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NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review
superboyac:
Note Frog's look is distractingly busy-looking and hard on the eyes. I couldn't see myself willingly spending a lot of time in it because of that. The interface isn't XP...or even Win98. It looks closer to an early Delphi app under Windows for Workgroups, or possibly something written for a Commodore 64. At least to my tired eyes.
A pretty interface won't make a bad app into good one. But it can certainly make a very good app look like a bad app. And with all the competition in this category of product, a dev might not get a second chance if the interface is a turn-off.
-40hz (May 18, 2014, 06:34 PM)
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it's so true, lol!! it was the first thought i had when i used it the first time!
IainB:
Some points I would make:
Berry (NoteFrog author) stated that the NF software is intended to be an Information Manager, rather than a Clipboard Manager. I think the original prototype for it was ClipGuru - a clipboard manager. I thus class it as a PIM (Personal Information Manager). (By comparison, CHS is apparently a Clipboard Manager that started out life as being intended as a PIM.)
NF is a WIP, and will be slowly getting there with each successive release.
Ergonomics:
* For me, one of the single most frustrating things about NF is that the default setting in NF at startup is/was clipboard capture OFF. If you want it ON, then you have to set it manually every time. It doesn't STAY ON by design. If you have blithely spent an hour researching and clipping lots of stuff only to discover that you have nothing to show for it, then you will see my point. Even if you have set NF clipboard capture ON, it is not persistent, and the default seems to be reset under certain circumstances - e.g., if the laptop crashes, or if you install NF afresh (though this behaviour is not consistent.).
* Garish colours in a UI can be visually/perceptually disruptive. In NF, the colours of the UI seem to be adjustable to some extent. They don't need to be that garish if you find them disruptive. I wish I could do that with the glary washed-out colours in OneNote 2013 under Win7/8. (OneNote 2007 was fine.) However, it doesn't stop me from using OneNote 2013, which is a tremendously powerful PIM.
* There seem to be some fairly major constraints to the easy entry of text in the NF process of entering text or editing a note, and I have reported those to Berry.
* NF needs a built-in dynamic spellchecker.
* As you scroll down a list of notes, the viewer in NF is quite fast - seems to be consistently faster (responsive) than compared with (say) CHS, for example, which has intermittent lags on scrolling. However, that doesn't stop me from using CHS.
Searches/hyperlinks:
* NF searches can be saved for re-use. (Similar to CHS, which uses saved SQL searches as "Favorites".) The effect in NF and CHS can be rather akin to "tagging" if you use special strings in text as tags - e.g., "#this is a tag", but you have to set each and every tag, which would be tedious in the extreme. Both NF and CHS could benefit significantly from automatic bulk text insertion/removal of the same text string into/from many clips.
* NF uses "Stacks", and I discovered that it had the ability to hyperlink content within an individual stack and between different stacks. This was apparently not intended as a design feature, and has been disabled. Still, it would be great to have. For example, OneNote has hyperlinking, and it works a treat - is very useful. You can hyperlink within a single OneNote Notebook, across multiple Notebooks, and externally - e.g., to a file on a local or network drive, or a Cloud drive, or a URL on the Internet.
40hz:
^Agree. A "stacks" linking/cross-link feature would be a huge plus to me if I were looking for yet another note manager. That's about the only thing in OneNote (and Hypercard in days of yore) that I found uniquely useful with either product. :Thmbsup:
dcwul62:
Note Frog's look is distractingly busy-looking and hard on the eyes. I couldn't see myself willingly spending a lot of time in it because of that. The interface isn't XP...or even Win98. It looks closer to an early Delphi app under Windows for Workgroups, or possibly something written for a Commodore 64. At least to my tired eyes.
A pretty interface won't make a bad app into good one. But it can certainly make a very good app look like a bad app. And with all the competition in this category of product, a dev might not get a second chance if the interface is a turn-off.
-40hz (May 18, 2014, 06:34 PM)
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Yeah, it might seem shallow, but it's a valid concern.
-wraith808 (May 18, 2014, 09:14 PM)
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Valid it is... at least for me: I did not have any further look into it...
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dcwul62:
Some points I would make:
Berry (NoteFrog author) stated that the NF software is intended to be an Information Manager, rather than a Clipboard Manager. I think the original prototype for it was ClipGuru - a clipboard manager. I thus class it as a PIM (Personal Information Manager). (By comparison, CHS is apparently a Clipboard Manager that started out life as being intended as a PIM.)
NF is a WIP, and will be slowly getting there with each successive release.
-IainB (May 19, 2014, 12:58 AM)
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Frankly, if it was for me, I would vote for a 'combination' of both.
At least:
-It should be able to capture all clipboard (text, html, images, whatever), recording date-time of capture
-This by adding a 'caption' so I can quickly see what is about
-In case of webpages, it should keep track of the URL
-Lateron I should be able to drag-drop/move all captures to specific locations (left folder tree)
e.g.
\Computer\Software\Microsoft\Office\Word..
\Computer\Hardware\SSDs\ ...
-It should be able to export all its non-image-data (text/html) to single files .txt-files and whilst doing so adding caption-date-time of capture.
This is so the text will be 'searchable' by desktop search tool (like X1)
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