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Looking for information manager that combines strengths of X1, Evernote, TreeProjects, GloboNote, My Notes Keeper, Clipboard Help & Spell,
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Posted by yosemite
Nov 21, 2014 at 04:23 AM
Weird, I was just browsing the OneNote dev blog and they have this:
“Introducing the OneNote Search API (Beta), powered by Bing”
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/onenotedev/archive/2014/11/17/onenote-search-api-powered-by-bing.aspx
I don’t get this at all. OneNote Search is already top notch and super fast (if properly indexed) so this seems a step backwards. “Let us have access to all your stuff through the cloud and we’ll, uh, we’ll, hmm, we’ll make it better! Promise!” Barf.
Posted by 22111
Nov 21, 2014 at 01:18 PM
( Re Search, continued: )
“I too would love an integration of file manager / outliner / super-search. Maybe someday. But it would be very hard to do, and I don’t think there’s a large market for it. So… expensive.”
As for the outliner part and the large market, that would probably be in function of the obviousness (= “getting into the way” for non-outliner-affin users) of the outlining character of such integrated software, and as said above, if every item is a file in itself (with pre-loading of file groups, and even with an additional pane listing sub-items within any file (not only a traditional outliner part, but also headings within a Word or a pdf file, but that additional pane would be displayed just in case the user would WANT that “outliner” part of it, so it would not bother all the other users just being after an optimized file manager); and of course, buyers shouldn’t have the impression that they pay extra for the outlining part of the thing.
At the end of the day, outlining within a file manager would not be so exotic, it would just be an AUTOMATED drilling down the hierarchy within the file system for specific parts of it (as you can do today, manually, by opening sub-folders into additional panes in cascade
(if enough of such additional panes are available (but often hidden behind tabs; but see X2’s scrap panes or DO’s additional windows with additional “listers”; also see the Miller-columns-style file managers which remain exotic (“tiny market”) since for everyday use of a file manager, you don’t Miller columns, i.e. you are only interested in the sub-folder deep down, but not in its multiple parents, so the latter should not take 3 quarters of your screen estate))),
AND with the additional functionality that all those lists are not necessarily sorted by just automatisms anymore (abc, suffix’ abc, etc.), but will have to be sorted manually, too, for any one of them, wherever the user decides so (and also in different sort orders for different contexts in which they appear); cf. XY’s manual sorting in their latest releases… but which, on further looking, is restrained to what in fact are virtual folders only; in other words, the integration of files-as-they-are in the file system, AND of files-(virtually-or-not)-relocated (to “other” positions or additional positions) has not been made (yet) in this set-up (so that in spite of the advertizing, XY’s “manual sorting” is nothing more (yet) than X2’s scrap panes (I don’t know if DO’s listers’ capabilities lately go beyond these?).
All this should be available, and be easy (!) for the user, but be far from intrusive.
As for a market for integrated search, that market would be immense, and I think that a file manager in the region of 100 bucks (DO) should indeed offer such functionality. As said above, search tools sell development kits, too, but at high prices, and the virulent problem is that if you sell dtSearch for 250 or 300 bucks, perhaps plus TVA, you can’t sell the development kit to a file manager developer at a price that would entitle him to sell his combined product for 100 bucks: His sales would not only cut into yours, but literally raze your own market (and if you sold a crippled version to the file manager’s developer, that quickly would become known, and it’s him who would be blamed to sell some overpriced “fake”).
From what precedes, it’s evident that with a tool such as X1, integration possibilities would be quite more realistic, but here again, file manager at 50 bucks, or with X1 integration 100, and X1 alone 50 bucks again, would mean that the price the file manager’s developer would have to pay to X1, would be rather high, in order for X1 to not lose money, but get more (from the sharply risen market penetration of their product) than before.
In other words, the core technology being the search technology (whilst “anybody” could create another file manager), integration should probably come from the search engines’ side, not from the file managers’ side (and that means the above-mentioned outline, or folders-INTEGRATING-virtual-elements technology cannot be expected to arrive soon - it’s much more probable that some file manager will quite soon integrate some third-rate search technology (for which even some free offerings exist), and that people will then have to live with that substandard solution (the standard being defined by what should be possible, financial considerations put aside).
