First, let me offer a belated "happy new year" to all! I meant to do that sooner, but was struck with a severe case of CRIMP at the start of the year, because I didn't want to go through another year switching programs all the time. My variant is actually CRIMS at this point (switching rather than purchasing), as I seem to already own quite a lot of software.

So, in a fit of helpless thrashing, I fired up Zoot. At first, I had the same feeling I've had many times when trying Zoot again over the past several years: "this is too strange, I'm never going to stick with this."

But then, I changed some of the fonts and reduced the font size in a custom theme. This made everything more compact and I liked that. Then I spent some time reading the help file (the help file is pretty good now) and just doing things without being too committed. Soon, some of my old Zoot 5 muscle memory came back to me, and before long, I was being reminded of what I liked about Zoot so long ago.

The main thing is the multi-database approach. This makes a lot of sense to me, as the problem I run into time and again is feeling like things are going fine when I spin up a fresh copy of some old favorite software and everything is limited and clean, only to hit a wall of overwhelm and clutter past a certain point. Even though Zoot itself is initially overwhelming, once you get past that feeling, the actual information you are dealing with seems a lot more controllable, even at volume.

Second, the ability to interact with Zoot without the main program showing is great. You can quickly add clips, web links, and new items no matter what else you are doing. And you can query any database and pop up a single item or even multiple found items in a new detached window. You can even insert Zoot item text into other programs, which may have existed for a long time, but I'd forgotten about it if so.

Anyway, it eventually all started making sense again. We'll see if it sticks.

I'm curious to know how it's working for you.. I found Zoot interesting in concept and gave the trial a run on different computers but for some reason Zoot kept posting a message on top saying it was checking the license key or something to that effect and would be unusable for around a minute every 5 minutes it seemed to check on this. I could only stand this a few times while trying to test it so gave up on it.

I'd still like to know what opinion of the software you have after you've tried it out.

I think that's one of the few I haven't purchased yet.

Thanks,
Larry

Oh sorry, and Happy Belated New Year to you also.

Larry, yep, I think that only happens in the trial version (and only after the initial trial period expires). Tom may be able to extend your trial if you want to give it a more thorough test: https://www.zootsoftware.com/support

I'm going to try to stick with it for a few weeks and will report back.

LB wrote:

I'm curious to know how it's working for you.. I found Zoot interesting
in concept and gave the trial a run on different computers but for some
reason Zoot kept posting a message on top saying it was checking the
license key or something to that effect and would be unusable for around
a minute every 5 minutes it seemed to check on this. I could only stand
this a few times while trying to test it so gave up on it.

Yea that may have been it. Thinking back, I probably loaded the trial on those two computers a year or so before and never got around to actually trying it out. I've done that on other trials also so it's something I'd do. I've got to remember not to install the software until I'm actually going to try it out.

Look forward to your opinions on it.

Have a good one,
Larry

I installed Zoot again today and quickly found out why I didn't put more into the trial. I can't find a way if there is one to display the Calendar pages in basic Calendar format, i.e. Month, Week, Daily views with Grids / Table type format. I don't like the list format sorted by date unless I need an Agenda.

I'm sure I'm missing it but I searched for a way and couldn't find one. I see how I can choose Month, Week etc. but that just chooses the dates and still lists them in List format. Am I missing something?

Thanks.

Chris Murtland wrote:

Larry, yep, I think that only happens in the trial version (and only
after the initial trial period expires). Tom may be able to extend your
trial if you want to give it a more thorough test:
https://www.zootsoftware.com/support

I'm going to try to stick with it for a few weeks and will report back.

LB wrote:
I'm curious to know how it's working for you.. I found Zoot interesting
>in concept and gave the trial a run on different computers but for some
>reason Zoot kept posting a message on top saying it was checking the
>license key or something to that effect and would be unusable for
around
>a minute every 5 minutes it seemed to check on this. I could only
stand
>this a few times while trying to test it so gave up on it.

You have inspired me to take another look, having spent many years using Zoot, and having abandoned it quite a while back. It is interesting looking at it through the lens of 2021. The use of apps like Obsidian and Roam have changed the scene a lot. For me, Zoot has utility as a universal inbox and as a task management/workflow tool. But having used Obsidian for a while now, there is no way I could make Zoot my only PKM app with the alternatives out there.

@LB:
That's correct, there is no traditional calendar view. You can sync to Outlook, but I haven't done that in about 15 years. I usually only have 2-3 appointments per month, so I just use Google Calendar.

JDS wrote:

You have inspired me to take another look, having spent many years using
Zoot, and having abandoned it quite a while back. It is interesting
looking at it through the lens of 2021. The use of apps like Obsidian
and Roam have changed the scene a lot. For me, Zoot has utility as a
universal inbox and as a task management/workflow tool. But having used
Obsidian for a while now, there is no way I could make Zoot my only PKM
app with the alternatives out there.

Yeah, the approaches are pretty different, and Obsidian is certainly appealing to me - it's clean and straightforward and the plugins are adding a lot of power. It's flexible and a pleasure to use.

Zoot shines in a fairly particular use case, which is amassing a ton of information from various sources and being able to split it among multiple databases and slice and dice, filter, and show the information in multiple contexts with different views (and doing some automated processing). I find this great for reference material and lightweight project management, and it seems like it could be really useful for writing long non-fiction and fiction. You could set up, for example (this is the gist, not a literal Zoot rule), a view for "all scenes having less than 300 words involving character Jane in the setting lake house that were modified last month."

