Black Hole Organizer is a free form text and information database where you can define your own database fields and organise your texts, snippets, links and files in categories (folders). Further, Black Hole Organizer has a very good search engine.

It is featured on Bitsdujour.com today (2nd January 2015):
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/black-hole-organizer/in=todays-deals-home

This program is very stable but the last update (v.3.3) was on the 2/21/2012.

Best,
Dominik

Hello Dominik,

I bought this program many, many years ago when it was being developed by Lincoln Beach software but then re-purchased in 2012 when it was on offer at Bits du Jour on the basis that an upgrade from version 3.30 would be forthcoming in the not-too-distant future. Over two years later, no sign of an upgrade and they are still offering v3.30 today.

Kind regards,
Geoffrey

Geoffrey Miller wrote:

Over two years
later, no sign of an upgrade and they are still offering v3.30 today.

But kudos to the developer for giving one of the best answers to that I've ever seen on BitsduJour:

"It has been really hard to come up with options to upgrade a product that works so well." :-)

To be fair, he also says they're working on an upgrade and it should come out this year: "all who purchase this will get the upgrade at no cost."

But I'll hold off for now, as I need another PIM like I need a hole in my head (sorry, couldn't resist that pun ;)

I love that.

And in truth, some programs really are so good (so "pretty much done") that the pressure to "upgrade" breaks them. Consider the Bean word processor for the Mac, or the dual-pane outliner Treepad. Good enough for what it started out to do, and short of a platform architectural change, a solid part of a toolchest that you can just use it, instead of constantly relearning it.

Black Hole organizer seems like a pretty adept information manager. I picked up a license a few years ago (don't remember how... probably a Bits du Jour promo). I haven't used it before, but it has some great features, including the Floater capability, where you can shrink it down to a small floating window into which you can drag text and documents for organizing... the "black hole" from which its name derives. But it is also a bit dated in some areas too.

Still, it is a venerable organizer that has been around for well over a decade. For $5 it is a bargain.

Steve Z.

I did a trial when I was looking for a PIM with customizable columns. It fell short of what I was looking for but I figured I'd pick it up for $5. I bailed out of the ordering process when they required my name, address, and phone number even though I was buying through Paypal.

I contacted them and suggested they were hurting their sales by requiring personal information for Paypal purchases. I was told they do that to make it easier for them to track down people illegally distributing their software. I hadn't heard that one before.