There's an excellent discussion at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?zx=1dam86dyqvy3h#inbox/1415fedbb730ffdb called Zoot and Evernote.

The discussion deals with a theme of growing importance on the Zoot group, that of taking time to develop a helpful help file to guide people through the process of setting Zoot up, and being able to take full advantage of it. Right now there is a steep learning curve, and many people (myself included) are unable to make full use of the program. This is a shame because it's a program of great power, capability, and elegance.

Zoot is a one person operation (as near as I can determine). That one person, Tom Davis, does an amazing job of creating software, responding to users within hours, and often posting resulting fixes within 24 to 48 hours.

With a good help file and set of tutorials, my guess is many 100s, if not 1000s, more people would use Zoot. On this particular thread, months of requesting, begging, for a help file has reached the point where someone asked Tom to stop developing the product for a while so he could write a help file. In spite of offers of volunteer assistance he's yet to take up any of the offers (as far as I know).

Ironically, Zoot has had good writers around it for a long time - James Fallows is perhaps the best known, as is our own Steve Zeoli here, and Jan Rifkinson, who has written here on occasion. Over recent months I've followed Jan's posts, and he's blown me away with his patience and his ability to think in terms of what Zoot is capable of. Unlike me, Jan has all the right questions, which is the best way to getting to good answers. :)

The other interesting aspect of this thread is that it is one of the more serious looks I have seen at the limitation of Evernote. Evernote, recognized as a top, multiplatform means to capture information, and to retrieve it anywhere, has major weaknesses when it comes to processing information. A brief perusal of its forums shows the attempts to make that point over its years. In part, the Evernote Trunk is a response to some of EN's weaknesses as an info manager.

So also are the scores of videos on YouTube telling users how to make Evernote a GTD manager, a life manager, the place to store all one's business information, etc. EN can do that, to be sure, but I often feel with EN I am using work arounds to compensate for the fact that EN developers do not have a full understanding of the mission, that metadata capture hardly exists, that it's not possible to keep notes separate from the content (Ariadne in its previous form had an elegant way to do this, but unfortunately the new developer seems to have lost sight of all the potential in that simple yet effective program; I hope Ariadne's fabled thread is enough to lead him back to her.).

It's good to see EN's info processing limitations named and discussed on the Zoot site.

Ironic in a way that Zoot and Evernote in their respective fashions stand apart from the crowd of software programs, and yet both have an Achilles heel which brings (needlessly) limiting factors into play.

I'm not suggesting Zoot and EN should get together, so much as hoping Zoot would a) get the essential help file, (b) arrange for a third party author to write Zoot for Dummies, (c) develop already powerful info tools further, and (d) create a multi-device capability. Perhaps the most powerful asset Zoot has at the moment is the cohort of erudite, helpful forum members, some of whom are willing to crowd source the work among themselves.

Daly

The link to the discussion which you mentioned doesn't work (at least by me); I get a message stating that "The conversation that you requested no longer exists."

Could you post an alternative link, or, barring that, reproduce the discussion there?

Thanks!

i think this may be the discussion Daly is referencing:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zoot-xt/6B2QSAjfByY

Daly's link is a link to Gmail, but his email is accessible only to him; the above link is to Google Groups, which I hope will be accessible to everybody.

I am a bit surprised to see that Jan Rifkinson is in the Zoot discussion, since I thought he had gone "all in" with Infoqube. Both programs share the limitation of being (I believe) one-man operations - so that development doesn't proceed very quickly. To put it mildly. haha.

As a long-time Ecco devotee - I like the Infoqube approach better - where the tree is integrated into the text editor (often called "single-pane".

oops, sorry, that post got sent before I had finished. no matter.

Daly, Jim, thanks for the heads up. Very interesting conversation.

The learning curve has stopped me from playing around more with the new Zoot and of upgrading. In the past I bought version 5 to use with my MBA work but quickly left it out of my workflow. The deadlines for my studies were very very tight; not the kind of context where I'd like to spend much time exploring how to do what I need to do.

As for Evernote, it is still my capture box for anything in digital form (and also for photographed notes) but I will concur that I have to take my info elsewhere if I want to do something further with it. And I haven't found anything in the Trunk which could help me in this.

Interesting discussion here. OK, so what about Zoot XT and Evernote?
Well, they are two of my "favourites".
Since using Lotus Agenda on MS-DOS PCs in the late '80s, anything which had a similar potential for usefulness as a PIM (Personal Information Manager) has been of great interest to me. That that includes anything that can be used to collect, analyse, sort, search and extract information/knowledge for use in *thinking*. By "thinking" I mean the activity involved in assembling information and knowledge and synthesizing it into something new - (say) maybe new (to me) thoughts or rational arguments - and articulating those in structured rational form into *written English language* or numbers in tables, with visual graphs/illustrations where useful. I do not mean to suggest here that things like (say) Powerpoint presentations are a substitute for thinking. What I mean is that the act of articulating your synthesis in structured form into written language or numbers IS the act of thinking, and when someone else reads it then that is a completed communication of your thinking. (The sad thing about this definition of the act of thinking is that one realises that when one is saying "I think that such and such", one is probably not actually thinking very much at all, but merely regurgitating a jumble of possibly related concepts and metaphors through the filters of one's paradigms/beliefs/opinions.)

