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learning Ultra Recall
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Posted by bboyd
Oct 24, 2007 at 08:20 PM
Rather than hijack the whizfolders topic, let me start a new thread to pursue a comment made there by quant, and ask about Ultra Recall.
quant said:
>I have the same feeling about UltraRecall, with custom
>attributes/templates/saved searches/forms/hoisting and second to none Customer
>support it is a product hard to beat!
>
>But at the same time I think to myself, that it’s
>not me who is losing for not using such a great product ;-) and great products don’t
>really need to be advertised or talked about
I’m slowly moving towards giving up on OneNote in favor of Ultra Recall, for a number of reasons. Primarily because OneNote simply doesn’t work as well as a number of other programs at importing web pages, but more specifically because I’m attracted by Ultra Recall’s database power. I thought I could live with OneNote’s folders, and I’ll still have a use for them, but - for me - the tree just makes more sense for the way I think and organize. I thought OneNote’s linking ability would be enough, but UR is much stronger and, even better, the ability to show parents and children together with the main info item is especially helpful. Not least because you can click on any parent or child and see its own parents and children. And make new connections if need be. (This is not unlike the theme of the ConnectText thread, but UR is certainly not a wiki. It does perhaps have greater appeal to those of us who like our data more regimented, though.)
Once you get your mind around what quant mentions, attributes/templates/saved searches/forms/hoisting, it becomes clear that the potential of UR is considerable. I’m already very happy with how I can adapt it to my very particular needs.
But the learning curve does seem to be daunting when hoping to extract the greater good from UR, so this is where I’m asking if I’ve missed something. Like a decent owner’s manual, beyond the Help pages provided. I’m amazed at how customizable the program is, and how one can devise templates with any field one chooses. But it took me forever to figure it out on my own, mostly gleaning clues from the forum, that to create or amend a template one has to first set up attributes, then set up a form consisting of those attributes, then bring that form into a template. I’m barely an amateur with a program like MS Access, so I feel lucky to have figured out this much about UR.
Having done so, I’m very impressed with how I can make it exactly right for what I need. Those of you who are veterans: may I ask how you got there? I’d love to have better explanations for some of its powerful features than I can now find, but the current support pages seem to assume too much.
One last thing about quant’s quote above: I can share the feeling that it’s not me who is losing for not using such a great product, but it would be great to have more people be talking about it, not just to expand the user base and thus keep the developer in business, but to expand the knowledge base as well. When I searched UR here in this forum, there are many references to it, but not as much detailed discussion as there is with some other programs.
Posted by Ken Ashworth
Oct 24, 2007 at 09:12 PM
bboyd,
Have you posted to the UR forum? Most of us are pretty response to user questions.
Yes, it’s been mentioned many times in both forums that the manual leaves a bit to be desired - long on explianing the functionality, but short on real-world examples. Maybe this is where the users-helping-users comes into play (a 12-step program).
Like you, what drew me to UR was that it is based on a database, and this is where my grounding is. I don’t have a requirement for formal writing so many of the programs discussed here - and the problems they are trying to solve - don’t apply to my needs (but the discussions are informative).
One major drawback to UR is getting your data back out, not that it’s trapped in the program, but publishing your data in a meaningful way without having to go thru another program(s) to do the layout and styling.
I (and others) are hoping that this lack of a “presentation” layer will be addressed in the future.
Posted by Thomas
Oct 24, 2007 at 09:44 PM
I started small by importing from Treepad and other sources, and was gradually expanding my understanding of UR as my needs were expanding. Also used to visit the Kinook forum everyday, plenty of great tips were posted that I incorporated. Starting small and gradually expanding is easy, but if you need to start with a bigger and more complicated project from zero knowledge of UR, it might be a bit steeper learning curve.
Posted by quant
Oct 24, 2007 at 10:14 PM
bboyd wrote:
>But the learning curve does seem to be daunting when hoping to extract the
>greater good from UR, so this is where I’m asking if I’ve missed something.
learning curve depends on whether you came into contact with databases before. UR can be considered as a classic rational database but with a very well thought of and customized front-end.
Even then it takes some time. It took me about a month, few hours a day, to understand about 90% of UR, but even after half a year I found new features. The good approach is to go through the settings and try to understand/learn what the options mean. Also some of the examples that ship with UR can show you what can be done (GTD), but you won’t learn it without getting your hands dirty.
> I’d love to
>have better explanations for some of its powerful features than I can now find, but the
>current support pages seem to assume too much.
this is a problem with help file, lots of explanation, but no examples ... but they plan to revamp it
> One major drawback to UR is getting your data back out, not that it’s trapped in the program, but
> publishing your data in a meaningful way without having to go thru another program(s) to do the
>layout and styling.
this is also going to be addressed by having HTML export.
Let me just paste the roadmap for the planned features in UR:
# Always-on-top drag/drop target for importing into UR
# HTML export
# Rich text editor enhancements
# Ability to hide completed items
# Highlight search results
# Support updating form date field via Calendar pane
# Multi-user enhancements
# Internal editing of stored web page items
# Show Lineage in Item Parents pane
# Automatic clipboard capture
# Calendar pane
# Revamp the help file
# Tab enhancements
# Title attribute based on other attribute values
# Investigate desktop search integration again
# Custom sorting in tree
# Queue import operations
# Keywords pane
# Filtering in tree
# Open multiple items in side-by-side windows
# Multi-DB search
# Visualization
# Connections pane
Many people here seems to be continuously looking for a better soft to meet their needs. Like the main quote on Kinook’s website says
“I consider the search for the perfect PIM finished.”
and I don’t think I will be looking for UR replacement any soon ;-)
Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Oct 24, 2007 at 10:35 PM
>Let me just paste the roadmap for the planned features in UR:
# HTML export
# Rich text editor enhancements
# Ability to hide completed items
# Support updating form date field via Calendar pane
# Multi-user enhancements
# Internal editing of stored web page items
# Show Lineage in Item Parents pane
# Calendar pane
# Tab enhancements
# Title attribute based on other attribute values
# Custom sorting in tree
# Keywords pane
# Filtering in tree
# Open multiple items in side-by-side windows
# Multi-DB search
# Connections pane
They seem to have simply copied the current features of SQLNotes! http://www.sqlnotes.net (free while in beta)