Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
General brainstorming for Note-taking software
longrun:
Sorry I missed Info Select discussion. I'd searched on Info Select (actual name), not InfoSelect.
longrun:
P.S.--There's no IS trial, but Micro Logic does offer full refunds if not satisfied.
nevf:
@ all - It would be a real shame to see this thread end. To date it is ageing nicely and just keeps getting better and better.
@ thomthowolf et.all. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE a) Send crash reports to me, b) Join our forums and post your suggestions & criticisms there or if you prefer e-mail me. Don't ever expect that others have reported a problem you are having, or expect some new feature will magically appear all of its own accord. Developers need your help. We do, we really do.
I've fixed two problems in V1.96.0.0 (out shortly) that would cause SUL to crash. One was related to capturing selected contented from very large web pages. This may be what you've witnessed. See here.
Surfulater's memory footprint is quite small, however it is blown out by MS IE which it uses internally. There is nothing we can do about this. However in the scheme of things I don't consider it an issue.
Tags are coming in Surfulater soonish.
Re. Templates and Hot-keys do you mean you want keys for Article|New Article..? Changing templates after the fact should be doable. Added to the todo list.
Search across KB's is planned. Better retention of formatting is on the todo list. I've written about the underlying issue here on my blog.
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@all - Re. Hierarchies or Tags and which way to go. There shouldn't be any need to be forced to use one or the other. Surfulater currently has its tree, with the same article in as many folders as you want and its 'see also' cross reference links. Tags will be added shortly. Use either, both or none - you choose, you are in control. Just how it should be. And of course their is fast boolean search.
superboyac:
nevf, that article you posted last week has really got me thinking about what the solution to organizing notes really is. I thought tags and categories were the solution, but now I see that they each have distinct advantages and disadvantages. There must be a way that is the BEST solution, but what is it? And I think that the solution has to be more than just simply offering both options, that is, both tree heirarchies and tags. I'm thinking that there's some way to come up with a new system that is better than both of them. But I can't say what that is at this point.
nevf:
nevf, that article you posted last week has really got me thinking about what the solution to organizing notes really is. I thought tags and categories were the solution, but now I see that they each have distinct advantages and disadvantages. There must be a way that is the BEST solution, but what is it? And I think that the solution has to be more than just simply offering both options, that is, both tree heirarchies and tags. I'm thinking that there's some way to come up with a new system that is better than both of them. But I can't say what that is at this point.
-superboyac (March 20, 2006, 03:26 PM)
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I don't think there is any one BEST solution as everyone works in different ways and has different expectations. If you had to pick just one solution it would have to be "search'. In other words don't categorize or tag or in any other way organize information, just search for whatever you want. That's pretty much what search engines are about. Some add useful extras such as clustering, but that is simply a layer over the search results. See http://clusty.com/
When I embarked on the design of Surfulater I spent quite some time looking at and talking to people about various visualization techniques such as 2D and 3D graphs et.all. (see http://www.grokker.com/ http://www.thebrain.com/products/personalbrain/default.html and http://www.softasitgets.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=1093#poststop ) In the end my conclusion was that these look great and are fun to play with, but you spend too much time clicking here and there and the benefits just don't come through (IMO).
In a similar way, you can spend (waist) too much time organizing and re-organizing tree's, and trying to find stuff in them. I've written about this on my blog and in the forums. kfitting suggestion of filters helps here, but also complicates. Surfulater already has some tree filtering and more is to come. See One or many Knowledge Bases and Tree Filters etc.
You also need to note that Tags aren't really anything new. Keywords have been around in software forever and are in essence the same thing. A number of the early applications we wrote, had keywords, some 20 years ago.
I'm very much looking forward to implementing tags (keywords :)) in Surfulater as I want to see for myself whether they better suite my way of working. I'm very optimistic that they will, but I'm skeptical at the same time. Time will tell.
Re. the aforementioned article. The folks at OSAF (Chandler) are an interesting bunch, but this is just one article and viewpoint amongst many.
Ok back to you. When you've worked out that BEST solution please make sure I'm the first one you tell. ;)
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