart TVs around yet have been subsidising the price of hardware, desktop OS and software for the heavy users like the forum members here. This era is quickly coming to an end.
I expect the prices of PCs and laptops to go up over time, as they’ll become specialist instruments, while everyone else will be touching tablet screens or speaking to their portable devices or dumb terminals at work.
I suppose there could be a chance that a smaller but higher-priced market for specialists might benefit some software developers to write expensive high-end software for corporations and specialists. But many might just prefer to write apps for 99c and sell them to millions on mobile device platforms… Depressing…
Posted by 22111
Aug 4, 2013 at 07:57 PM
“The hundreds of millions of consumers around the world who didn’t really need a PC but had to buy one because there were no cheap tablets or smartphones or smart TVs around yet have been subsidising the price of hardware, desktop OS and software for the heavy users like the forum members here. This era is quickly coming to an end.”
This is exactly what has happened, and what will happen. My first notebooks - I always needed notebooks, so I had to pay the price - were 8088, then 286, and at prices of which the equivalent would by portable workstations today, so I profited very much from the sudden ubiquity of notebooks some years ago.
But there are two more phenomena, except for what you say further down:
- Many “light” users grew accustomed to what notebooks have on offer, even on top even “lighter” devices, so many of them will not entirely replace them but continue to buy, but it’s predictable indeed they will buy just one new notebook for every 3 or 4 new “light” devices they will add to their hardware collection. Thus, prices will certainly rise again, but never to the state of affairs when only rich people, and those who absolutely needed notebooks, bought them.
- Danger for individual pc software development in outlining and such seems to also come from another field of the business. Some weeks ago, I read that there are endevours from corporations like SAP and such to more and more “cover” the market of tiny businesses and even “power-user” individuals. This is bad news for individual developers, all the more so since these very professional corporations that up to now didn’t deign to “serve” individual customers, have the required manpower to deliver lots of features in no time.
But let’s be honest, for us, this would be rather good news if such a thing realized: One-man-show developers did not exactly spoil us, these last years, so something new, better and more complete would certainly be well received, and speaking for myself, I would be willing to regularly spend 500, 800, 1200 dollars for software packages, like in the old times, but for real good software now, a thing I have given up to expect from those one-man shows. Don’t get me wrong: I always would prefer to give my money to Mr. Smith, rather than to Ellison/Gates/Andsuch, but then, those Mr. Smith out there didn’t deliver - that’s why this forum exists at the end of the day: Were it not for incredible, persisting shortcomings in all this one-man-show software even in features that would have been so easy to implement ten years ago (and not speaking of the real complicated stuff, now with integration of web, collaboration, synching), the phenomenon of crimping would have remained even more marginal than it is.