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A useful property of 2-pane PIMs
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Posted by Cassius
Feb 18, 2008 at 08:43 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>May I ask which specific 2-pane PIM you were working on? In my experience, not all are equally good at this kind of browsing approach.
>
>alx
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Alex,
I think that what I did was simpler than you imagine. I just fully expanded some left-pane items and viewed them one-by-one. Thus, all 2-pane PIMs that have multiple levels should work the same way. My first 2-pane PIM was the original TreePad. However, development of it ceased for a long time while Henk was setting up a formal TreePad business. During the interim, I finally gave up waiting and switched to Jot Plus (http://www.kingstairs.com) and have been using it ever since. I’ve also tried other 2-pane PIMs, but once PIMs started using compressed data, I could no longer use a general search program across different PIMs and dropped the others. (Maple developed other problems.) Development of Jot+ seems to have slowed since last May.
There are now more powerful 2-pane PIMs, such as UltraRecall (which I have), but I WILL NOT waste more time moving all my info to something else.
Now that I’m retired, I use Jot+, MyBase, Ecco (for its contact list, formerly also for its calendar), Inspiration, Word 2000, and GrandView. As I posted a while ago, I discovered serious problems with NoteMap (related to long notes) and have dumped it.
What has made me think of using EverNote (which I also own) are its multiple features and my penchant for just dumping info into a PIM without much consideration of which heading I should place it under.
-c
Posted by Cassius
Feb 18, 2008 at 08:43 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>May I ask which specific 2-pane PIM you were working on? In my experience, not all are equally good at this kind of browsing approach.
>
>alx
=======================
Alex,
I think that what I did was simpler than you imagine. I just fully expanded some left-pane items and viewed them one-by-one. Thus, all 2-pane PIMs that have multiple levels should work the same way. My first 2-pane PIM was the original TreePad. However, development of it ceased for a long time while Henk was setting up a formal TreePad business. During the interim, I finally gave up waiting and switched to Jot Plus (http://www.kingstairs.com) and have been using it ever since. I’ve also tried other 2-pane PIMs, but once PIMs started using compressed data, I could no longer use a general search program across different PIMs and dropped the others. (Maple developed other problems.) Development of Jot+ seems to have slowed since last May.
There are now more powerful 2-pane PIMs, such as UltraRecall (which I have), but I WILL NOT waste more time moving all my info to something else.
Now that I’m retired, I use Jot+, MyBase, Ecco (for its contact list, formerly also for its calendar), Inspiration, Word 2000, and GrandView. As I posted a while ago, I discovered serious problems with NoteMap (related to long notes) and have dumped it.
What has made me think of using EverNote (which I also own) are its multiple features and my penchant for just dumping info into a PIM without much consideration of which heading I should place it under.
-c
Posted by Manfred
Feb 18, 2008 at 08:52 PM
There are many ways to interact with your information. Browsing and searching are perhaps the two most fundamental ways at dealing with any extensive body of information. There are clearly some advantages to browsing. And it might be said that two-pane outliners make most of these advantages.
But I am NOT sure whether an applications with a sophisticated search capability wouldn’t have found it as well. You say that a search of the topics would not have shown it.
I understand that the paid version of Evernote allows you to search also the body of the notes, so if the topic was “highly relevant,” a search for two or three relevant words connected with the operator “and” would have shown it as well. In fact, it might have found more topics that you even now do not know you have :) I don’t use the paid version of Evernote (but ConnectedText, which has a very sophisticated search feature as well. But any other database application would allow you to do this.
An application with hypertextual or other links between items might also facilitate other variations on browsing, like exploring, i.e, following a path from one item to another (with forethought) or simply meandering or re-visiting old notes without any plan. I do not mean that a two-pane outliner does NOT allow you to do these two kinds of browsing; only that the ability to link has advantages over the “one-dimensional” browsing two-pane outliners facilitate.
Manfred
Posted by Cassius
Feb 18, 2008 at 10:33 PM
Manfred wrote:
>But I am NOT sure whether an applications with a sophisticated search capability wouldn’t have found it as well. You say that a search of the topics would not have shown it.
===================================================================
Manfred,
The situation was that I was not searching for the topic, thinking that I had already seen everything on it that I had downloaded from the Web. My finding the long-forgotten article was a serendipitous result of my “thumbing through” the left pane of a PIM file. (I say “thumbing through,” because I treat the left pane as the table of contents of a book, and the search function as the book’s index.
-c
-c
Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 19, 2008 at 08:33 AM
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