Messages

1

General Software Discussion / Re: FileBoss (soon on bits) vs. Directory Opus

« on: March 24, 2013, 03:25 PM »

flamerz, it's evident your observertion is right, the discussion on the bits offering there shows this clearly enough. As said, their version 3 was out for a week or, make it 3 weeks, and with their bits offering date fixed in advance. They should have reported the bits offering for some more 3 weeks, but I suppose that wasn't possible, bits-wise (bear in mind they had been on bits many years ago, not regularly as some other developers do, so we cannot assume bits treats them as preferred customers (cf. the Sunday they got there, but in retrospective, that Sunday wasn't too bad since this way, not too many prospects (hopefully) got into this early-publishing nightmare there).

They are heavily working on every single point mentioned there, and many more, I'm sure, even the minor ones, and their only "fault" is having gone bits early, instead of doing it 3 weeks later; that's unfortunate, but let's face it, next time, even the bits crowd that wants it all for free will get a more mature version, not some x.0, but x.3 or x.4, and should be happy with it, and I hear that for us DC members (or "visitors", as I happen to be called by the system), there could some intermediate offering, even if bits-only people not having a look, too, might wait for version 4.1 (or 4.02 or such): The x.0 lesson has been learned and how to avoid it, by everybody, I presume.

Another possible strategy which comes to mind: Developers offering rock-solid, perfectly mature versions x.9 or such on bits, with listing all the fine things to come within the next months, with version x+1.0 and following, together with a free update to that next major version - from what I've seen by the reactions of bits customers in such cases, I think that's a very enticing offer that makes salivate (and possibly buy, judging from what they say there) lots of prospects in the (special) bits world - of course, I just can speak of the probable reaction of those who post there and don't know how all the silent bystanders react - but they probably react in a positive way as those who write, since their high interest might be contagious, as is the prospect to get all these new fine things soon (the bits owners are the only ones to have valid data on all this) - with some bugs then, in the intermediate releases, but you accept these much better when you've become accustomed to a product, than if you hear of them in the moment you are expected to take a decision for a software brand-new to you.

This being as it might be, FileBoss is certain to offer many very good things, and what people (rightly) said on bits on its version 3  labour pains, will very soon be the news of yesteryear, not being valid any more today.

2

General Software Discussion / Re: FileBoss (soon on bits) vs. Directory Opus

« on: March 21, 2013, 02:42 PM »

Oh, I forgot: It seems this "automatic collecting files from multiple source folders" also functions with comments in FB, which means you can use tags for this, not only tags in the file names, but also in the ntfs comment attribute - I had been very eager to find a file manager able to do exactly this, but couldn't find any, about a year ago, and I had trialled FB for this, in vain, as any other available file commander then. So, for FB in version 3 now, this seems to be another UNQIUE feature which could be tremendously useful, since if access to these comments (= for creating, and for updating them) is realized in a slick way, that is) it allows for doing real-life "document management" just with a file commander, i.e. just within the Windows file system itself, and without having to add multiple codes into the file names for this (which is totally unpractical and an awful way of doing things).

Of course, IF you use comments = tags for your file management, partially or in the most general way, you need a file manager that makes it easy to administer this meta data (adding, removing, (individual or global (!) changing of such tags), so there will be needed another, more thorough look into this, but let me just say here that no file commander of my knowledge is splendid here, X2 being the best in this respect among FB's contenders (XY, unfortunately, has not done away with its proprietary (!) meta data yet (meaning it cannot process standard ntfs comments), so all of them could do with a little help from their respective developers, with regards to Windows metadata. (Metadata specific to individual file formats like MS Office, pictures or audio files is another subject indeed into which I never delved up to now, so I cannot speak of the respective capabilities of all these file managers with those.)

3

General Software Discussion / FileBoss (soon on bits) vs. Directory Opus

« on: March 21, 2013, 02:14 PM »

No need to repeat the numerous missings in Directory Opus, all the more so since it's not well accepted in this forum to mention them, and when you do, you're invariably told that you are asking for sheer rubbish: Whenever Directory Opus doesn't have, it MUST be rubbish, it's that simple! Cf. the current DO thread for this, and I happily accept this. But let me speak about FileBoss:

They have a "home licence", for up to three computers, and a "commercial licence" where you pay for any computer - BUT the "home licence" is also valid for individuals, i.e. and if I understand well, if you have some corporation or work in some, the corp must pay per seat, but you're free to install your "home" licence on up to 3 comps, be them in your personal use (and not of your paid secretary) or that of your family members. (Compare this with DO where even your wife pays extra (all the more so since DO checks every single comp out every felt minute).)

Good news here, FileBoss will be 40 p.c. off very soon, on bits - remember bits takes 50 p.c., so don't blame FB for wanting 30 p.c. of the asking price, and not just 25 p.c. - unfortunately, 40 p.c. off seems to be a lot less "interesting" than 50 p.c. off for many prospects, but we're speaking of some 5 dollars here, so don't let pass a very interesting offer (and bear in mind, the DO-1-comp-30$ version is literally stripped to the bone).

