Reflections on the mortality of PIMs and the anguish resulting thereof

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Posted by Cassius
Nov 10, 2008 at 02:44 AM

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 the debugging & development of a PIM.

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

But for long term use, a 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 jpeg. Even with this capability, such exporting can be an exceedingly long-term, tedious task, unless the PIM has a batch exporting facility or one can use a macro program to simulate batch export.

I would like to suggest an alternative approach to storing and retrieving information. This would replace two-pane PIMs, but not replace software, such as outliners, used for authoring.

First, save the information of interest in files using standard formats, such as rtf, html, jpg. This preserves your information and makes it usable cross-platform. The content of these files would correspond to the content of the right pane in two-pane PIMs. Name each file with the words you would assign its information in the left pane of a PIM.

To create a structure analogous to the heirarcal tree in the PIM’s left pane, create folders and sub-folders named as you would in the tree. The individual files would correspond to the lowest level branches of the tree.

Personally, I might use three means of locating information in a PIM:

1) Drilling down in the tree (to me, like a table of contents),

2) Using search (to me, like an index), or

3) Using tags (to me, like subject listings).

To simulate the tree approach. one could just drill down into subfolders, use Windows explorer, or use, say, an rtf file with shortcuts to each folder or file. The only problem I see here, is that the “expand all” tree function is missing.

Search could be done using just about any Windows file name/text search tool. (There might be problems with compressed files or files such as .mht files.)

Tags could be placed in each file’s “Properties” box under the “Customize” tab. Notes and the URL of a saved Web page could also be placed there. These could be searched for using the same search tool. (To distinguish tags from ordinary file text, one could precede tags with one or two special symbols, such as #^.)

I realize that such a process is more cumbersome and time consuming than the use of a PIM, but I’m hoping that you can come up with improved or different ideas. Also, I may have left out important PIM properties that need to be

Let’s try to eliminate the agony of PIM morbidity.

Please, HAVE AT IT!

-c

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