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Looks like a new version of Surfulater is about to be released.
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Posted by Derek Cornish
Oct 23, 2008 at 04:40 AM
Glad to see you are giving it a thorough workout, quant.
Zoot is in transition. It’s Zoot32 now, and quite stable, but the many of the old limitations you mention are still in place. The developer is working on incorporating a new rich text editor and the other constraints will be taken care of when that task is done. But for those whose interest is mainly in textual information Zoot(32) remains hard to beat IMHO.
Derek
Posted by Cassius
Oct 23, 2008 at 05:43 AM
You will grow old & gray waiting for some of the features you want to be in Zoot. I know—I have & am still waiting.
In fact, since I am now retired, the advantages of Zoot that I could have used if it also had RTF and images are now of little use to me. I bought it, but after a bit of testing, I discarded it.
-c
Posted by Graham Rhind
Oct 23, 2008 at 07:14 AM
Derek Cornish wrote:
>Tom (Zoot’s developer) has spent a lot of time getting the
>Zooter’s “Archive Web Page” feature to work properly. Using IE or Firefox it now
>reliably saves web pages as mht files to the windows directory you select, indexes
>them, and opens an item in the relevant Zoot database (also selectable) that is linked
>to the saved mht file.
Just for the record, this works perfectly also in Opera, and it’s one of the reasons I respect Zoot - its browser independence. i get fed up of being constantly forced back to IE or Firefox because that’s all that other programs will support.
quant wrote
>seeing that people are replacing UR or WR by Zoot, I thought I would install it ...
>1. NOD32 recognizes it as a virus (NewHeur_PR virus)
>2. after stopping NOD32, install fine
>3. trying to run in:
>“In order to run Zoot you must change the locale for non-unicode programs to a non-unicode language.” - program dies.
>Never mind, are you talking about the same Zoot that has the following limitations?
>- A single database may contain up to 32,000 items.
>- A single database may contain up to 250 folders.
>- A single item may be assigned to no more than 25 different folders.
>- An item document may contain no more than 32,000 characters (around 10,000 words).
>- plain text items only
>or is that info old?
Valid criticism, though the virus warning is a false positive. The restrictions annoyed me initially not for being there but for not being made prominent enough in the documentation, so I was searching endlessly for “lost” data which overrode the restrictions. Once known I’ve found it easy to work within them (I don’t use Zoot for archiving, so don’t get anywhere near the limits any longer). What this does mean, though, is that Zoot is nifty. I was looking for programs which I could run on a daily basis from a USB stick so that, when I did travel, I didn’t need to move data backwards and forwards. Everything slowed to a crawl (I could write a three-volume novel whilst waiting for Outlook, for example, to open an e-mail), but Zoot remained speedy, and that, apart from an innate distrust and dislike of UR and its interface, led me to step across.
Graham
Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Oct 23, 2008 at 02:06 PM
Graham wrote:
I was looking for programs which I could run on a daily basis from a USB stick so that, when I did travel, I didn?t need to move data backwards and forwards. Everything slowed to a crawl (I could write a three-volume novel whilst waiting for Outlook, for example, to open an e-mail), but Zoot remained speedy, and that, apart from an innate distrust and dislike of UR and its interface, led me to step across.
———————————-
For the record (as this started as an Surfulator thread…), InfoQube (aka SQLNotes), is now portable and runs fine on any USB drive (a fast flash or a HD does of course provide better response). It is Unicode compatible (both UI and content). Its organisational features IMO surpass the competition (except possibly Zoot) and it does picture perfect full-page web-capture (clipped sections are not perfect, due to CSS, .js dependancies, but no worse than EN or other similar app)
Documentation (a key and critical issue) is improving thanks to an active and devoted community: http://sqlnotes.wikispaces.com/
Pierre Paul Landry
http://sites.google.com/site/infoqube/Features
Posted by jamesofford
Oct 30, 2008 at 01:26 AM
When I was on a PC, I was a big fan of Zoot. I had downloaded it and installed it on the recommendation of James Fallows in an issue of the Atlantic. It worked pretty much as advertised, and I used it every day. The programmer(Tom Davis? aka The Admiral)has always been very responsive to questions, complaints, and suggestions. There were times when a new version popped up on the website on a daily basis as he fixed things and incorporated new features. The community of users(Zooters)is active as well. I used it to store and search Outlook, and kept a database of scientific literature in it. It had wonderful abilities to slice and dice information, including the best implementation of Smart Folders that I have used.
Alas, the text only restriction made me move on. Also, I find the MacOS to be more conducive to my way of working. Also, and more to the point in this venue, I find the MacOS to have the better implementations of Outliners and PIMs.
Zoot software is one of the last bastions on the PC of the single programmer shop. I really hope that he succeeds at what he is doing.
Jim