On YouTube, see two videos (15, and 10 minutes, but they explain a lot), and I mention some points here that you can observe there.

Yes, FileBoss has more than 2 panes in one window / instance (you can see this in the 15-min. vid), and I won't repeat here why this is extremely handy for most pc users out there, any sorting out your inbox into multiple folders becomes so much easier then. This is a unique feature of file boss, within the big shots, neither DO, nor X2, nor XY, nor SC offering such a feature (and no, multiple tabs (which FB has, of course, as they all have) are NOT an alternative for multiple panes in any way). As for shortkey to access these multiple panes when you're a a keyboard guy, not a mouse guy (anymore, e.g. for carpal tunnel syndrome caused by far too many web sites in your previous life where amply mouse abuse had been inavoidable), let's see about this later.

The second video (about 10 min.) shows another specialty of FB, i.e. copying / moving files with common attributes (e.g. "tags" as name parts, and many more), also from many sources, to a common destination, BUT with replicating their respective source folders there. This seems incredibly useful to me, IF you need such a feature, i.e. then this function will save you an incredible amount of manual work. At this time, I don't grasp yet how I could make this unique feature useful for me (and then explain to others how it could become useful to them), but I have to admit I know this feature just from looking on, not from trialling, and I have got a certain feeling that for both for project management as for "software engineering" / versioning of multiple files in multiple folders and sub-folders, such a feature could become pure gold if used in a smart way (home-made CMS, anyone?!).

There are other such, sophisticated features in FB that are not immediately "accessible" for the casual prospect, so I'll write again after having thoroughly trialled. And FB isn't any newcomer, see the "mini review" for the previous version in the respective DC folder (which I discovered rather late I must say, so this hint might seem unneeded for some but may be helpful for others). The offer on bits is their brand-new version 3, just out a week or so.

4

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 14, 2013, 01:18 PM »

cthorpe, you were certainly not trying to help, not the first time, and not the second time. prick, me "insulting" you or your product? I tell you something: There's a current thread here about MS Office 2013/365, and people here say, it's too expensive, blah blah, switch to the free spin-off of OpenOffice sacked in by Sun. In fact, it's perfectly possible to buy a decent MS Office (= 2010, = not the latest, very problematic version) for LESS than this D "Opus" costs.

Now I certainly don't call you crazy, prick, you're smart people knowing how to play human nature of idiotic customers. But yes, I call totally crazy those people here that think a simple file manager that does NOTHING else than what the competition does (and sometimes does not even that, e.g. columns / comments / metadata, and your virtual folder system isn't that brilliant either, to name just a few points of many), is worth MORE than an office suite: totally crazy people, just incredibly dumb. Cynic people (= first you buy, then we'll tell you no it's not available, har, har) rule. Chapeau. Do what you want.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 09, 2013, 10:03 AM »

Very fine, cthorpe, no need to give you the benefit of the doubt a second time in a row when you SYSTEMATICALLY twist my words in order to "answer" to something else I never said, or even better, to make me not having said things that are obviously there. (Just a hint, though, do it "by accident", here and here, then it will perhaps go unnoticed and pass your manipulative message, but if you do it with every sentence, well, it's ineffective when it becomes too apparent.) Thank you.

Shades, I don't understand your argument, neither on the user experience level nor on the technical level. Why not have a third pane, and functionality "go/copy/move to pane 1/2/3" instead of "go/copy/move to the other pane" when never ever I'm asking for "copy/move to both other panes" - where's the prob I don't seem to see here? And again, I don't see the necessary functions to write a script in the DO command reference for selecting e.g. pane 4 as the target pane.

Just drop it. The real prob with DO is elsewhere: It's considered superior, and whenever you ask for a function that isn't there, you get the answer, "it's possible", without anybody telling you which way it could be possible. It's very similar to the alleged "superiority" of Apple: it's just "better", and that's about it. We're speaking of adoration of divinity here, while facts belong into quite another category. It's a revolting business scheme but which pays, man's nature being the way it is.

And finally, as said before and in any such file commander, scripts could copy/move, in the end, to tabbed (= invisible) folders, but wouldn't bring you the visual display of that third pane by this, or then by hiding one of the two folders currently on display.

And yes, copying / moving around files is core functionality of a file manager, not "you do it alone", and as such it should be assisted by your paid file manager, whilst in fact, functionality here is very poor everywhere (just compare the "go" functionality of these file commanders with their respective "copy/move" functionality, e.g. in XY). Another functionality is bulk renaming, here you'll have much more functionality, too, in most file commanders, than with "copy/move", and then I'd suppose most people do lots more of copying / moving files, than they do mass renaming. So I'm in my right to consider this state of affairs weird.

6

General Software Discussion / Re: Pdf Management

« on: February 09, 2013, 09:04 AM »

Interesting thread here (more than 4 pages I'm afraid):

http://answers.micro...-3e01349dccca?page=5

Even Adobe products can search several pdf's in a row, but it doesn't seem to be fast.

Have a look here:

http://www.foxitsoft...lter/performance.php

Foxit pdf iFilter is 20 bucks per seat; if it works, that should be very reasonable.

