I found a reference to Idealist still be acvailable to download, but the blog had been deleted when I tried to access it.
I've mislaid my original program when my trusty PC died and would love to be able to reinstall this marvellous program. Any ideas how I can get hold of a copy? Maybe someone has a copy and can transfer it to me?

If nobody here speaks up, you could contact the writer of the blog, whose new site is here (and he says he still uses Idealist):

https://lhosborn.com/

(I also found an intact copy of the blog via archive.org, but all of the links for installation files no longer work.)

That would be my blog. The original disappeared, and I never did get an explanation from the folk at Blogger. Anyway, its new incarnation is a Wordpress blog so hopefully more stable.

You won't find a link to Idealist on the blog itself. But if you contact me via the blog, I can send you a link to where the files are located on my public Onedrive folder.

Thats i will. This is still a missing but historical important part in my CRIMP museum.


Lawrence Osborn wrote:

You won't find a link to Idealist on the blog itself. But if you contact
me via the blog, I can send you a link to where the files are located on
my public Onedrive folder.

Could someone who has a copy please share a download link to eg WeTransfer, mega, ___drive?

Individuals should not be sharing commercial software because even abandonware has copyright protection.

Some sites have DMCA exemptions as a recognized library to distribute abandonware.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary

I take the point that even abandonware remains under copyright. But I think Idealist is a special case. Blackwell Scientific sold the rights to Bekon in the late 1990s. They attempted to develop it but made a pig’s ear of the job (Version 4 managed to crash and corrupt Windows! Version 5 did work after a fashion but was very buggy). The last stable version (3.1) was (temporarily?) released as freeware by Bekon and distributed through various computer magazines to tempt people to but into version 4 (which I did – and had to reinstall Windows as a result).

Since the version of Idealist I have was issued as freeware, I am happy to make it available. But note that the exe file will not work on 64-bit machines. (Idealist itself was available in a 32-bit version, which was pretty good for 1999, but the exe file is only 8-bit.) I have managed to keep it working by copying the entire program file across whenever I have upgraded my computer. If you are still interested in playing with it, I could put a copy of the directory on Onedrive together with notes on how to set it up on Windows 11 and then post the link here.

Note that a post ostensibly from Richard Nunn, original author of Idealist, states the following:

As the original author, I'm calling it: Idealist is now abandonware.

The Wikipedia definition is: "Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, which can no longer be found for sale, and for which no official support is available and cannot be bought."

If the IP owner, if one even exists, wants to make a claim then let them. They will be unable to prove a loss on their part in a court, because they have shown by their (in)actions that the product has no commercial value. In the meantime, use it whenever and wherever you like.

https://groups.google.com/g/idealistdb/c/WPUeVx-hPoA/m/k8O8-Fd2AgAJ

There are also further comments about this from Richard in various threads in that group.

There are also recent discussions there that appear to include working download links for installations files, such as the following:

https://groups.google.com/g/idealistdb/c/W3589hSxdlo/m/gPCCn_0jBQAJ

Why not? It's abandoned. Is it supposed to sit in a bin somewhere until 95 years - or however long the period - passes? Copyright reform is long overdue.

satis wrote:

Individuals should not be sharing commercial software because even
abandonware has copyright protection.

Some sites have DMCA exemptions as a recognized library to distribute
abandonware.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary

tightbeam wrote:

Copyright reform is long overdue.

No need for copyright reform. It's real life use is far more subtle than banned without express permission. Which is why Google, Facebook et al have felt free to slurp it into AI and argue about it later.

The copyright owner holds the rights, but it's their responsibility to enforce them.
Platforms want to steer clear of any risk so they tend to ban anything where a doubt has been raised about copyright. YT takes down videos because some entity has claimed them without even requiring evidence - the video makers have to argue it out with YT (it's common with music, where a piece has long been in public domain but entity has rights to a particular performance of that piece).

In this situation there is no realistic risk. If someone comes forward, proves they hold copyright, than as said they can't evidence any loss from it being made freely available. But we all know that noone is likely to come forward and that there's evidence of the owner making it freeware.