I would not dare comment on OneNote (had had version 2003 coming with some Toshiba laptop out of the bux, but quickly discarded that version), but their Bing integration makes sense to me, from THEIR point of view at the very least:
Bing is crap: Whenever I try, I do not get “other” hits, but I get a (strictly leatoric, not “better”) subset of what I get from google by the same search; people know this, so not many of them use Bing. On the other hand, search integration between your desktop (remind yourself not many people maintain monsrous knowledge “databases” on their pc, as we, outliner freaks, do) and the web has often been discussed as highly desirable, and in fact, I often do both searches, albeit with slightly different search terms then, for my search within the web (and everybody would probably do the same).
Now if the MS product “integrated” web search, and most people being quite “lazy”, i.e. they accept an “acceptable” offer in spite of their knowing just one step further, there is a better offering (and which doesn’t “cost” them any more than just that one more step to go), it’s to be expected that (perhaps even more or less “automated”, even unwanted / unneeded Bing searches will see the light of the day: MS’s commercial objectives reached, and if you really need good web search results, you’ll do the google search immediately afterwards.
But two things remains to be seen: First, will MS/ON/Bing invariably phone home even your internal searches (terms, let alone the results?): a) when you do a combined search (that would necessarily be positive, except for the results of course), b) when you don’t even want to search the web for it also?
And then, the graphical rendering of such Bing searches in ON: The only beautiful search I’ve ever seen in a website (I said this before) was in the TheBrain help forum, whilst I abhor sites which integrate google search, and I certainly would not want goggle-style search results in a desktop applic (see above for “some lines above and below the hit line” NOT in the hit table (and by that cutting off the hit table into non-digestible pieces), but in an additional pane).
As always, MS does what makes (some) sense to MS (alone): Well, I could have told you before, and anyone could have done that. This being said, some google (web) search integration would be welcome, but would not make any sense for google: No ads, and no blah-blah around the hits anymore… (I HATE those google hits, among the very first 5 (!) or so, where for “somesoftware review” I then get “Be the first to write a review!”)
Oh, I’ve got a hint for your smoothing your google searches: Currently, you will probably open too many even dubious hits because it’s not so easy to revert to the search tab, for clicking on further hits in case of not having got a sufficient number of satisfying ones yet.
Just do your searches in the very first tab, not from the tab you accidentally happen to be when you start your search: Most browsers have got a shortkey for going to the very first tab at least (or even tab 2, 3…, i.e. a tab you can remember, for a specific search - so if you need to have open some 2 or 3 searches concurrently, allocate tabs 1, 2, 3 to google from start on), so this will help in not precautionarily opening a plethora of probably unworthy hits for fear of not finding your original search anytime soon (and without the need of another particular FF/Chrome add-ins); the same would apply to dict.cc and such…
Which would imply you had “go to lastused tab” toggle of course, so I looked this up and found, under superuser.com, this:
“browse about:config
find browser.ctrlTab.previews
set true
wow! thanks! this what i’ve been looking for.
@Dashed You poor soul, waiting 1 year for the best answer.
And I’ve been waiting for several years! Thanks!”
Posted by 22111
Jan 11, 2015 at 01:53 PM
This is a spin-off of page 32 (!) of this thread http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2434.775 ,
since I don’t think real info should be buried within page 32 or 33 of a someday gross-page-long thread of which readers will perhaps read page 1, and then the very last (pages) only; on the other hand, even buried on some page 32, wrong and/or incomplete “info” should not be left unattended.
____________________
Re searching:
Read my posts in http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5593
(re searching, and re tagging, the latter coming with the 260 chars for path plus filename limitations of course if you wanna do it within the file name… another possibly good reason to “encode” tags, in some form of .oac (Organisation(al things) - Assurances - Cars), instead of “writing them out”)
Among other things, I say over there that you are probably well advised to use different tools for different search situations, according to the specific strengths of those tools; this is in accordance with what users say over here in the above DC thread.
Also, note that just searching within subsets of data is not only a very good idea for performance reasons (File Locator et al.), but also for getting (much) less irrelevant results: If you get 700 “hits”, in many instances, it’s not really a good idea to try to narrow down by adding further “AND” search terms, since that would probably exclude quite some relevant hits; narrowing down to specific directories would probably be the far better (“search in search”) strategy; btw, another argument for tagging, especially for additional, specific tagging of everything that is in the subfolder into which it “naturally” belongs, but which belongs into alternative contexts, too (ultimately, a better file system should do this trick).
