Planning for Tomorrow - the continuing death of PIMs

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Cassius
Nov 9, 2008 at 06:18 PM

This topic has been discussed many times before, but usually in the particular, rather than in the general.

The two main causes of the death of PIMs are,
1) Incompatibility with new operating systems and the failure of developers to update their PIMs to operate in the new OS, and
2) Complete discontinuance of development of a PIM.

My discussion here is limited to PIMs used for information, collection, storage and retrieval, as opposed to those, such as single-pane outliners, used for authoring.

If one uses a PIM only for short-term projects, the obsoleting of a PIM may not be critical, although there will be the aggravation of finding and learning to use a replacement PIM.

But for long term use, the possibility of PIM death can be devastating, unless the PIM has the capability to export its stored information into files using standard formats such as rtf, html and jpg. Even with this capability, such exporting can be an exceedingly long-term, tedious task, UNLESS the PIM has a batch export capability, or one can use a macro program to create the equivalent of batch export.

Is there, or could there be, an alternative approach?

What about saving information in standard file formats and using other tools to simulate PIM capabilities? (This would enable cross-platform compatibility.)

To simulate the capabilities of a two-pane PIM, for example, the left panel capabilities could be simulated by first creating folders and subfolders with names the same as those one would use in the left panel. Each file would be saved in the appropriate folder.

Then, the left panel could be simulated by directly using the folder heirarchy, using Windows Explorer, or using, say, a Word or rtf file that contains appropriately indented shortcuts to the folders, subfolders and files.

Search should be no problem since there are many search tools available, although there might be problems with files saved in, say, mht format.

Tagging could be accomplished by entering tags in the file and folder properties panel and using search to find them. Tags could be distinguished from ordinary search terms by preceding the tag word(s) with one or two symbols, such as #^.

What I’ve described is more cumbersome than most PIMs, but I expect that some of you can substantially improve on these ideas. I sure hope so.

-c

Posted by $Bill
Nov 9, 2008 at 08:00 PM

Cassius wrote:>>
The two main causes of the death of PIMs are,
1) Incompatibility with new operating systems and the failure of developers to update their PIMs to operate in the new OS,

I think that we are much less vulnerable today to your first death cause. Virtual Machine technology enables me to run Win XP from within my Win Vista OS or even a Mac OS. I can confidently expect to be able to run Ultra Recall (or even Ecco) until MY death without having to keep a old physical machine running.

The lack of the PIM’s feature set to cope with the changes over time will probably discourage me from continuing to use it. ie Zoot with markedup text.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 9, 2008 at 11:22 PM

I don’t use it, but what you describe sounds a lot like how I understand Together (Mac) works. The only difference being you create the folder/file hierarchy in Together. But Together stores your files in their native format, allowing tagging and other categorization schemes. Perhaps one of the folks on this forum who use Together can correct me if I am wrong.

Steve Z.

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 11, 2008 at 12:37 PM

$Bill wrote:
>Virtual Machine technology enables me to run Win XP from within my Win
>Vista OS or even a Mac OS.

I’ve been impressed myself in this regard. In Linux, before even having a go at installing Windows under a virtual machine, I tried Wine, which is a sort if Windows emulator. It seems to be able to run just about any Windows application that can be installed on a USB stick (so that one doesn’t need to go library hunting).

Cheers
Alexander

Back to topic list