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Why no love for MyBase? My early review:
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Posted by Paul J. Miller
Jul 10, 2018 at 09:24 AM
MyBase has some nice features but I didn’t really get along with the user interface and the fact that it became slow when it had lots of articles. I did try out the trial version of MyBase 7 but found that not a lot had changed on the user interface so I didn’t make any great effort to put it to the test.
Right Note on the other hand has a very nice user interface but lacks many features which I use when they are available. Things like transclusion and clones, backlinks (what points here?), a hierarchical tagging system and universal links. The addition of these things would turn it into a true wiki.
InfoQube is nice, shame about the complex user interface but I suppose haveing all those features does complicate the user interface somewhat. At least IQ is configurable so you can strip out a lot of stuff you don’t need and that simplifies things quite nicely.
Why can’t there be an app like IQ with an interface similar to RN ?
Oh Well ......
Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Jul 10, 2018 at 01:33 PM
Paul J. Miller wrote:
>Why can’t there be an app like IQ with an interface similar to RN ?
Most likely because RN is a straight “2-pane outliner” ***, whereas IQ has:
- Real, intrinsic, 1-pane outliner with columns, like OO or Ecco Pro
- Second pane for long documents
- Full featured Calendar
- Project management tools
- Scripting to automate your information management
That said, if you have suggestions to improve IQ’s UI, I’m all ears !
***: 2-pane outliners aren’t really outliners IMHO, they are a set of documents, arranged in a hierarchy
Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
http://www.infoqube.biz
Posted by Paul J. Miller
Jul 10, 2018 at 02:22 PM
Pierre Paul Landry wrote:
Paul J. Miller wrote:
>
>>Why can’t there be an app like IQ with an interface similar to RN ?
>
>Most likely because RN is a straight “2-pane outliner” ***, whereas IQ
>has:
>
>- Real, intrinsic, 1-pane outliner with columns, like OO or Ecco Pro
>- Second pane for long documents
>- Full featured Calendar
>- Project management tools
>- Scripting to automate your information management
>
>That said, if you have suggestions to improve IQ’s UI, I’m all ears !
>
>***: 2-pane outliners aren’t really outliners IMHO, they are a set of
>documents, arranged in a hierarchy
>
>Pierre Paul Landry
>IQ Designer
>http://www.infoqube.biz
>
Yes RN outlines are a strict hierarchy which means that it is a tree ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory) ) rather than a directed graph ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_graph ) which is the structure in IQ. Directed graphs are better. However an outline may be included as a note type which is rather neat (it also has a spreadsheet as a note type).
With just a few more features RN would become much more useful, but those few features probably represent a hideous amount of programming work. I don’t know.
Right Note is a lightweight which I find limiting but it does have an attractive user interface. InfoQube is more powerful and does much more but is also harder to use.
As for designing user interfaces, I know a good user interface when I see one but I am not very creative when it comes to original ideas for UI design. When things occur to me I will suggest them in the appropriate place.
Posted by Paul J. Miller
Jul 10, 2018 at 03:06 PM
nathanb wrote:
>So at this point I have to wonder what I’m missing here. Why hasn’t
>MyBase been mentioned as part of the age-old MyInfo vs UltraRecall
>discussion?
>
Maybe this is just a coincidence but maybe not
Having just taken a look around various note taking programs listed here I have noticed that the ones which are more successful and get more mentions in this forum and in other places are the ones which have forum in which users can discuss the merits of the program and interact with the developers.
Those which get little attention and are less successful are those which don’t have a user forum (Right Note and MyBase).
There is also one where the forum used to be a lively interesting place but now the developer has largely abandoned the forum and it has become almost dead. That program is ConnectedText which seems to be on the decline.
Posted by nathanb
Jul 10, 2018 at 10:16 PM
>That said, if you have suggestions to improve IQ’s UI, I’m all ears !
MyBase, MyInfo, and UltraRecall all have something in common that makes them more approachable than IQ. Well two things. Obviously IQ is much more flexible and open-ended in it’s workflow possibilities, and of course that makes it tougher to grasp. Assign from just complexity difference, IQ doesn’t use ICONS to differentiate data types (as far as I can tell).
The vast majority of people (myself included) are used to interacting with software where the items convey strong sense of place and content. Imagine Windows explorer without folder icons indicating “a bucket of files or more folders” or files that were just a list of text like they used to be in the DOS days. Even logical links have well-established visual indicators of those little arrows on the icon and I think MB, MI, and UR all use those to indicate item clones.
Of course IQ is fundamentally different in that items don’t have a place but show up when appropriate depending on the ‘grid’ being displayed and that attributes and grids are items too. So I can see why you wouldn’t want to pidgeon-hole a subset of items to show an icon that indicates they are a thing, not just metadata about a thing (yes I sort of understand that the genious of IQ is that attributes can be actual full-featured documents too). So why pretend to have a ‘sense-of-place’ when the whole point is to have everything be a pivot on everything else?
I…don’t know. All I know is that when I use the other three I instantly understand the overall scope and breadth of my notes and I commence to throw metadata and alternate clone hierarchies at them until the database starts to feel too complex to be manageable or clearly understood. I never mistake a tag for an item, or an item for an attribute, or a saved search (grid) for an item. I never ‘lose sight’ of my content which is almost always notes in the form of a document.
With IQ, I ‘lose sight’ of my notes almost instantly when I start to dink around with the attribute window which is a combination of simple attributes which may only ‘describe’ this particular item, categories common to hundreds of items, and saved-searches (grids) with little visual indicators to differentiate which is which until I click on one and experience a massive pivot away from the outline I was just getting the hang of. I really do understand how databases work and it doesn’t take me long to wrap my mind around that I’m just looking at a different view and that my precious actual typed notes aren’t any more buried than in the other info managers… It’s just a level of abstraction beyond me feeling comfortable where my stuff is.
Is it possible to auto-generate a ‘document’ icon in the title of an item if html pane content exists? Therefore I can instantly differentiate between content and metadata within all contexts and never worry about ‘losing sight’ of my actual notes?
Along those lines, is it possible to auto-generate a ‘grid’ icon in the title for all named grids? In the ‘properties’ pane, the named grids are blue underlined text which is exactly how hyperlinks in many other contexts look. I’ve learned what they really are within this context, but I still have to remind myself to not think of those as hyperlinks. The properties pane shows a LOT of similar looking text that means very different things. On one hand the shear power of being able to jump to items and pivot to other views from that pane is glorious but on the other hand it adds to the mental overhead to have to mentally categorize the different text strings. Of course they are already categorized for me by the headings they are in and I do understand those. But it still adds a mental step. Again I refer back to windows explorer and what it would feel like to navigate without the icon column. Of course I’d be able to differentiate excel files and photos by the file extension and I’d know where I was at in the hard drive by reading the \path… but seeing that ubiquitous green excel icon under that folder icon saves me the mental deciphering step.
I hope you don’t take this as actual criticism as I am able to walk through IQ and eventually understand what I’m looking at by stopping and thinking about it. When I do I’m always impressed at your achievement. I’ve obviously been conditioned to ‘software for dummies’ and my hangups are my fault, not yours. Just trying to convey how it feels to a normal ‘power user’ who is unable to make the mental leap to ‘database geek’ that IQ requires.