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Meta trends - what have we learned?
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Posted by jaslar
Dec 24, 2013 at 09:45 PM
First, happy holidays to all. And thank you for making one of the most interesting communities on the web.
As I’ve (mostly) lurked on this site, I have observed several themes.
1. Information gathering. Many of you are roaming and reaping. Let’s call that “research.” You find fragments (text, image, other) of interest or relevance, and you want to mark and remember those things.
2. The arrangement of ideas. This is the interim stage of consideration, engagement and interaction. You toss snippets into buckets, then link and compare and test those snippets. I suppose it’s really about pattern recognition.
3. The generation of new ideas. Ultimately, the intent of this activity is to create something new: to glean new meaning,
4. The publication of one’s work. Here, the idea is to offer it back to the world.
I’ve been poking around the site the past few days, dipping into previous discussion, and do see some trends.
First, there does seem to be a push toward multi-platform tools. This is balanced with some healthy skepticism about life in the cloud (with services that may wink out, not to mention being mined by entities unknown).
Second, the interoperability of data is key. Platforms change, software changes, but many of the folks here assert the need to preserve previous work. (I myself have moved from CP/M to DOS to Windows to the Mac to Linux.)
I have some other ideas and observations, but I’m curious to hear from you. All of you are constantly on the alert for new tools. (That would be CRIMPing!) But what are you seeing about the evolution of those tools—and the trends in information management?
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 24, 2013 at 11:28 PM
jaslar wrote:
Hello jaslar,
good summary and interesting analysis!
>All of you are constantly on the alert for new tools. (That would
>be CRIMPing!) But what are you seeing about the evolution of those tools
>—and the trends in information management?
I often find that the “new tools” I find are not necessarily new to the world but they are new to me, and that the interesting tools are not necessarily the most recently created ones. There are a lot of oldies that are still goodies out there, to be discovered.
Also, I’m not sure if there is always an “evolution” out there. With the rise of smart phones, tablets and web apps there is also a push for the mass market, which brings a certain amount of dumbing down with it. This may lead/have led to sophisticated applications being abandoned and developer talent diverted away from the kind of software we’re interested in here.
Nevertheless, on the whole I’m optimistic, as I keep running into surprising and unexpected developments when I least expect it.
Happy holidays to all, and all the best in the New Year!
Posted by jimspoon
Dec 25, 2013 at 02:24 AM
sitting here with relatives who are watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, which i already saw two days ago! So I am browsing about with my trusty laptop.
One thing I’ve noticed is the proliferation of outliner apps for iOS and Android, while I have seen very few new outliner - pim - notetaker programs for Windows. So it seems like there’s a been shift from developing of programs for desktop os, to development of webapps and apps for mobile os. As Dr. Andus indicated this shift has involved some dumbing down. I suppose as mobile and web platforms become more powerful and sophisticated, we can expect to see more sophisticated outliner / pim / notetaking apps for these platforms.
jim w.
Posted by 22111
Dec 25, 2013 at 03:38 PM
“sitting here with relatives who are watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, which i already saw two days ago! So I am browsing about with my trusty laptop.”
That would have to be called “more general crimping”, for input, too - well, that’s what all those non-outlining people out there do all the time, right? (We just enlarged this general concept to being unhappy with unsifficient sw.)
Cloud, collaboration, multiple platforms
I don’t want to appear negative here, I fully acknowledge that all this is going cloud in the end since that, yes, will greatly facilitate collaboration (at a price, but I shut up here). I simply would like to remind that Petko, who seems to be willing to spread MI to slates now, after all, could better concentrate on his core work, optimizing MI, had MS ever had the obvious idea to put some money into the development (together with the processor maker of their choice) of processors and “peripherals” by which your regular Windows application would run on a slate with both the weight and the battery consumption of an iPad or an Android device, so many, many developing hours are lost to work here that should have been unnecessary in the first place.
