http://www.gen-9.net/

Check out the video tutorial. Looks interesting.

Thanks for the link, jimspoon.

Must be a case of the mid-January blues. I crimp, therefore I am - but Noah's pitch doesn't hook me.

A couple of points explaining why I'm not going to download Noah, why I'll be sticking with Zoot or EverNote as a way of freeing my information from "separate data islands" etc.

The video is good. It makes me think that Noah has the potential to become a great product.

But the site, for all its Web 2.0 touches, lets the product down:
- no rss link for news
- no full screenshots
- no staff biogs
- the "forum" is just a company blog
- Noah has a bland, corporate feel to it

So, I'm not doing anything else here except to bookmark the site.

It's an uphill task for any developer to get me to shift from my core applications. The people behind Noah could make it easier for themselves by making it easier for me to find out about them and their product.

Ike

I must have a terribly suspicious mind, but as this is a free product and there doesn't seem to be any advertising in the product, what's in it for the developers?

Graham

Here's an interesting bit from one of the news links in the site:

http://enewschannels.com/2006/09/29/enc241_200154.php
A recent survey shows that after using organizers and PIMs for over 6 months, 50% of users abandoned them, and only 15% said that the software really helped them become more efficient.

(I think I definitely become to the 15%, though what I have done with the time I've saved is debatable; I probably spent a lot of that looking for other PIMs!)

I will also keep my information in my separate islands for many reasons, one of them being resilience. I have already put too much of my info in one PIM (Hyperclip) in the past, only to find the company disappearing into thin air not long after. I am even more doubtful of a company offering a completely free product with no indication of where it is financed from and how it plans to remain in business.

That said, NOAH does sport some novelties I would like to see in other information organisers, mainly the Grid organising info items in a time sequence. I have actually suggested the product to a couple of colleagues who have remained as yet indifferent to the less colourful applications I have chosen for myself. I think that for someone who has only used MS Office apllications this could be an eye-opener.

BTW I find it reminds a lot of the (no longer developed?) Omea Pro. Must be the .NET framework.

alx

ugh, another prototype;
too large and slow, for what it does.

-cpb

Alex, you say Noah reminds you of Omea Pro.

I just glanced very quickly at the site, haven't yet looked at the video, and a funny thought crossed my mind..

Something about the approach resonates with what I have more recently seen on the Chandler site, and in the current version of Chandler.

So the cynic in me says, "I wonder if this is what Mitch Kapor has really been doing while his development team anguished over how many angels could dance on the head of a virtual pin?"

I do not like the reference to it being the first program that does all the things it says it does, because that is a bit of a stretch.

I have tried to use Gmail exclusively for my email during the last two years -- even the work I do for the agency that hires me I use Gmail for, rather than the internal system -- and amazingly, no one has called me on it yet.

But it would be nice to have my Gmail incorporated with other stuff on my computer, or somewhere. Now that I use USB sticks more, it helps. But there is a fragmentation that concerns me.

If I had the Gmail downloaded -- the Gmail that I want, that is -- when Mozy does its hourly off-site backup of my system, that mail would be backed up a also, as well as linked to specific files.

Daly

This looks like an interesting piece of software, but it hardly replaces a good information manager. First of all, it doesn't appear to have any serious note taking capability. Second, you have to capture full web pages and not just pieces of text from those pages. Third, you can only associate your information with "contacts," and not with specific topics. I gather that "contacts" don't necessarily have to be people... they can be things as well. Nevertheless, it seems less than intuitive. Fourth, the timeline view is handy, but it would be nice to be able to view data in other aspects.

Noah looks like it could be a very useful e-mail manager, but its limitations make it an inadequate replacement for OneNote, Zoot or any of the other powerful information managers we discuss.

In some ways it reminds me of a now defunct program called Correlate (www.correate.com) in which you drag in documents and e-mail and other information from diverse sources to build a knowledge map. But with Correlate, you built your knowledge map as a hierarchy of topics, rather than on a timeline basis.

Anyway, while it isn't as visually appealing, you should be able to achieve the same timeline perspective using EverNote... but EverNote is a far more powerful information manager... but one without the e-mail capabilities of Noah.

It does make one wonder how a company can build a product that it gives away... there must be an income stream from somewhere. Maybe they rely on "volume." ; )

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Third, you can only associate your information with "contacts," and not
with specific topics. I gather that "contacts" don't necessarily have to be
people... they can be things as well. Nevertheless, it seems less than intuitive.

The theme hierarchy in Noah includes "stations" (such as home or work), "channels" (i.e. groups, such as friends) and "topics" (they use contacts as an example, but it could be the name of a project or whatever). Stations can have several channels, and the same channels may belong to several stations; e.g. you can have personal finances accessible as a topic without switching stations.

