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A useful property of 2-pane PIMs
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Posted by quant
Feb 19, 2008 at 09:19 AM
ditto
Chris Thompson wrote:
>I’d argue the opposite of the consensus in this thread: two pane outliners tend to
>conceal information, making it harder to find. Approaches that I think are useful in
>rediscovering information:
>1) automatic embedded clustering or classifier
>algorithms - i.e. when you’re viewing an item, there’s an area of the screen that
>suggests possibly related items
>2) wiki-like manually created links between
>items
>3) single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics -
>note that this is subtly different from two pane outliners, which require you to click
>through to get to specific topics; there’s at least a chance with single pane
>outliners that you’ll find info by scrolling through it
>4) graphical views - at the
>minimum, thumbnails, though I’ve found that there’s a certain minimum size before
>thumbnails become useful in recognizing information; small icons are useless
>
>The
>only thing that’s worse at helping to discover things than two pane outliners are pure
>tag-based systems. Tag clouds help, but they have a tendency to hide the small
>things.
>
>—Chris
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 19, 2008 at 02:44 PM
Okay. Sounds great. Does such an application exist? Does it exist in the PC world? If not, what application comes closest?
Steve Z.
Chris Thompson wrote:
>I’d argue the opposite of the consensus in this thread: two pane outliners tend to
>conceal information, making it harder to find. Approaches that I think are useful in
>rediscovering information:
>1) automatic embedded clustering or classifier
>algorithms - i.e. when you’re viewing an item, there’s an area of the screen that
>suggests possibly related items
>2) wiki-like manually created links between
>items
>3) single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics -
>note that this is subtly different from two pane outliners, which require you to click
>through to get to specific topics; there’s at least a chance with single pane
>outliners that you’ll find info by scrolling through it
>4) graphical views - at the
>minimum, thumbnails, though I’ve found that there’s a certain minimum size before
>thumbnails become useful in recognizing information; small icons are useless
>
>The
>only thing that’s worse at helping to discover things than two pane outliners are pure
>tag-based systems. Tag clouds help, but they have a tendency to hide the small
>things.
>
>—Chris
Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 19, 2008 at 04:38 PM
That’s just a grab bag of features I’ve found useful. I can’t think of an app that does all of them, though there are several that do at least two.
For a cross-platform example of classifier-based suggestions, take a look at Google Reader’s “home” screen. When you’ve got dozens of feeds, the home screen does a good job of presenting you with snippets from feeds that you haven’t read in a while but which you might want to check out, based on attention data. Your most read feeds never seem to appear on the home screen. Then on the right there’s a box with clustering-based suggestions, suggesting blogs you might like based on groupings of similar interests with other users.
The only desktop outliner that does this well that I know of is DevonThink. It’s a pretty standard two-pane outliner (with a variety of views, but at heart a two-pane outliner) except for a decent set of data-based classifier algorithms.
These things are useful though. It would be a lot harder to browse Amazon.com for example if it didn’t use collaborative filtering techniques to suggest other items you might be interested in looking at.
—Chris
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Okay. Sounds great. Does such an application exist? Does it exist in the PC world? If
>not, what application comes closest?
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 19, 2008 at 04:53 PM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>The only desktop outliner that does this well that I know of is DevonThink.
>It’s a pretty standard two-pane outliner (with a variety of views, but at heart a
>two-pane outliner) except for a decent set of data-based classifier
>algorithms.
I remember salivating a little when we discussed this aspect of DevonThink a few months ago.
>
>These things are useful though. It would be a lot harder to browse
>Amazon.com for example if it didn’t use collaborative filtering techniques to
>suggest other items you might be interested in looking at.
>
This is true to some extent, but I also find that their suggestions can be rather odd… Like the way some strange Google ads pop up on this site (there’s one right now for Powerful Church Software). And I always wonder what they’ve got that isn’t being revealed by automated filtering.
So I definitely agree that this functionality would be very welcome… But I also think that “thumbing through” the data can also be quite useful. The best software would allow for both, I think.
Steve Z.
Posted by DaXiong
Feb 19, 2008 at 06:18 PM
Chris,
I agree with your thoughts on single-pane outliners, but am not certain about your comment about tags.
I’d kill to find a word-processor/outliner with tagging capability so I can cross reference my documents.
Evernote isn’t really a word processor, and General KnowledgeBase just doesn’t “feel” right when I use it.
Graphical stuff and icon previews seem like fluf to me, not really useful for the way I use software.