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In the doldrums?
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 24, 2008 at 03:47 PM
Looking at the long list of outliners and PIMs recently posted here, I realize how few of them are new or doing anything innovative.
In fact, the whole category of applications seems to be asleep. The most exciting event on the horizon is the promised RTF formatting for Zoot! (I’m exempting SQLNotes here, Pierre, because you’re application is still in its pre-release stage.)
Am I missing something? Or have we really seen the end of genuine innovation and advancement in this category?
Please feed my CRIMP habit!
Steve Z.
Posted by dan7000
Jul 24, 2008 at 05:26 PM
I think EverNote3 is pretty exciting. There is also some movement on the web-based outliner front. For instance, thinkfold.com is interesting.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 24, 2008 at 07:14 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>I think EverNote3 is pretty exciting. There is also some movement on the web-based
>outliner front. For instance, thinkfold.com is interesting.
Dan,
I’d enjoy reading your comments about why EverNote3 is exciting. Is it the ability to share notes over the Internet with a variety of devices? Or are their other features that intrigue you?
Thanks.
Steve
Posted by dan7000
Jul 24, 2008 at 09:37 PM
>I’d enjoy reading your comments about why EverNote3 is exciting. Is it the
>ability to share notes over the Internet with a variety of devices? Or are their other
>features that intrigue you?
Well, to be honest, one exciting thing about it is that it’s new. But here are a couple of other things:
1. The most exciting thing for me is the use of tags for organization. I’ve always been a hierarchical-outliner type of guy, but after using del.ici.ous a lot, I’m starting to think tagging is a smarter way to organize data.
First, items can have more than one tag, vs only one outline parent.
Second, tagging separates the organization of data from its content, vs outlining makes you decide whether the content of one note is a subset of the content of another.
Third, you can tag something without calling up the whole outline -so I can completely file a clipping from the web using a little dialog box just by choosing tags - vs with outliners, you have to send everything to an “inbox” or “unfiled notes” folder and then go through and file them later.
2. Unlike Omea, OneNote and (I think) Ultrarecall, which all support tags too, tags are totally central to EN’s organization - the fact that hierarchical folders are not supported forces me to really concentrate on the tagging metaphor.
3. The speed and workflow of clipping is a great usablity experience. As I said above, when I clip from the web or a document, I quickly tag the item in a small dialog box and I never have to re-organize that item again. In contrast, OneNote and other programs force a 2-step process: clip into “unfiled” and then later file it for real.
4. Yes, the ability to share notes over the internet. I use 2 computers regularly and I’m in the market for an iPhone so this is pretty useful.
5. Because the notes are stored on the internet, they are automatically backed up and immediately accessible if my computer explodes. My last machine died in March and I had to figure out how to re-install a licensed copy of ADM to get access to my old data. That’s less of a worry with EN.
Two things I HATE about EN, though
1. Notes don’t allow true rich text formatting: you can’t add a table or change the paragraph style within the program. Oddly, though, tables and various paragraph styles retain their formatting when pasted from other apps.
2. No embedded files. You can only embed PDFs. I would at least like a way to link to a file, but EN doesn’t enable this because links to local files wouldn’t work on the web. I have suggested that they integrate with a service like OneBox to easily add links to files stored on the web.
Posted by Cassius
Jul 25, 2008 at 05:41 AM
It has just occurred to me that tagging can be represented graphically by a Web diagram, or perhaps it is the reverse?
Some nodes in the web are tags and some are “items.” Each item that, for example, is tagged by “Tag A,” has a line (link) from Tag A to the item. But if, say, two tags are related, then they can also be linked.
This could easily become overwhelming without a proper interface which would not only need capabilities such as those in The Brain and Inspiration (e.g. centering on a specific node and being able to zoom (in or out) ones view of the web, but also the ability to display only selected parts of the web, rather like in InfoSelect enables one to see only selected parts (not necessarily contiguous) of the tree.
-c