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Two Pane Outliner Shootout
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Posted by fishejim
May 24, 2018 at 12:34 PM
I really like Infoqube, but my job uses a lot of formulations in spreadsheet format and html tables don’t always play nicely with Excel. Rightnote has a spreadsheet format for nodes (notes) that does the trick perfectly, so it is my default outliner.
Posted by nathanb
May 24, 2018 at 03:38 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Does anyone use Zoot anymore?
I’ve taken a look at it recently but am having trouble finding my notes on it at the moment. My impression was that I liked the capabilities but it looks to have an uncertain development future. It’s strength is to be used as an aggregator of email, rss feeds, and web bookmarks. For that use case, it may be unmatched.
I’ve long given up on the concept of a 3rd party email importer. I agree with the concept, as we get a ton of reference and task info through email. But email has been so bogged down with noise from advertisers and other abusers that the thought of importing something that is 5% signal and 95% noise into a note/task system would just be a big bag of hurt.
As for the RSS reader and bookmark organizer…I would be curious to know what some others here do with those. I use Feedly for RSS and bookmarks are generally just embedded in notes or in Lastpass for anything that needs login info. I’ve long struggled to differentiate other’s info vs mine within my notes and have tried harder to separate those worlds for search purposes. For example, if I’m researching a topic, that’s going to involve a bunch of loose thoughts, outlines, and references that I create but it also might involve several articles, book quotes, research papers etc. The data ratio is generally 5% MY content vs 95% OTHERS’ content that I’m trying to cobble together to make sense of. Sometimes it makes sense for a search to dig into both, but that can really muddy things up. So I’m trying to be better at keeping my own content separate from reference content. I think Zoot is better for those who don’t mind the idea of merging all the sources into a single stream.
I’m truly envious of those who can do that. I can’t even keep my own content coherent. So compartmentalizing is a survival strategy.
Posted by satis
May 24, 2018 at 08:50 PM
nathanb wrote:
>As for the RSS reader and bookmark organizer…I would be curious to
>know what some others here do with those. I use Feedly for RSS and
>bookmarks are generally just embedded in notes or in Lastpass for
>anything that needs login info.
I use Newsblur for RSS, and I either use the web interface or ReadKit (which doubles as a client for Pocket, which I jumped to years ago from Instapaper). I’d use ReadKit (or possibly Reeder) more on my Mac, but the web interface (and Newsblur’s own iOS app) give access to its proprietary smart folders showing popular saved stories, top stories publicly shared from users, and my favorite feature: “Infrequent Site Stories”, which bubbles up posts from low-volume sites I subscribe to. (I subscribe to 1319 sites as of today.)
NewsBlur also easily lets me save stories to a SAVED STORIES section broken down by whatever folder the sites had originally been put in. I currently have 78 saved stories, but I tend not to use it much now because the paid verison of Pocket ($45/yr, but I’m grandfathered in at $25/yr) will save the text of stories (which Instapaper won’t) thus saving articles from bit-rot.
If I’m at work or on the go and want to visit a site later I usually just Share->email it to myself and check it out later.
Posted by satis
May 24, 2018 at 08:52 PM
> saving articles from bit-rot.
I meant to write ‘link-rot’.
Posted by Gorski
May 24, 2018 at 11:50 PM
nathanb wrote re Zoot:
> it looks to have an uncertain development future.
Zoot’s developer, Tom Davis, has been working on it continuously for more than two decades, so it’s unfair to say it has an “uncertain development future.” Very little of the software discussed here has that long of a history of dedication. He’s continually tweaking the app and the most recent update was May 15, 2018.
> It’s strength is to be used as an aggregator of email, rss feeds, and web bookmarks. For that use case, it may be unmatched.
It does do those things but personally I think it’s strength is being able to quickly vacuum up large quantities of information, then sift, sort, tag, and categorize it later in myriad ways. I don’t use it routinely for a variety of reasons, but I do occasionally and it deserves much more love on this forum than it’s gotten in recent years.