(Citations from the above page 32:)
Armando: “That said, I always find it weird when Everything is listed side by side with other software like X1, DTSearch or Archivarius. It’s not the same thing at all! Yes, most so called “Desktop search” software will be able to search file names (although not foldernames), but software like Everything won’t be able to search file content.” - Well said, I run into this irresponsible stew again and again; let’s say that with “Everything” (and with Listary, which just integrates ET for this functionality), the file NAME search problem has definitely been resolved, but that does not resolve our full text search issues. Btw, I’m sure ET has been mentioned on pages 1 to 31 of that thread over and over again, and it’s by nature such overlong threads will treat the same issues again and again, again and again giving the same “answers” to those identical problems, but of course, this will not stop posters who try to post just the maximum of post numbers, instead of trying to shut up whenever they can not add something new to the object of discussion. (I have said this before: Traditional forum sw is not the best solution for technical fora (or then, any forum), some tree-shaped sw (integrating a prominent subtree “new things”, and other “favorites” sub-trees) would have been a thousand times better, and yes, such a system would obviously expose such overly-redundant, just-stealing-your-time posts. (At 40hz: Note I never said 100 p.c. of your posts are crap, I just say 95 or more p.c. of them are… well, sometimes they are quite funny at least, e.g. when a bachelor tries to tell fathers of 3 or 4 how to rise children: It’s just that some people know-it-all, but really everything, for every thing in this life and this world, they are the ultimate expert - boys of 4 excel in this, too.)
Innuendo on Copernic: Stupid bugs, leaves out hits that should be there. I can confirm both observations, so I discarded this crap years before, and there is no sign things would have evolved in the right direction over there in the meantime, all to the contrary (v3>v4, OMG).
X1: See jity2’s instructive link: http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=9638) . My comment, though: X1’s special option which then finds any (? did you try capitals, too, and “weird” non-German/French accented chars?) accented char, by just entering the respective base char, is quite ingenious (and new info for me, thank you!), and I think it can be of tremendous help IF it works “over” all possible file formats (but I so much doubt this!), and without fault, just compare with File Locator’s “handling” (i.e. in fact mis-treating) accented chars even in simple .rtf files (explained in the outliner thread) - thus, if X1 found (sic, I don’t dare say “finds”) all these hits, by simply entering “relevement”, for finding “relèvement” (which could, please note, have been wrongly written rélèvement” in some third-party source text within your “database” / file-system-based data repository, which detail would make you would not find it by entering the correct wording), this would be a very strong argument for using X1, and you clearly should not undervalue this feature, especially since you’re a Continental and by this will probably have stored an enormous amount of text bodies containing accented chars, and which rather often will have accent errors within those original texts.
X1 again, a traditional problem of X1 not treated here: What about its handling of OL (Outlook) data? Not only that ancient X1 versions did not treat such data well, but far worse, X1 was deemed, by some commentators, to damage OL files, which of course would be perfectly inacceptable. What about this? I can’t trial (neither buy, which I would have done, otherwise) the current X1 version, with my XP Win version, and it might be this obvious X1-vs.-OL problem has been resolved in the meantime (but even then, the question would remain which OL versions would possibly be affected even then? X1-current vs. OL-current possibly ok, but X1-current vs. OL-ancient-versions =?!). I understand that few people would be sufficiently motivated to trial this upon their real data, but then, better trial this, with let’s say a replication of your current data, put onto an alternative pc, instead of runningg the risk that even X1-current will damage any OL data on your running system, don’t you think so? (And then, thankfully, share your hopeful all-clear signal, or then, your warnings, in case - which would of course be a step further, not necessarily included within your first step of verifying…)
Innuendo on X1 vs. the rest, and in particular dtSearch:
“X1 - Far from perfect, but the absolute best if you use the criteria above as a guideline. Sadly, it seems they are very aware of being the best and have priced their product accordingly. Very expensive…just expensive enough to put it over the line of insulting. If you want the best, you and your wallet will be oh so painfully aware that you are paying for the best.”
“dtSearch - This is a solution geared towards corporations and the cold UI and barely there acceptable list of features make this an unappetizing choice for home users. I would wager they make their bones by providing lucrative support plans and willingness to accept company purchase orders. There are more capable, less expensive, more efficient options available.”
This cannot stay uncommented since it’s obviously wrong in some respects, from my own trialling both; of course, if X1 has got some advantages (beyond the GUI, which indeed is much better, but then, some macroing for dtSearch could probably prevent some premature decision like jity2’s one: “In fact after watching some videos about it, I won’t try it because I don’t use regex for searching keywords, and because the interface seems not very enough user friendly (I don’t want to click many times just to do a keyword search !).”), please tell us!