Blackwell Idealist seems to still have a heathy fanbase, like Ecco Pro or Lotus Agenda. Has anyone tried to create a piece of software that mimics the features that makes Idealist so well liked?

Lucas wrote:

...

There are also recent discussions there that appear to include working
download links for installations files, such as the following:

https://groups.google.com/g/idealistdb/c/W3589hSxdlo/m/gPCCn_0jBQAJ

The installation file mentioned here worked on Win11, thank you!

As for copyright, I'd rather take the long term view that good ideas tend to make the world a better place, and more people should be exposed to them instead of the short term thinking of the potential financial loss incurred by the originator. If people don't know what's out there, they are less likely to demand their software be better. This doesn't apply to everything, but I'd argue that copyright infringement is not categorically a bad thing. People kind of have to claim it to prevent others from abusing your creation for their profit but it hinders knowledge dissemination and even for academics to own their own work(though they go into it with full knowledge and consent beforehand that they won't have rights to their own intellectual labor). In this case, i don't think anyone is using Idealist for commercial purposes so I don't see the harm.

Interesting question. I’ve found – and this is really going to irritate some of you! – that one can create something very similar using Obsidian's properties and templates features plus various plugins, with the added advantage of much greater flexibility, rich text support and vastly greater data capacity (that was one of the shortcomings the last version of Idealist attempted to resolve). Thing is, there are a lot of full-text-capable knowledge managers out there; the extent to which they’re “comparable” with Idealist varies enormously. Having designed an entire business admin system using Idealist (that worked really rather well in combination with MS-Word templates, albeit back in the 1990s), I’m intrigued by the capabilities of e.g. Notion and similar systems (cf. e.g. AnyType), which combine full-text support with relational features, in this respect.

The advantage of Obsidian is that you can configure a given vault to behave in very specific ways, so that it’s feasible to create a very complex knowledge management system if you really want to – personally, I always try for the minimum necessary to fulfil the required functions. But the sample project included with e.g. the Projects plugin gives you a taste of the kind of thing you can create if you want to (alas, Projects has been discontinued, but I use CardBoard to achieve similar outcomes).

Then, of course, there’s Pierre’s astonishing InfoQube, which I was looking at just the other day (alas, Windows only, but hey). IQ easily matches and exceeds anything Idealist could do! And benefits from regular support, a very reasonable price, and a constantly growing list of super-integrated features. I’m well impressed by how far it’s come! What’s more, you can keep it as simple as Idealist if you want to – you don’t have to use e.g. the “Pivot Table” feature, although you may eventually be glad of it, depending on how extensive your Idealist-a-like system eventually becomes!

Finally, to answer your question more precisely: there was an Idealist clone around a few years back, but it appears to have sunk without trace (as does askSam, the near-equivalent that also had a very large fanbase back in the day). I’d love to know what the Idealist programming team are doing nowadays...

Cheers,
Bill

James Salla wrote:

Blackwell Idealist seems to still have a heathy fanbase, like Ecco Pro
or Lotus Agenda. Has anyone tried to create a piece of software that
mimics the features that makes Idealist so well liked?

The Idealist clone: Quercus, of course (still available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qercus/

I'm still using version 3 of Idealist (the less said about Version 5 the better) on a daily basis and have done so through every iteration of Windows and cannot understand why there is not a simple, modern, equivalent.

askSam was another favourite which I still use on rare occasions - how that was allowed to wither and die is a mystery when it was such a useful program. Too many of the ones I used to use have gone (Idea Mason, Infohesive) but then I'm probably showing my age.

Kind regards,
Geoffrey

There is a rather good MacOS equivalent which has, unfortunately, not done well enough for ongoing development: Noteship, developed by the amiable Rico Gundermann. It’s more like a very advanced version of askSam than Idealist, in that you can define any fields you like at the head of a document (not unlike Obsidian, actually) and then put rich text notes in the body of the document. You can do quite a lot of crossmatching, use various specialised views, etc., but as I say, this very promising app is essentially dead in the water...

Cheers,
Bill