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myBase Desktop 6.x + Addons Packfor PC on Bits Du Jour today
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Posted by Simon Bolivar
Oct 16, 2013 at 02:50 PM
At $39.50 - 50% off it’s normal price.
Posted by 22111
Oct 16, 2013 at 03:46 PM
I had trialled version 5, and my experience was a “mixed” one: Not bad at all, but several things important for me were lacking. Then, I read this user review:
http://download.cnet.com/MyBase-Desktop-Edition/3640-2065_4-10060413-1.html
And it is a serious one, even if it doesn’t give too many details (but as you know, details are often unwanted, so people auto-censurize themselves).
I think that now that Zoot 6 is out and available, there are not that many real reasons to switch from my Ultra Recall to something other that in the end would not be that much better than UR, or is it (now)?
Anyway, I’m intrigued, but my deceptions have been so numerous that today, I’m not willing anymore to trial thoroughly: I’ve become lazy. Sometime, I try to “sell” things I really think that are worth it, to other people, and for other things, I tend to wait for other people to “sell” me their respective “loves”.
The sale is today and (European time) some more 15 hours, up to tomorrow morning, and if I get good arguments why I should buy and switch, I’d happily do.
Posted by Wayne K
Oct 16, 2013 at 06:46 PM
I’m in the same position. I’m thinking about getting it just because it seems decently powerful and is on sale. Looking at it closer might be a future retirement project. I kind of regret not getting Ultrarecall and MyInfo when they were on sale.
I pulled up my old trial version (6.1.1) and played around with it briefly. I’m not seeing anything that makes me feel like I need to buy it. I’m pretty well locked into the idea of using fields/columns for organizing information (Ecco Pro, Zoot), so I really don’t see myself making extensive use of this. It does have a nice spreadsheet view for organizing attachments at the bottom of the page.
Maybe someone else can point out something that makes it a buy. Right now I’m thinking that $39.50 is pretty steep for something I might maybe use someday.
Posted by PIMfan
Oct 16, 2013 at 10:38 PM
Well I don’t know about “switching”, but there are a couple of interesting things about MyBase that having me thinking I might pull the trigger on the deal when I get home tonight:
- Longevity: MyBase has been around for quite some time, and I have recently been lamenting the state of the PIM industry as many beloved tools/apps I’ve used over the years have now disappeared. Development of MyBase continues and for every Agenda/Ecco/Ariadne/Omea/ThinkLinkr/etc out there that has gone, I am encouraged to see MyBase still vibrant.
- Data Safety: I downloaded and ran MyBase and noted seventeen, count’em SEVENTEEN export options. This tells me the developers are pragmatic enough to understand the value of even one piece of a client’s data in their application is worthy of a robust export capability. I can sleep better at night knowing my data can be released later if need be…
- Storage: Wjjsoft has put out a beta of a new version that uses a 64-bit storage architecture (SSG-5 http://www.wjjsoft.com/structured_storage.html). I think many of us on this forum are/were fans of Ecco, and while the Ecco Extensions help someone, it’s 16-bit addressing limitation is an Achilles heel that nothing short of a redevelopment can erase. The SSG-5 storage engine that MyBase will be using in the near future can address a PETABYTE of storage, meaning the odds of me ever overflowing the cup on it are slim and none. In acknowledgement of the potential peformance hit of loading such large data loads, Wjjsoft have incorporated a “load on access” feature that will help keep performance at useable levels. Of course, one user stuffing a petabyte of data into a single file might have missed a few counseling sessions - but that’s a different story…
- Regex Support: Enough said. Complicated and geeky to the extreme, but it certainly is not ambiguous. For a very large collection of items, I will depend on Regex to find and filter items to get exactly the items I am seeking.
- Non-Admin Install: To check it out, I simply had to download and extract the zip contents to a directory on my desktop and then run it. No installation required. This is a big deal for those of us working on contrained PC environments where we do not have admin permissions.
- Output Quality: In testing the output options, I created a test outline of items and associated notes. I then used the Export MSWord Outline option to see how the output looked. It exported to Word and after switchingout of Outline mode to Normal mode, all Word heading were used properly (i.e.not just formatting, but assigned heading level). The ability to take an outline with content and quickly get it into a distributable format is key for me as I tend to distribute content I write. This has been one of the sore points of my use of ConnectedText is that a quick and reliable method for getting content out and readable in MS Word is a bit more involved than I wished it was.
- Extensions/Expandability: A well-documented javascript API is available. Having the ability to extend an application beyond original use is something nice to have, depending on your proclivity to tinker with this sort of thing.
