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Ideamason on special

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Armando:
Thanks for the feedback Grorgy!

I wonder: what do you find you're "achieving better" (or could achieve better) with IdeaMason than your previous (or current) software setting/system?

Thanks!

Darwin:
Yes - thank you Grorgy. I still find myself drawn to the premise behind IdeaMason but will need to buy it now to figure out if it is for me or not! I only had the demo installed for about 6 hours, but of course somewhere buried in my registry is a record of the date of installation and no way to run the trial now... No worries - I don't actually NEED IdeaMason... it just seems "cool" (but not to the tune of $59.95 to confirm this impression - I've already been down that road with other "Gee whiz, neato!" inspired software purchases).

Still... The features I am most interested in are the referencing system (Endnote compatible) and the idea of preparing a draft from notes, memos, and other fragments of writing. I suspect that this is possible with both Do-Organizer and NetSnippets (both of which I own) but haven't explored generating reports with either of them beyond a cursory read through of the help file.

Armando:
Some quick thoughts : one thing that definitely attracts me to IdeaMason is the apparent tight integration between the different elements/parts/data often involved in a research/publishing process. My current system works well, but I sometimes have the uneasy feeling that everything is scattered all over the place... Which is not exactly true, of course  :)... it's been designed that way, but I'd need a more efficient index/TOC able to encompass everything in my research projets-- IdeaMason might be able to do that. Maybe.

One aspect that bugged me when I tried it (and it's always the same thing, regardless of the software -- myBase, Ultra Recall, EverNote, Surfulater, whatever) is the fact that when you link documents to the main database, links remain fragile and will be broken as soon as pathnames change.

Obviously, maybe...  But I'm amazed that no software in that "genre" seems to be able to cope graciously with this unavoidable and very problematic problem (especially when you have 100s of files and references that have been or could be renamed, moved or whatever). (The only software I know that will keep track of path changes -- in a completely different class of software though-- is tag2find ; there might be others.... )

Another aspect of IdeaMason that I'd potentially dislike is its "rigidity". By that, I mean that some features do not seem to be easily customizable. (What example could I give... ?? well, if I wanted to create an extra tab for another important category, or create an extra type of "material", etc., it doesn't seem to be possible... I think... but that's with most software, of course : nearly all of them are rigid. But, unfortunately, in that "genre", I find that flexibility extremely important ; everybody works a bit differently so the software needs to adapt to that reality. No?)

Anyhow : I WILL have to eventually (re)consider IdeaMason more carefully...

Darwin:
One aspect that bugged me when I tried it ...I WILL have to eventually (re)consider IdeaMason more carefully...
--- End quote ---

You're in the same boat as me WRT having to take a leap and buy it if you want to find out if it will do what you want it to do as if you've already run the trial you won't be able to again... Your description of your workflow sounds similar to mine - lots of apps holding lots of info (Evernote, NetSnippets, TexNotes Pro, ZuluPad, Word, UltraEdit, EndNote, Excel, Access, ESRI ArcGIS... etc.). It is nice to speculate that IdeaMason can take all of this disparate info and organise it and even synthesze it for me, to a degree. At the very least replace several of my other apps... but, I paid for them and they work well - my system (like yours) works well. Do I need to spend more money to accomplish what I can already accomplish..!?

Grorgy:
Well, firstly what I am achieving better, I'm starting to get all the documents I have organized in one place, links to all the journal articles, scanned pages from books and so on, using categories to give them some added meaning and reusability.  I am jotting more stuff down, probably because I like playing with the program  :-[ , more than any change in habits at this stage.  Like Darwin says it can format a whole document built up from the various materials, and by the way, the materials all have a set type, but then you name each item and can give it a category or categories and can link it with a project you are doing, and once built the document can be exported to word or any other RTF editor, though it works with words templates.  I haven't figured out how best to do this part yet, as my documents are only quite short essays, and don't need lots of heading (or any).  So that fits in what i can do better when i get it sorted.

I've just started using endnote, I dont really need it but now seems like a good time to learn how as i want to continue onto higher degrees in time when it looks almost essential, or something like it, but hey, i get it free  ;) , so I haven't looked into exporting or importing endnote references yet.

Seems to me that you guys have worked out a system that works, and while I dont know how far through you are it would seem to be to be counterproductive to change to ideamason , though if you were just starting, or looking at just using it for smaller items or other work then I would recommend giving it another look.

I use evernote for the ephemera of the web, so its got lots of junk in it, stuff i should really get rid of, but its all in categories to and if I need something I can have a look there, and at that point decide to move it to ideamason and have it available more permanently (I've had evernote go silly on me and I've lost its contents a couple of times, though not recently, probably getting better at using it)

What I want to do, is have the references in endnote and Ideamason, figure out how to get the documents formatted how i want them so they can easily be exported to word, have evernote as the main place for new snippets and get the ones of value into ideamason.  However, I'm not there yet.

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