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In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...
40hz:
Personal Brain for some stuff, maybe Compendium for some stuff
-barney (June 22, 2011, 12:28 AM)
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If you ever do get something non-trivial up and running under either, could you please be sure to share it with us? Pretty please even?
I've wanted to like both of those programs ever so much since the day I first learned about them. But despite giving them decent try-outs, it's been "no joy" I'm afraid.
Maybe I just don't have the right category of project to use either of them with. (And thinkertoys do tend to be domain specific, sad but true.) Still...something in the back of my head keeps alternating between thinking the king has no clothes - and that I'm seriously missing something.
So any input - especially with a real live working example application - would be greatly appreciated. :)
Dormouse:
Yeh. I've tried Compendium too. Could never think of a use for it that it was the best solution for.
Sort of opposite problem to that I have with IQ - plenty of possible uses for it and recognise that it might be efficient if I thought the way it does, but never see an easy way of doing what I want. And probably never will unless the failure of other tools forces me to try and adapt to its way of working. May need to have another look sometime.
Would take a lot more persuading/examples to make me try Compendium again.
superboyac:
This is going to sound waaaay out of left field...
I think the biggest problem with all of these information managers is none of them offer the user a good way to customize how they want to SEE the information. Look, storing information is easy. Even without any special programs, it's easy to just use a good file manager to organize a bunch of files and folders. What a lot of these programs do is focus on the STORAGE of information, which to me is not a big deal. That's why i always struggle with that part. I'm fine with basic file management, I don't need a new way to manage files.
The presentation is where it gets bad. All of these programs either want you to view your data in THEIR way, which usually only resonates with a specific group of people. But you don't have the ability to tweak it to what you need. Just to prove my point further, most of these information managers have really awful printing support. Most of them are very basic, maybe the default IE type print preview thing.
The reason why this is bad is because why am I going to spend all this time importing/creating the database, if I'm not going to see or get out the end result of what I want?
Which is why I think my ultimate idea for a program like this would be awesome, but I don't have the talent to create it:
The ultimate information management program:
First, it should be able to import content in easily. Especially content that is "very normal". text files, ms office files, pictures, popular database formats. That takes care of bringing things in.
Then, it should offer a flexible way to establish relationships among all these items. Hierarchies should be easy to make, like in infoqube, ecco pro. Hierarchies are essential. I don't care if you call it tagging or outlining, but relating content needs to be easy.
Now for the best part. I should be able to take all these content elements and like a desktop publishing program, specify how they should be laid out and so forth. So I can print it, export it to an image or html file, etc. This is what most programs lack big time.
Once you like a certain layout, you should be able to save that layout as a template or something and reuse it easily with other data.
That's an idea worth exploring, I think. We spend too much time designing how to bring content into the application. There are tons of programs that do this. Any program like MS Word is going to be better at writing stuff than an information manager, yet they all go through the whole exercise of giving us a Word-lite editor, that people keep requesting more features to make it more like Word. Then they don't have this feature or that feature, like image resizing, rotating, etc...but all this stuff is done better with programs specific for that. This is what most developers spend their time doing.
What is consistently neglected: printing features, export/import features, interface improvements. No. we keep doing the same mistake everyone else in this world does: make it bigger, bigger, more stuff, more stuff...yet never go back and fine-tune or fix things that we have now had a chance to use and improve. Just like google, it used to be awesome, now there's so much crap on it that it's 99% crap, 1% useful. So you might argue it's still worth it for that 1%, but after a while, you give up because your tired...you're tired of wading through all the crap to find that one thing.
I'm on a big fix with elegance lately, since I see so little of it in my life. granted, I'm an engineer in los Angeles (how ugly and boring can it get?!) but I still see very few examples of it around. Plus, I'm super cynical now.
40hz:
I actually don't care how easy it is to use. If it does what I want, I'll put in whatever effort it takes to master it. The problem for me is when it isn't easy to use - and it still doesn't do what I want.
Right now (and much to my surprise) the very inelegant (ok, more like hokey) wiki approach seems to work better than most for most info projects.
Maybe wiki is as good as it gets right now with the generally available paradigms and technology we have available for garden variety PCs?
Hmm...
Man do I hate 'fuzzy' anything. (I'm the son of an engineer, in a family of engineers, so I guess my bias is to be expected even if I'm not one.) And I know fuzzy is the reality you usually have to deal with. But I hate it just the same. I'm an "elegance" junky - where elegance is defined as the ability to bring simplicity and precision to the accomplishment of a task. )
;)
Armando:
The subject of the perfect information management software can be discussed endlessly and yet... No magic formula will emerge for at least 3 terribly banal and cliché reasons : users' needs are often different, users come/are from/in various contexts, users possess various degree of geekiness... That's why you'll have people immensely enjoying Compendium while others will find that TiddlyWiki or oldish Ecco are the best things since slice bread... While I'll just be left scratching my head :tellme:
As far as the original requirements were... I'm not sure why Barney didn't explore OneNote more (jimdoria's heartfelt suggestion) as, really, it seems to fit the bill almost perfectly. Not to mention that it's sexy and does what it does really well.
- allow drag and drop from almost any other application : CHECK
- record the URL of the drag and drop origin if a URL, or the title bar if a non-Web application : CHECK
- record the date (and time?) of any drag and drop operation : CHECK (last modified date, at least... IIRC, a while ago)
- include images along with text in any drag and drop operation : CHECK
- allow creation of individual notes interactively: CHECK (well... I have to admit I'm not sure exactly what that means... But if does mean what I think it does : CHECK... :))
- allow - but not require - a tree/outline structure (in order to pre-classify note or drag and drop entities): CHECK (but OneNote isn't a pure outliner)
+ one million other things.
So, apart for the last element, maybe, OneNote seems to be a winner -- well I admit that I haven't tested Zoot 32 (not enough time).
And, of course most of you know I use InfoQube for everything data related (or almost), with its current imperfections. But I'd be very surprised if it fitted the bill here. Yet, apart for "recording the URL of the drag and drop origin" stuff (which could probably easily be done), it does everything mentioned above. Like I said : it boils down to one's needs, level of geekiness and usage context...
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