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ConnectedText versus Ndxcards
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Posted by Derek Cornish
Oct 19, 2007 at 01:01 AM
Manfred -
Thanks very much for the url of your article commenting on CT. It really does make an excellent case for it.
I was about to launch into a discussion of how similar CT and Zoot are, for all their apparent differences, until I recalled your discussion of this very issue on our fall-back forum back in June ‘06: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/outliners-pims/message/286
One has to invest a lot of time in these programs - preferably in connection with real projects - to get a sense of their strengths and limitations. Once heavily invested in one, changing becomes a major issue, especially as their features overlap so much. Steve Zeoli suggested as much when he rejected CT as a useful complement to Zoot [http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/outliners-pims/message/290]
What he was looking for was an authoring program to compensate for Zoot’s (and probably to some extent CT’s) weakness in this area. This leads me to two more questions:
Does anyone use CT and Zoot together on a regular basis, and if so, for what purposes? And is WhizFolders living up to its promise of providing a useful intermediate authoring stage for CT and Zoot before one has to move into MS-Word?
Derek
Posted by john oconnor
Oct 19, 2007 at 03:46 AM
John O’Connor wrote:
>I just had an Eureka moment with ConnectedText. With ConnectedText the cards shuffle
>themselves without the need for human intervention. How very interesting.
Let me explain. I should have used the word search rather than shuffle. In NDXcards you find connections between cards by searching for a shared keyword. If you forget to include the shared keyword in your search then you do not find the connection between the cards. In Connectedtext as soon as you have entered a “card” that contains a shared keyword with an existing “card” you can see that there is a connection.
This is how I think I will be using Connected text. I make an entry about a concept that contains several keywords including: Color, Blue, and Rainbow. Several months later I make an entry about a concept that contains the keywords (Or links) Color, and Yellow. I immediately see that there is a connection to my prior entry and based on this new connection I go back and revise my first entry. I then create a new entry called Rainbow which links back to my first entry. I then revise my second entry to add Rainbow as a keyword and perhaps update my new understanding of the second entry in light of the first entry and the new entry called Rainbow. Then I update the Rainbow entry.
Connectedtext is a thinking tool. I cannot say the same about NDXcards.
Posted by john oconnor
Oct 19, 2007 at 03:53 AM
>Connectedtext is a thinking tool. I cannot say the same about NDXcards
Just to clarify, I think ConnectedText can be used as a tool to learn and understand material as it is being placed into ConnectedText. This is is contrast to other programs where learning about the material is postponed to a later date.
John O’Connor
Posted by Ike Washington
Oct 19, 2007 at 12:29 PM
Derek Cornish wrote:
>Does
>anyone use CT and Zoot together on a regular basis, and if so, for what purposes? And is
>WhizFolders living up to its promise of providing a useful intermediate authoring
>stage for CT and Zoot before one has to move into MS-Word?
The core of the current version of my knowledge system consists of a locally hosted personal wiki which uses Mediawiki, the wiki application behind Wikipedia, working together with Zoot.
For me, Mediawiki is a better solution than CT: it’s open source, comes out of a huge community of developers, powers Wikipedia so isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. I explain how I’ve set it up here: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/524/0/wiki-tool-for-windows-and-mac
But setting up Mediawiki is a bit of a pain. I can see myself using CT. Its feature set looks great, compares well with Mediawiki. They both provide the same kind of wiki capabilities.
I use Zoot for accumulating data on particular topics. What I particularly like is the Zooter - allows me to add notes, comments and keywords as I read from the screen. The keywords ensure that the note ends up in the relevant folders.
The wiki is for long-term notes which evolve, grow into substantial essays over time. As well as the advantages of using a wiki - good for brainstorming, easy to access since it’s just another tab in Firefox, a way of collecting information to be used like LEGO bricks to create something larger, what I find useful here is that I can see how these changes have occurred, can go back in time, see how my thoughts have developed.
I combine, rewrite in NoteMap; the resulting piece of writing is archived - as a blog post, wiki entry or published article.
In any case, it’s available through my local search engine, DT Search, as are the wiki, zoot and notemap entries.
I really wanted to use WhizFolders - but its functions, at least in the ways I wanted to use them, overlapped with Notemap and Zoot. I’ve juggling too many windows, tabs as it is. And I’ve become accustomed to Notemap.
Ike
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 19, 2007 at 05:37 PM
The immediate recognition of common key words seems independent of the wicki approach of CT. Is that right? In principle, a program like ndxcards could have a feature like this. Or so it would seem.
john oconnor wrote:
>>Connectedtext is a thinking tool. I cannot say the same about NDXcards
>
>Just to
>clarify, I think ConnectedText can be used as a tool to learn and understand material
>as it is being placed into ConnectedText. This is is contrast to other programs where
>learning about the material is postponed to a later date.
>
>John O’Connor