Idea Mason: The Final Verdict

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Posted by Gary Carson
Jun 12, 2008 at 01:17 PM

Well, I’ve been using IdeaMason for a couple of months now and I finally decided to get rid of it and go back to using OneNote 2007. IM’s an impressive program in a lot of ways, but it’s just too cumbersome to be useful, in my opinion. The main problem is ergonomic. Too much work involved with data entry, etc. You have to manually refresh views to see new updates. You have to fill in multiple-field dialog boxes to enter new material. I didn’t find any actual bugs in the software, but I kept running into features that didn’t work exactly as I expected, so I was spending a lot of time in Help, a sure sign that a program is over-complicated (assuming that I’m not a moron—a big assumption). The real deal killer for me, though, was that IM doesn’t have web capture, the ability to save a web page with a few clicks of the mouse. At least, I couldn’t find a web capture function. IM can link to web sites and save local copies of pages, but, once again, the process just takes too long. With OneNote, CTL+P ENTER captures a web page and saves it in the Unfiled Notes folder. WINDOW KEY+S does the same thing for screen captures. Very simple. IdeaMason is probably useful for academic types dealing with hundreds of citations, etc., but it’s overkill for me. Your mileage may vary.

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