- File/Item Encryption: 256-bit AES encryption to secure your info from everyone except NSA.
Some Wishes/Features I Didn’t Find:
- Saved Searches: Didn’t find a way to create a complex Regex search and then save it for later re-use. Of course I could create a folder of regex expressions and then copy/paste them, but that’s a bit more klunky that I would like.
- The Universe is Row-Based: Many PIM tools today let you establish columns/fields that can then be used to categorize related elements and quickly display them in columnar views (Ecco/InfoQube style). It doesn’t appear MyBase utilizes this paradigm and instead uses a row/outliner paradigm. This doesn’t kill it for me, but common item templating with metatagging of item properties is something I get great use out of when I work in PIMs.
Disclaimer: I have no association with Wjjsoft and have never purchased the application. My observations above are based on me downloading and running the 64-bit v6.2 (beta 2) version. I have exactly two hours of myBase tinkering under my belt - and the above observations need to be viewed in that light.
With that said, at the BDJ price today, I find MyBase a compelling, extendable product for the price, with all of the above notes reasons for me to add it to my list of apps. I will be likely become a new customer when I get home and get authorization from COMWIFEHOMEFRONT….
Posted by 22111
Oct 17, 2013 at 08:03 AM
Thank you so much, PIMfan, for these remarks, all of them on the spot, and some of which I wasn’t aware. Your review came too late for me, and with German “summer time” (at the end of October), the new bits day starts at 8 in the morning, not at 9 as I had in mind (will be back at 9 for the winter)... and they didn’t prolong for another day.
The review in the link above has been written by a ribbon advocate, so it’s to be taken with a grain of salt, but he’s not wrong (except for the ribbon), and some months ago, I re-trialled Treepad (the thing in 20 versions from free to enterprise, from the Netherlands, and without a forum or such): There, too, import/export is so good, and so many outlining formats can export/import from the Treepad format, that I have often mentioned TP as your “translation” format of choice, even if neither your source nor your target format would be TP.
Also, TP has got many features that you search in vain in most other programs, but I wasn’t able to “touch” it, and it’s the same problem with myBase: When you do almost all your work in one program, you look at it the major part of the day, and if it’s something “visually as old”, that’s a real problem, not for everyone, but for the myself, and for that ribbon advocated cited above.
You are perfectly right with your longevity argument (as you are with every other), but that coin has two faces: These programs ARE “old”, which is a good thing, but they didn’t make the step to buy new components, at some time, in order to present something visually much more appealing (Ultra Recall did rely on MS stuff from the beginning (or at least for many years now), so the look is much cleaner and less “Nineties”) - I know that with new components, some readjusting / minor new coding becomes necessary, but that would “pay”, in user appeal.
Btw, there is very little development with TP, while there is with myBase, so I don’t want to mix up this very different pace of development for both programs.
Also, even for the second content pane we have been discussing in the other thread, I’m not sure that myBase is really able to do it, since from what they say, it’s different KINDS of content, all depending from the SAME item in the tree, and then being shown in different panes all depending on that same item, which is something quite different from what we are looking out for, which is concurrent display of two content panes of two different tree items: All those panes in myBase screenshots are to illustrate its concept of “holding together” different kinds of content/links, from its special link list; of course, this is an advanced concept, judging from (for example) MyInfo’s link items (one extra item for each external link, and not even a comment field in that special item), but it supposes a totally different way of working, and what about exporting such proprietary concepts then?
All this is not said to invalidate what you’ve said about myBase, PIMfan, it’s just “soft criteria” that hold my back, when in fact the “hard criteria” are quite fine, though.
Among them, as you mentioned, regex search, which can be extremely helpful for smart “tagging” by coded keywords, since if you do the those keywords right, rather short regex search then can replace a long list of twenty “OR” / “AND” elements in Boolean search, and in many cases, such “stored searches” (even if, as in myBase, you must “store” them manually as textlines in some item) would be the better solution than endless cloning of dozens of items.
To finish, I would like to remind a rather important feature most outliners don’t have (and which myBase probably doesn’t have either, and which every outliner should have to which you switch from another one should have as I see it): Search should display the text context for your found items (when your search was for text within the content): Anybody ever having used desktop search engines like File Locator knows how extremely useful such a feature is, in the absence of any “relevance” functionality in presenting search results.
We are always discussing various solutions that in the end do not even two thirds of what they should do, our choice being bound to deciding upon which features we are willing to do without.
Btw, this (quite rare) “link list” concept of myBase reminds me of Surfulater, and this again makes me wander why Surfulater’s developer never really was interested in making his program a real “outliner”, meaning to spice it up for general PIM work.