Forum Posts Feed
Why no love for MyBase? My early review:
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Anthony
Jul 11, 2018 at 02:22 PM
nathanb wrote:
>So at this point I have to wonder what I’m missing here.
>
On the desktop environment (in my case PC one) three things in v.7:
1. Does not index PDFs.
2. WebCollector is browser specific, and there is no a *global* way to copy a web page or whatever else and paste it into MB without its addons (not so in UltraRecall and RightNote).
3. Linking files, drag’n'dropping, and moving items in the outline are not as “natural” as in other apps (example: an item is moved by a mix of drag’n'drop and menu selection).
Having said that I still use v.5.51. Max Ram used: 9Mb.
Posted by nathanb
Jul 13, 2018 at 04:02 PM
Anthony wrote:
nathanb wrote:
>>So at this point I have to wonder what I’m missing here.
>>
>On the desktop environment (in my case PC one) three things in v.7:
>1. Does not index PDFs.
>2. WebCollector is browser specific, and there is no a *global* way to
>copy a web page or whatever else and paste it into MB without its addons
>(not so in UltraRecall and RightNote).
>3. Linking files, drag’n'dropping, and moving items in the outline are
>not as “natural” as in other apps (example: an item is moved by a mix of
>drag’n'drop and menu selection).
>
>Having said that I still use v.5.51. Max Ram used: 9Mb.
Thanks so much for this. Really helpful. This does reflect my impression and the main reason for this post. That it has all the features I tell myself I’m looking for but it feels like I’m talking myself into liking it more than I do. It’s visual design is really nice, but as you’ve highlighted, it’s a bit more clunky to use than others. Still haven’t ruled it out though. I’m encouraged by the customizable keyboard shortcuts which could go a long way towards streamlining it.
Posted by 22111
Jul 14, 2018 at 02:39 PM
Very first sentence of this thread: “I’ve been evaluating the robust Windows knowledge bases (MyInfo, UltraRecall, IQ, MyBase) and MyBase is the one I keep paying more attention to.” - then: “Paul J. Miller’s main complaint…links…”
Well, Mr. Miller has done some very valuable work re “outliners”, shown on his blog; among other things, he tested them with “heavy load”, and he said, re MyBase, that even with some 10,000 items or less, I don’t remember very well, response times went sharply down (if I remember well, again), and so I would certainly not list MyBase among “the robust Windows knowledge bases”.
As an aside, he discovered how to bold tree entries in UR, hence my question if that could be realized as some 1-key macro (and as toggle, ie with de-bolding the entry if it’s already bolded, too); I never grasped UR’s “user attributes” to begin with, so I unfortunately do not know where to begin with such a macro, but it undeniably would be a big enhancement to UR while almost certainly making any ephemeric interest in MyBase obsolete.
Since at the end of the day, 10,000 items is nothing, once you’ve got a conclusive way to get info into your bucket software, it’ll be all about its organization then, and as said, I’ve had only minor complaints with almost 1 million of entries within UR.
(So the remaining posts/pages of this thread weren’t of any further interest to me: be more concise, dear fellow software judges: Once you encounter some eliminator, don’t pursue further, spare your time.)
Posted by nathanb
Jul 15, 2018 at 09:13 PM
22111 wrote:
>(So the remaining posts/pages of this thread weren’t of any further
>interest to me: be more concise, dear fellow software judges: Once you
>encounter some eliminator, don’t pursue further, spare your time.)
Actually we had some good discussions going on after that first post and I’m a wiser CRIMPer for it! In my first post I acknowledge the indispensable Paul Miller’s review but also mentioned that it was for an older version and that one of the most significant changes since that review was a significant upgrade to MyBase’s underlying database. So it may be still true that MyBase slows down with growth, but I’m not sure that is a ‘settled’ issue at this point. However, though I’ve done infinitesimal testing with it, it does seem to be not designed for speed like Ultra Recall. I’m basing that solely on needing to manually ‘re-index’ for a search to find any new entries for a ‘current session’ and that taking a few seconds for even a very small dataset. Even OneNote is very fast and non-intrusive about ‘continuously indexing’. That doesn’t bode well for ‘1 Million’ entries in MyBase. I’m no programmer, but it ‘feels’ like MyBase doesn’t entrench itself heavily within the OS like some of the others which I’m sure is why it seems to be the exact same animal on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I’m leaning away towards using MyBase as a daily driver but think it is viable as a front-end for a large file archive that a person updates periodically.
Even though I find nested tagging and direct ‘two-way’ linking valuable, I’m now leaning towards Ultra Recall as my main system. The freedom of custom user meta-data for many different data types within the same database is very compelling. That means I can contain completely different kinds of Knowledge Bases under different branches of the main hierarchy but still ‘cross link’ individual items between those different data sets when needed. Sure I’d rather have explicit ‘backlinks’ and nested tagging, but the cloning (and quickness that UR lets you clone things) enables me to emulate those two things reasonably closely, especially considering the custom attributes when necessary. I’m a heavy Outlook user at work and am only just realizing how UR can level up many aspects of that flow.
When you say you have ‘1 Million’ UR entries, is that within a single database? How big is that file? I think the UR devs say the database limit is 2TB but I’m curious to know how big the larger ones in the wild are.
Posted by Jon Polish
Jul 16, 2018 at 12:40 PM
If it helps, I just tested version 7 with my test database of 16885 notes that was originally made with version 6. The database is marginally faster, BUT I am using a newer computer than my original testing. A fairer comparison would be to install version 6 on my current setup, but I no longer have it. My guess is there will be no difference.
Jon