Text bits processing, “Atlantis”
Also, and this has been mentioned here in the past, what today’s outliner offer with regards to text processing, both within their editors (intra-item) and within their tree (inter-item), is quite basic (or outright non-existant, for the latter category); both myself and “Dr Andus” insisted on the importance of such functionality (and of which you speak here, “between the lines”): re-arrangement of info bits, between/among those items, is not supported by most outliners (and which makes additional appeal for 1-pane outliners for some, and rightly so, or for traditional text processors having good outline functionality superimposed, as in Word (! with or without add-ins for that) or in Atlantis (of which Prof. Kühn raves, and with good reason, even when that fine sw lacks important functionality by other criteria, e.g. cross-referencing - in fact, you can do 10,000 pages files with Atlantis - people report to have done this successfully -, but then, any cross-reference there will only be done by external mark-up surrogates; no search result “tables” = lists either (which, again, would be so helpful in a text processor being able to process texts of any size) (a “table” would mean something more, showing meta data like “within which chapter/sub-chapter”, a “list” just showing the immediate contexts of those “hits”, and even a simple “list” would be of tremendous help here); but then, for mimicking a basic (an even not-so-basic) 1-pane outliner, Atlantis is outstanding sw!!!) With today’s outliners, if you shuffle MINOR bits around alot (and academic workers necessarily do this), Atlantis might be a VERY viable solution (as for most of them, Word is, not unexpectedly), so all our crimping is caused by the inability of current outliner developers to listen to us (and yes, I do a lot with external macros to fill up those gaps, but it’s all so unelegant when you have to do it from outside of the native code body of the sw you use).
Developers not listening as much as they should (but doing cross-platform translation work instead, sometimes)
No content here, I’ll spare you my rant and shut up. ;-)
Posted by 22111
Dec 25, 2013 at 04:05 PM
I forgot the obvious: In Atlantis, no tables, and hence, probably no formulas, no good pic handling (but, as said, real good outlining functionality).
And I perhaps did not make my “little chunks of text vs. bigger chunks of text” observation clear enough:
We had the discussion here about 1-pane vs. 2-and-more-pane, and it seems the big interest of the 1-pane variety (or then, Atlantis/Word instead) lies in the ease of access and handle even minor bits/chunks, whilst our current 2-pane outliners 1) put, by their generic design, obstacles into that process, and then, 2) do nothing to overcome those obstacles (whilst there are many such possible little “helpers” imaginable) - just one very basic example: The majority of 2-pane outliners, when you switch forth and back between 2 items within the same file, do NOT even go back to the other item’s cursor position, but to the begin of text of that item.
Thus, we have, in 2-pane outliners, two different concepts (bad, bad!) for pieces of content (that only vary by size and should hence be treated as similarly as possible): For chunks of text being big enough to constitute an item of their own, all goes well, perfect processing, here the 2-pane concept excels. And then, whenever a chunk of text is NOT big enough to “justify” an item of its own (be it a paragraphs, even several paragraphs, or even just a sentence or even less than a sentence), in our 2-outliner “workflow”,
we get into deep trouble, our tool clearly gets into our way.
And of course, such problems should have been attacked years ago, from our side (thinking about it), and from the developers’ side (by realizing our suggestions we might have brought in). It goes without saying that such problems will not evaporate in the cloud but have to be resolved, at least for academic writers who don’t have such bits to shuffle around here and there, but on a “dozens of times a day” basis - and then, inter-item cross-referencing that remains valid for publication (and which neither any outliner nor Atlantis offer, but Word does, so no wonder the outliner community remains that select, in part by their in-house made “omissions”, both on the user side, where the “asking” for these necessary elements is not strong enough, as on the developers’ side, where such “academic basics” are considered to be just “too demanding”).
Info crimping is one thing: There can never be enough info out there to irgurgitate, except for morons. But outliner crimping is caused by numerous, blatant omissions in this special field of the “industry”: We have A Right To Be Unhappy! - omg ;-)