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Noah
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 28, 2008 at 08:55 PM
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
>
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 29, 2008 at 09:06 AM
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
Posted by -MAF-
Jan 29, 2008 at 09:01 PM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 29, 2008 at 11:10 PM
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
Posted by -MAF-
Jan 30, 2008 at 05:21 PM
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. **