That's it (unless I've missed something); so at best one can have three thematic hierarchical levels which is not much. Indeed I recall none of the information managers we have here to be so limiting. One might be able to bypass the limitation in some cases by creating folders and subfolders but this only seems possible at the mail Inbox etc.

Fourth, the timeline view is handy, but it would be nice to be able to view data in other
aspects.

The timeline view is so 'common sense' that I wonder why nobody has thought of it before. The fact that it is zoomable (Evernote is not, as far as I know) provides a "from bird's eye view to detail" outlook to information in the time dimension which for me is like a dream come true. Being able to drag and drop "stuff" in it and create events is great.

I think that Noah can indeed be useful in conjunction with an info manager such as UltraRecall or Evernote that can create permament external shortcuts to their internal data, i.e. as a "time map" of existing information. It could be very useful for documenting project implementation (that's what Correlate was marketed for by the way).

alx

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Something
about the approach resonates with what I have more recently seen on the Chandler site,
and in the current version of Chandler.

The company information is very limited (Gen-9, Inc., a Delaware Corporation, is privately held) to the extent that I wonder whether it implies something --which for me here in Europe is far from obvious. I.e. if it said "a Redmond Corporation", I would have guessed who's behind it. Do you know any famous software developer with their office in Mountain View, California?

alx

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

The company information is very limited (Gen-9, Inc., a Delaware Corporation, is
privately held) to the extent that I wonder whether it implies something --which for
me here in Europe is far from obvious. I.e. if it said "a Redmond Corporation", I would
have guessed who's behind it. Do you know any famous software developer with their
office in Mountain View, California?

alx

I don't know how common knowledge this is outside the USA, so just in case you and others are not aware of this: It is common for US companies to incorporate in Delaware even though they do not reside in that state. It's something to do with the laws of incorporation, I suppose. Anyway, that fact isn't really relevant to the discuss, but I thought it would be of interest.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I don't know how common knowledge this is outside the USA, so
just in case you and others are not aware of this: It is common for US companies to
incorporate in Delaware even though they do not reside in that state. It's something
to do with the laws of incorporation, I suppose. Anyway, that fact isn't really
relevant to the discuss, but I thought it would be of interest.

Companies that incorporate in Delaware pay no state income tax.

-c

Delaware seems to be the Liberia of American states.

Up here on the Great Lakes, it's common to see giant ore freighters with a home port of "Wilmington, Delaware" emblazoned on their sterns. Trouble is, it would be physically impossible for these behemoths to traverse the locks of the St. Laurence Seaway and make it out to the salt water so they could actually visit their "home port" some day.

And we won't talk about the tolls that Delaware collects on the roughly 200 yards of Interstate 95 that cross through a corner of the pint-sized state.

Noah looks very interesting. Even though I am using a Mac at home, I am still using a PC at work, and it would be very nice to have something like Noah to help me keep all of the material related to projects together. I may give it a try.

It is quite reminiscent of Omea Pro. I had a real love/hate relationship with that program. On the love side, it allowed me to put everything that had to do with a project into a single worspace including all emails, all word files, excel files etc. And it pulled all of the information in automatically. All you had to do was dole it out to the appropriate workspace. And you could set up rules to do the parsing for you. Very slick. Alas, it was slow as molasses on my computer(A laptop, an IBM T43.)

I'm not sure about the timeline mode of organizing. Even though they have a slick interface that allows you to switch the timeframe over which you are looking, I still have trailing obligations from 2006-not many, but a few, and not having them in view could be sticky.

Also, how are they going to make money on this? I have some concern about using a program, and then getting stranded when the developers go out of business.

Still, it could be a useful tool. Anyone given it a workout yet?

Jim

Jim wrote:

Also, how
are they going to make money on this? I have some concern about using a program, and then
getting stranded when the developers go out of business.

That was one of my main concerns from the start and the next question I will be asking at the forum. Interestingly, they have already announced Noah 2.0 beta testing:
http://noahnoahnoah.com/?p=8
The new version will have web publishing capabilities, so they might be looking into a new social networking concept.

Still, it could be a useful
tool. Anyone given it a workout yet?

I am, though not fanatically; I find some things non-intuitive and needlesley limiting. For example, you can drag and drop document straight to the timeline, but only to the "Channel's" Documents row, i.e. you can't associate an external file with a specific topic/contact, only with a time and a channel.

The program consumes about 230 Mb (!) but is actually faster than I would expect for a .NET application.

alx

For what it's worth, I posted a question on the Noah Forum inquiring about their business model. The answer I got was:

Think Google!

alx

I hope they are well capitalized.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

For what it's worth, I posted a question on the Noah Forum inquiring about their
business model. The answer I got was:

Think Google!

alx

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I find some things non-intuitive and needlesley limiting.
For example, you can drag and drop document straight to the timeline, but only to the
"Channel's" Documents row, i.e. you can't associate an external file with a specific
topic/contact, only with a time and a channel.