So I have been experimenting with, trialling and using various PIMs, including, for example, Zoot, InfoQube, InfoSelect and Evernote in their respective progressive incarnations for years - as well as many different "writing tools" and "distraction-free writing tools" and RSS/Atom feed aggregators or "feed readers".
One PIM in particular that seemed to have impressive potential for use was Evernote, and when they added the ability to detect, search for and find text in images (e.g., photos), I was sold. However, when it became apparent that the full ball of wax was only going to be made available via the online service and was not to be allowed to be duplicated or function on the desktop client, I was rapidly unsold. I could see why they did that - it was to lock-in and protect their main source of revenue, which their business model dictated as being online resource usage. However, my requirements mandated that I be able to access and manage my PIM information database and tools online and offline on a PC, with the PC database being the main/primary as and when I needed it to be.

As a result of having access to Microsoft's superb corporate Home Use special deal for MS Office (full corporate version) for $9.95, I have had the opportunity since about 2008 to experiment with and trial - and I now use - MS OneNote. This was for versions 2007 and 2013. I am pretty ambivalent towards M$ Corp. I have been critical of them for years, mainly because of their cuckoo-like and monopolistic practices and their tendency to strong-arm competitors, suppliers, and customers alike. However, I have been favourably inclined towards them because of the constantly-improving and now arguably brilliant quality of their software - e.g., including the successive versions of Windows operating system(s) and applications like MS Office (Word, Excel, Access, OneNote, InfoPath), MS Security Essentials, SharePoint, disk compression, and TS (Terminal Services).

As far as my current understanding goes, Evernote is entirely eclipsed by Onenote, and seems unlikely to be able to catch up unless they seriously redevelop EverNote and the Evernote business model. That would seem unlikely to happen in the short term.

OneNote is sold as a note-taking application and seems to be aimed mainly at the corporate and student users/sectors. The public praises of OneNote seem to be subdued for some reason, but I suspect that may be because OneNote is a bit like Zoot in the sense that it can do so much and can seem so complicated that no-one is entirely sure exactly what it can do and what it is for.

Discussed elsewhere in OutlinerSoftware are some of the useful OneNote features, including those for coping with text automatically OCRed and indexed from images, text automatically detected and indexed from audio recordings (including mp3 songs), and synchronisation with audio transcripts. No other commercially available system that I am currently aware of can offer such a comprehensive set of useful functionality as OneNote, so I have moved to becoming a confirmed user of OneNote as opposed to just trialling it.

In a discussion: Strategy for capturing and retaining OCRed text ("Alternative Text") from images, at http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=36230.msg338880#msg338880 , I describe OneNotes thus:
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"This would seem to be consistent with OneNote's being organised something like a huge and complex wiki - it hyperlinks everything it holds in rather clever ways. Everything you do in the Notebooks is linked to date, time, and author, and material in OneNote is cross-linked internally within OneNote itself and externally to sources of material from across the internet and the client PC. Thus, if you copy anything from OneNote, the copied content will include all the relevant links related to where it was located at the time it was copied. If you move stuff around, the links are tracked and dynamically reassigned as necessary, so there is continuity and you don't easily get dead/broken links."
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That discussion is about how I accidentally discovered how to effectively bulk collect what OneNote calls "Alternative Text" (which includes automatically OCRed text) from several text-containing images at a time - rather than the tedious default piecemeal approach in OneNote of collecting the AltText from one image at a time.

If you have been following what I have said here and elsewhere, then you might be able to see that:
(a) it provides some substantiation for the argument that Evernote has already been eclipsed in functionality by other technology (e.g., OneNote), and

(b) that because OneNote is now cloud-centric AND client-centric, then Evernote's lead in that regard seems to have been lost - OneNote Notebooks can be stored in the Cloud (i.e., SkyDrive) and distributed on client devices - all for easy access by different collaborative users - with parts of the Notebook able to be locked or encrypted and made accessible to either public and/or specific users only.

MS designers seem to have achieved this by designing OneNote Notebooks such that they are a database of disparate, discrete, relatively small and organised pieces of information (.one files). Since only ONE piece of information (i.e., a .one file) is being changed at a time by the user - e.g., messing with text, a copy of a web page, an image, or an embedded document, audio or video file (I didn't mention OLE with MS Office files, file embedding/linking, editing images, or the video aspects did I? Sorry.) - the bandwidth required to update/sync across the Cloud is minimised, and the elapsed time for that is also minimised. The Notebook itself could be HUGE though.
It has taken MS a while, but I think this might arguably rather be a slam-dunk for OneNote AND MS Office, with Evernote outclassed and made obsolete, and the excellent Zoot already disappearing down its own peculiar evolutionary dead-end.

Interestingly, Evernote and Zoot will probably be just innocent casualties - marketing collateral damage - blown away as MS manoeuvres, redefines, captures, consolidates and controls the market for corporate information processing worldwide, with a scaled product approach. I say this because the increasing dovetailing and integration across all MS systems/products (e.g., including especially Sharepoint, Lync, Skype, InfoPath, Excel, Word, Access, Project, Outlook, Internet Explorer, NTFS, the Windows OS) is now so successful that it seems to leave little or no room for competition, by default. Maybe just some niches is all.
For a while there, it looked as though Google's Cloud initiatives might have been able to make some inroads into MS' corporate market share, but I think Google maybe have pushed MS out of their complacency and encouraged them to sharpen their wits - which they did by producing a whole slew of new and now much better-integrated versions of their existing product range, capped off by SkyDrive and Outlook.com.

very interesting post, Slartibartfarst. i may have to try OneNote (have had OneNote 2007 for years without really trying it) again.