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Posted by Cassius
Oct 31, 2008 at 10:13 PM
1. Can Web Research export to standard formats?
2. I looked at WR a couple of years ago, but decided to stick with myBase+WebCollect, which, in many ways, is similar to WR.
-c
Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 31, 2008 at 10:37 PM
Here’s the website:
http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/
(Not necessarily the most Google-friendly name!)
—Chris
Cassius wrote:
>Chris, I tried Googling “Together” without luck. Where can I find it?
>
>Thanks.
>
>-c
Posted by dan7000
Oct 31, 2008 at 10:49 PM
jerryk, I appreciate the thorough post about ON, Zoot, WR and UR. Just wanted to add my perspective with a couple of other apps: ADM and Evernote.
I used ADM from 2004-2007, then switched to OneNote for 07-08, and now I’ve switched to EverNote3.
***web pages***
ADM worked surprisingly well as a webpage grabber, although the process was slow and manual (cut and paste). Some pages lost some formatting but I always got what I needed. I found it better than ON or EN.
ON: table-based pages are often mangled, but everything else comes in easily using a fairly reliable 3d party plugin for firefox, which is not yet supported in FF3 or Chrome.
EN: tables are hopeless but everything else comes in great. The web capture is by far the fastest and most reliable of any capture program I’ve seen - mostly because it is web-based and it all happens behind the scenes. It works in any browser because it’s just a bookmark.
*** Emails***
ADM: cut and paste is all you get, and no links to the original.
ON: WHY couldn’t they figure out how to create links to the original message in Outlook??? Still, the capture worked well.
EN3: capture is perfect EXCEPT no embedded files in EN, so you lose your attachments.
*** text**
EN is by far the best. You get web access and tag-based navigation, which I am concluding is the best option for text snippets
***files***
ADM worked great for embedded file storage: you could attach any number of files to any outline item. Slick. But you couldn’t search the files.
ON worked great too, except that (1) you couldn’t search the files and (2) it took a lot of clicking and scrolling to find the file in a OneNote notebook.
EN does not embed files EXCEPT for PDFs (for some reason). AND embedded PDFs are searchable.
Currently, I’m mostly just putting links to local files in my EN notes. Not searchable, and not portable, so I need something better - but it sounds like this is what people are doing with WR too.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 1, 2008 at 08:27 AM
I would agree with Steve Z. that a single repository for everything is for now unrealistic—and, as far as my own needs are concerned, probably for the future as well.
For example, I have a large quantity of project-related photographic material that would bloat any database file to the point of uselessness. I only recently delved into movie files, and already my library of TED (http://www.ted.com) lectures representing valuable references, has grown to several gigabytes. So I would suggest that the file system remains unchallenged as the repository infrastructure.
Focusing on the large percentage (in terms of discrete items rather than volume) of information that many of us have to deal with, I would suggest that much of what has been mentioned is capable enough, as long as it can incorporate links to items held in external repositories, be it the file system or other dedicated applications supporting such links to their content, e.g. Evernote, Surfulater, UltraRecall, Zoot etc. In this way, rather than exporting/importing information around, one can simply link to where that information is currently held. (Mind you, a long-term discipline in file management is required so that such links don’t become redundant overtime).
An additional reason for this is that the near future may easily bring more kinds of information items. E-mails, websites and files have been mentioned, but how about RSS? Omea Pro incorporated RSS as a repository and the first time I read about it I thought it was of marginal importance, but now RSS constitutes an important part of my reference information. OPML files grouping several RSS feeds together are now widespread and dynamically linking to them is preferable over importing. And, I’m sure there’s more to come.
In fact, I can’t stress the superiority of linking over importing enough: as flexible as all-in-one applications may be, dedicated applications usually do their job better. For example, even if one imports emails to a single mega-repository, one will probably keep sending e-mails from the original e-mail application. Another example are websites: with dynamic Flash-driven sites almost becoming the norm, reliably grabbing information from the web is becoming more and more difficult for general-purpose applications.
Last but not least, it’s incredibly easy to end up with multiple outdated copies of one’s data. I see “Outlook address book importing” in just about every software imaginable but, overtime, this may be useless if the imported data can’t be synced to the original. But then, if it needs to be synced, why not simply link to the original?
Cheers
Alexander
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 1, 2008 at 11:29 AM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>Steve, if you haven’t tried it already, take a look at the current version of Together.
>I think it’s the strongest single repository program available at present. It allows
>you to pull in web pages as *either* webarchives or PDFs, which is a nice choice, and
>webarchives are fully editable. More important to me, it stores all the underlying
>files in the filesystem, so you’re not locked into the program and everything’s
>transparently accessible via Spotlight. Though Devonthink is still the only
>program with machine learning algorithms built in.
Chris,
Thank you for the Together suggestion. I have looked at Together in the past, but thought it was too redundant to Yojimbo, which I bought early on in my MacBook life. However, the more I learn about Together, the more it seems like a better product than Yojimbo. I am also intrigued by EagleFiler, especially now that its smart folders can perform actions on data… which makes EF start to sound like a Mac version of Zoot.
Before shelling out money for either of those applications, I want to see what DevonThink 2.0 is like.
Steve