Noah's use of the timeline as well as its serious limitations got me searching for similar interfaces. I found practically none, but I might be looking at the wrong place.

Does anyone know of information managers that can organise external information, i.e. files, links, etc, along a timeline? I'm not talking about outliners / text processors used by fiction writers and such, which we have discussed in the past. I'm talking about putting all the stuff that we usually put on a foldable tree interface, on a horizontal (ideally) timeline.

The closest I've come to something like this is Evernote's Note List view which is vertical, but no more intuitive than a mail inbox.

alx

Hi,

I'm from Gen-9, the "Noah guys". Heard about this discussion and thought I would let you know we're here to answer any questions - or at least we'll do our best to answer them.

Hi MAF,
(I am as yet unsure whether MAF stands for Matt, Michel or Mike ;-)

I'm glad you could join us. Noah is a very different beast from what most of us have tried around here, and I for one am interested. Nevertheless, there's some issues that I personally find as severe shortcomings for serious information organisation. Here are the main two, related to what I consider Noah's main novelty, the Time Grid:

(a) Noah can organise things well on the temporal dimension, either focusing on the detail or zooming out to a bird's eye view. Not so on the topic side. I would expect foldable sub-topics down to several levels, like most information managers provide, in order to be able to organise data thematically, e.g. Family > Daughter > Health > Vaccinations. Now everything related to the topic Daughter is filed under a single heading.

(b) Furthermore, external documents can only be dragged to the Channel's Documents, rather than to the specific topic/person they concern. E.g. all mail messages from my friend Thanos can be kept in his row, but files related to him, such as videos, CV or whatever, are kept in the same row as all my other Friends'.

That's it for the moment :-)

TIA
alx

Hi Alex,
I posted something (rather long) last night, but it seems to have vanished, so I’ll try (summaries) below, between “**”. I hope the info is useful. –MAF- (it’s Mark, by the way) :-)

(a) Noah can organise things well on the temporal dimension, either focusing on the detail or zooming out to a bird’s eye view. Not so on the topic side. I would expect foldable sub-topics down to several levels, like most information managers provide, in order to be able to organise data thematically, e.g. Family > Daughter > Health > Vaccinations. Now everything related to the topic Daughter is filed under a single heading.

** I suggest you make a “Channel” or “Station” called “Daughter”, which should give you plenty of space to put all of the information you can imagine in the sub-Channels and/or sub-Topics. We intentionally limited the number of layers – too many make finding the stuff you’re looking for too difficult, or time-consuming. We targeted a two to three click average for finding what you’re looking for.**

(b) Furthermore, external documents can only be dragged to the Channel’s Documents, rather than to the specific topic/person they concern. E.g. all mail messages from my friend Thanos can be kept in his row, but files related to him, such as videos, CV or whatever, are kept in the same row as all my other Friends’.

**Version 2.0 will allow you to place documents directly on the Topic line. We’ll also have a new set of tools that allows you to move, sort, copy and search through these items. **

Mark, thanks for the prompt reply.

-MAF- wrote:

We intentionally limited the number of layers – too many make finding the stuff you’re
looking for too difficult, or time-consuming. We targeted a two to three click
average for finding what you’re looking for.**

I think most of us here would consider this approach seriously limiting. People with uncomplicated information might find 2-3 layers sufficient. But my own file system has a minimum of seven layers, as does my folder hierarchy in the UltraRecall tree. Zoot, a most capable information manager is considered limiting for allowing no more than 250 folders per database.

The Family > Daughter > Health > Vaccinations hierarchy is not desirable for reasons of space, but rather of focus. For me, that's the whole point of having folders within folders. Otherwise my folders would look like small desktops with unrelated information. The fact that all the items might have to do with my daughter doesn't mean I would like to keep them together.

Perhaps the example wasn't the best. Here's another, closer to reality (as I actually don't have children yet :-)
Work (Station) > Customers (Channel) > CSR Ltd (Topic)
I might easily have several projects running with the same customer. Each project might include several sub-projects. For example, one of our customers is a charity, with several corporate sponsors, with each of which we are doing a separate sub-project. Keeping everything related to a customer together would be utterly confusing.

I think you should reconsider the 'thematic dimension' of Noah's organisational capability, so that it matches the power of the temporal one. For example, one could zoom in and out into the themes, much as one zooms in and out in time.

**Version 2.0 will allow you to place documents
directly on the Topic line.

Definitely looking forward to this, which would allow for example to monitor deliverables on several projects from the same window.

alx