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askSam dead?
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Posted by Geoffrey Miller
Sep 10, 2013 at 10:09 AM
More than wonder - time to bail out!
Geoffrey
Posted by Jon Polish
Sep 10, 2013 at 11:54 AM
The site is back up with limited functionality and a new look.
Jon
Posted by 22111
Sep 10, 2013 at 08:50 PM
“More than wonder - time to bail out!”
Well, well, well!
Just these days, there has been another fail report about AS locking data here on their “forum”:
http://listserv.vt.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=ASKSAM-L
But as you can also see, it has been answered by “Flo”, the main contributor to their forum years ago, and who, as a single person, held it alive for years and years; and he offers the solution that almost always solutioned that very problem.
As I said here in another thread, for some uses, AS simply does not have any contender, and this has very much to do with the unwillingness of so many developers, for some years now, to develop new niche products, or what they think are niche products: As we know, development is done for the web, for the cloud today, and then you have expensive software like CRM and such, and I have the impression CRM software gets more and more expensive overall.
With AS, you can create a very good CRM system, at little cost (standard or professional, at bits, here and there), and many people do not have too much problems with their AS installation - ok, they just link to pictures, instead of importing them, and such measures, in order to not stress AS out: Its source code should be among the most awful you will have ever seen.
Mr. Goodman, who has bought the product from the very old developer (or his widow?), was the marketing chief in good old AS days, so this perhaps explains why current development takes ages.
For the last 15 years or more, AS has not been in the right hands anymore, so all its possibilities have been left unexplored.
But then, too many developers don’t do real development in niches, like CRM, where returns for good programs should be quite satisfying, so AS is certainly not dead, but of course, in its current installments (6 and 7), it does not even handle e-mails like you would like it to treat them, so it’s indeed moribund… has been moribund and in this brain-dead state for 10 years or so now.
But it’s interesting to see how other programs try to do things, for example Chaos Intellect: They have been developed with e-mails in mind, but for all the rest, they don’t do so well either.
Let’s put it bluntly: Whenever you need a real good program, spend 1,000 dollars or more, and you will get it (if you are prepared to then spend considerable 3-digits figures each year for updates). If your task does not justify such expense, you have to live with programs missing mandatory features: Reliability and e-mail in AS, an overall tree, a decent editor or formatting in the tree in Ultra Recall… or wysiwyg in Connected Text.
I hate this situation, but whenever I thought by myself, the “you get what you pay for” rule has been suspended in this particular instance, I quickly discovered I had again lied to myself.
So AS is not dead, but buy it cheap.
Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 11, 2013 at 11:40 AM
22111 wrote:
>Let’s put it bluntly: Whenever you need a real good program, spend 1,000
>dollars or more, and you will get it (if you are prepared to then spend
>considerable 3-digits figures each year for updates). If your task does
>not justify such expense, you have to live with programs missing
>mandatory features: Reliability and e-mail in AS, an overall tree, a
>decent editor or formatting in the tree in Ultra Recall… or wysiwyg in
>Connected Text.
Sorry, this all seems pretty inaccurate. I think you’re saying that high-dollar niche software is always better than low-cost general purpose software. But I don’t think I can pay $1000 for a program that is just like UR but has formatting in the tree or $1000 for a program that is just like CT except with WYSIWYG; those programs just don’t exist. And I don’t call either of those features mandatory, I call them extraneous. But something else I find mandatory would surely be extraneous to the next person.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 11, 2013 at 12:01 PM
Price and features are not always correlated. AskSam Pro costs $395, much more than most of the programs we discuss here, yet it is one of the least-well supported—and they can’t even keep their servers running. It is also poorly developed. While Scrivener costs $45, and is one of the most feature-rich applications I’ve ever seen. It is also continually and smartly developed.
Which is not to say that you should avoid higher-priced applications. I love Tinderbox and TheBrain (sounds like a cartoon show), both of which cost more than the average app, and feel I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth.
Steve Z.