First of all, I can confirm that both developers have (competent) staff (i.e. no comparison with the usual “either it’s the developer himself, or some incompetent (since not trained, not informed, not even half-way correctly paid “Indian”“) that is really and VERY helpful, in giving information, and in discussing features, or even lack of features, both X1 and dtSearch people are professional and congenial, and if I say dtSearch staff is even “better” than X1 staff, this, while being true, is not to denigrate X1 staff: we’re discussing just different degrees of excellence here. (Now compare with Copernic.)
This being said, X1 seems to be visually-brilliant sw for standard applics, whilst dtSearch FINDS IT ALL. In fact, when trialling, I did not encounter any exotic file format from which I wasn’t able to get the relevant hits, whilst in X1, if it was not in their (quite standard file format) list, it was not indexed, and thus was not found: It’s as simple as that. (Remember the forensic objectives of dtSearch, but it’s exactly this additional purpose of it that makes it capable of searching lots of even quite widespread file formats where most other (index-based) desktop search tools fail.
Also, allow for a brief divagation into askSam country: The reason some people cling to it, is the rarity of full-text “db’s” able to find numerics. Okay, okay, any search tool can find “386”, be it as part of a “string”, or even as a “word” (i.e. as a number, or as part of a number), but what about “between 350 and 400”? Okay, okay, you can try (and even succeed, in part), with regex (= again, dtSearch instead of X1). But askSam does this, and similar, with “pseudo-fields”, and normally, for such tasks, you need “real” db’s for this, and as we all know, for most text-heavy data, people prefer text-based sw, instead of putting it all into relational db’s. As you also know, there are some SQLite/other-db-based 2-pane outliners / basic IMS’ that have got additional “columns” in order to get numeric data into, but that’s not the same (, and even within there, searching for numeric data RANGES is far from evident).
Now that’s for numeric ranges in db’s, and now look into dtSearch’s possibilities of identifying numeric ranges in pseudo-fields in “full text”, similar to askSam, and you will see the incredible (and obviously, again, regex-driven) power of dtSearch.
Thus, dear Innuendo, your X1 being “the absolute best” is perfectly unsustainable, but it’s in order to inform you better that I post this, and not at all in order to insinuate you had known better whilst writing the above.
____________________
Re ntfs file numbers:
jity2 in the above DC thread: “With CDS V3.6 size of the index was 85 Go with about 2,000,000 files indexed (Note: In one hdd drive I even hit the NTFS limit : too much files to handle !) . It took about 15 days to complete 24/24 7/7.” Note: the last info is good to know… ;-(
It’s evident 2 million (!) files cannot reach any “NTFS limit” but if you do lots of things completety wrong, and if you persistently left out 3 zeros, it would have been 8.6 (or, with the XP number, 4.3, but nothing near 2.0:)
eVista on
“In short, the absolute limit on the number of files per NTFS volume seems to be 2 at the 32nd power minus 1*, but this would require 512 byte sectors and a maximum file size limit of one file per sector. Therefore, in practice, one has to calculate a realistic average file size and then apply these principles to that file size.”
Note: That would be a little less than 4.3 (i.e. 2power32-1) billion files (for Continentals: 4,3 Milliarden/milliards/etc.), for XP, whilst it’s 2power64-1 for Vista on, i.e. slightly less than 8.6 billion files.
No need to list all the google finds, just let me say that with “ntfs file number” you’ll get the results you need, incl. wikipedia, MS…
But then, special mention to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/197162/ntfs-performance-and-large-volumes-of-files-and-directories
with an absolutely brilliant “best answer”, and then also lots of valuable details further down that page.
I think this last link will give you plenty of ideas how to better organize your stuff, but anyway, no search tool whatsoever should choke by some “2,000,000 limit”, ntfs or otherwise.
Posted by 22111
Jan 11, 2015 at 05:50 PM
Kind of type (in fact, lack of attention) above:
“Note: That would be a little less than 4.3 (i.e. 2power32-1) billion files (for Continentals: 4,3 Milliarden/milliards/etc.), for XP, whilst it’s 2power64-1 for Vista on, i.e. slightly less than 8.6 billion files.”
EDIT: OF COURSE THAT IS NOT TRUE: The number you get everywhere is 2power32 = slightly less than 4.3 billion files, and I read that’s for XP, whilst from Vista on, it would be double of that, which would make it a little less than 8.6 indeed (I cannot confirm this of course), and that would then be 2power33, not 64 (I obviously got lead astray by Win32/64 (which probably is behind that doubling though)).
Posted by 22111
Jan 11, 2015 at 05:51 PM
typo ;-)