I think I'm ultimately drawn to more of a database model than a pure document/note model, because I quickly get overwhelmed with just a huge stack of notes or files. I want fields and custom searches based on a combination of field conditions. I especially like it when I can set these up once for a particular need and then reuse forever. I've found I want to see only relatively narrow subsets of my data at all times. The other software I repeatedly come back to for that reason are Ecco, Ultra Recall, and InfoQube.

The backlinks and unlinked mentions that are currently all the rage seemed great to me at first, but I found that in actual day to day use I didn't use them much. They were either too obvious or returned too much noise. I didn't even navigate using direct links frequently; I'd jump to a specific item or just search. Relying on search in Obsidian, when all you have to work with is the document content and the tags, becomes too general for me when I reach some pretty small threshold of notes (a couple of hundred).

I've used a lot of personal wikis, and ConnectedText was my favorite of the category, mostly because of the properties and attributes (semantic wiki features), which allowed interacting with notes more like a database when needed. Obsidian is developing super rapidly, and I expect some kind of semantic wiki features to be added before long, either in the core app or as a plugin. I'm sure I'll revisit at that point, although I'm really trying to make it to 2022 without revisiting anything :-D

Chris Murtland wrote:

@LB:
That's correct, there is no traditional calendar view. You can sync to
Outlook, but I haven't done that in about 15 years. I usually only have
2-3 appointments per month, so I just use Google Calendar.

JDS wrote:
>You have inspired me to take another look, having spent many years
using
>Zoot, and having abandoned it quite a while back. It is interesting
>looking at it through the lens of 2021. The use of apps like Obsidian
>and Roam have changed the scene a lot. For me, Zoot has utility as a
>universal inbox and as a task management/workflow tool. But having used
>Obsidian for a while now, there is no way I could make Zoot my only PKM
>app with the alternatives out there.

Yeah, the approaches are pretty different, and Obsidian is certainly
appealing to me - it's clean and straightforward and the plugins are
adding a lot of power. It's flexible and a pleasure to use.

Zoot shines in a fairly particular use case, which is amassing a ton of
information from various sources and being able to split it among
multiple databases and slice and dice, filter, and show the information
in multiple contexts with different views (and doing some automated
processing). I find this great for reference material and lightweight
project management, and it seems like it could be really useful for
writing long non-fiction and fiction. You could set up, for example
(this is the gist, not a literal Zoot rule), a view for "all scenes
having less than 300 words involving character Jane in the setting lake
house that were modified last month."

I think I'm ultimately drawn to more of a database model than a pure
document/note model, because I quickly get overwhelmed with just a huge
stack of notes or files. I want fields and custom searches based on a
combination of field conditions. I especially like it when I can set
these up once for a particular need and then reuse forever. I've found I
want to see only relatively narrow subsets of my data at all times. The
other software I repeatedly come back to for that reason are Ecco, Ultra
Recall, and InfoQube.

The backlinks and unlinked mentions that are currently all the rage
seemed great to me at first, but I found that in actual day to day use I
didn't use them much. They were either too obvious or returned too much
noise. I didn't even navigate using direct links frequently; I'd jump to
a specific item or just search. Relying on search in Obsidian, when all
you have to work with is the document content and the tags, becomes too
general for me when I reach some pretty small threshold of notes (a
couple of hundred).

I've used a lot of personal wikis, and ConnectedText was my favorite of
the category, mostly because of the properties and attributes (semantic
wiki features), which allowed interacting with notes more like a
database when needed. Obsidian is developing super rapidly, and I expect
some kind of semantic wiki features to be added before long, either in
the core app or as a plugin. I'm sure I'll revisit at that point,
although I'm really trying to make it to 2022 without revisiting
anything :-D

You have much more accurately and eloquently described what I meant by saying that Zoot will be great as a universal inbox and a project management tool. I think conversely, that Obsidian, despite all the interesting plugins, cannot function as a database/task management tool, nor is it that easy to use it as a capture tool. On the other hand, if you are looking for a Zettelkasten or a tool for developing complex thinking and writing, Obsidian is great, and Zoot is not. I plan to try to use them as complementary tools, and despite my decades of being an inveterate disappointed CRIMPer, Iam quite optimistic this time.

Great idea, JDS. I tend to always fall for the everything bucket/kitchen sink trap, but if I limited Obsidian to only my own conceptual and exploratory writing and not clutter it with anything else, I'd probably enjoy it a lot more and find it more useful.

JDS wrote:

You have much more accurately and eloquently described what I meant by
saying that Zoot will be great as a universal inbox and a project
management tool. I think conversely, that Obsidian, despite all the
interesting plugins, cannot function as a database/task management tool,
nor is it that easy to use it as a capture tool. On the other hand, if
you are looking for a Zettelkasten or a tool for developing complex
thinking and writing, Obsidian is great, and Zoot is not. I plan to try
to use them as complementary tools, and despite my decades of being an
inveterate disappointed CRIMPer, Iam quite optimistic this time.

Zoot version 9 released today:

https://www.zootsoftware.com/whats-new

Do you use it, and what do you think of it?

I don't use it. I just saw that the update was released (although the beta has been out for a while) and it's been discussed here a lot in the past. Perhaps others will chime in.

Looks like there has been significant improvements.

I trialed it and I appreciated the scope of info it helped you keep track of. There is a pretty good application help file that will get you started, but I found there was a learning curve.

Some recent talk on the Zoot user google group last month got my hopes up about video tutorials in the works. I really appreciate videos demonstrating an application. Intended to respond that I think it would be a good move, but do not think I did.

It has been one of those programs I must have tried about half-a-dozen times over the years, but it has somehow never "clicked". Perhaps time to try again with the latest version, which does seem very reasonably priced.