When having crawled many more "search pdf index" sites, I'll do perhaps some testing, just indexing my current pdf's of all sorts with multiple progs and compare the results (and no, there does NOT seem to be any such prog that will tell you it can't properly index a pdf...). Prob here, in order to not affect the indexing with one prog by the previous installation of a competing prog, I'd have to to reset my comp to a previous state between every trialling (takes my 30 minutes each time). But from the above thread you'll have understood that the pdf format is the worst file format you can get. All the more so it'd be helpful to know which indexing search tools (and in which global circumstances of your system) will deliver reliable results. I would have expected many more insights into this format from the "academic sw" side (where reliability of pdf searches would be crucial), but no...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 08, 2013, 06:58 PM »

"and then you can drag and drop whatever you want from either pane"

OMG !

No, thank you, cthorpe, I see you try to be helpful, and I know I mix up two things here: More than just two panes, AND keyboard functionality. But then, I explain in detail why drag and drop is to be avoided, and then this (I'm sure our posts crossed by some seconds, which explains this)...

But on a more serious level, your solution isn't that practical even for drag and drop afficionados, since, as said, this "moving around files" is NOT done from one source to several target, but from "anywhere in the lot to anywhere in the lot", and that's why, e.g., tabs ain't a solution either, even with (missing!) commands like "move selection to tab 1/2/3..." - it's, as said, all about "natural working", picking this file here, moving it there, then picking another another one and moving that around. With tree views, instead of folder views, that's not possible. Thus, thanks, but no, thanks. No, it's up to these developers to have some second thoughts about what they make us miss: 2 panes only, as in Norton Commander of the Ancient Age, that's almost incredible, in view of what could easily be done instead.

8

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 08, 2013, 06:16 PM »

I

tomos, I'm sorry there's been a misunderstanding.

You do the best you can, with underwhelming sw; I have used window managers in order to glue frames together, and I finished by having set up a two screen combination (cf. my description of it here: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=32735.0 ), and I would like to add here, re this setting, that a relevant part of my system is wndhop.exe, a small, free utility that by pressing Win+Enter will shift your current window into the other screen.

What I meant was, it's totally unprofessional, on the part of developers (!), to force your users to employ such mean means: Instead of providing 3 or 4 "listers" for those who would like to use them, you "offer" several "windows" that then will not even automatically glue together but will "flow" on your screen and cause endless trouble there: This is all ridiculous and inacceptable - and the fact that you can maximize both windows to two different screens, isn't any good since your file commander is a TOOL, and should be considered secondary to your main applications. So there is no real excuse for this, and the price of this thing only adds to this total unprofessionalism. (see below)

I hadn't been aware you could take my criticism that was entirely directed to gpsoft's product, personally; if I had foreseen this possibility, I would have worded otherwise. Sorry again, has never been even my intention to insinuate something like this.

II

As for the ostensible irrelevance of my wanting 3 or 4 panes, I'll try again.

Very often, I rearrange not just some files, but rather big groups of files that are categorized into some 2 or 3 sub-folders, and I re-arrange them into different groupings.

Then, this re-arrangement, most of time, isn't into brand-new sub-folders, but partly into existing ones, i.e. some that have some content yet. And here, I then see files that, with the new content from those other sub-folders, would not be at their right place here in the future, so my re-arrangements are not really from one source folder into more than one target folders, but rather crosswise, from folder a into b, from a into c, from c into d, from c into b, from b into d.

Now, with the usual arrangement of just two panes, you'll DEFER all these moves that ain't readily available, and you try to GROUP them, i.e. you do what you easily CAN do, and then you open another sub-folder within the second pane, and you try to do a max here, shifting around, between these two specific folders, as many files as you can get for this task. Then again, another "combi" of just two panes, and so on and on and on.

Now, with four such panes visible at the same time, it's much more easy to shuffle all these files around, one by one, without having to "form groups for further processing", etc., you just work "naturally": this file doesn't belong in pane 2, so you press the key that will move it to pane 4, etc., with any such file, as long as it doesn't belong into a fifth or sixth pane: In my scenario, it's only for these files that you'll need "further processing".

It's clear as day that for re-arranging files within a group of similar sub-folders, such a more-than-just-2-panes setting comes extremely handy, and in practice, most of the time, it's just the THIRD pane that I'm missing: it's rare that I'd need a fourth, let alone a fifth or sixth pane.

And this means, this Norton Commander DOS style, 20 years after DOS, is RIDICULOUS and UNPROFESSIONAL, all the more so for 100-bucks sw, since much better solutions would come extremely handy for everyone, and would not be difficult to implement.

And now, with the mouse, with drag-n-drop, and with several windows (or even just run two competing file commanders concurrently and do the drag and drop between them), this is technically possible, but it's unprofessional, and it's a big pain in my arm...

and younger people here that don't have such medical probs should be warned: Today's web pages force you to do a tremendous amount of mouse shifting (and clicking, theoretically, so I bought (the overpriced) "Nib" sw years ago, and without it, I would probably not be able to even type anymore) -

so, you do your lot of mouse shifting (and clicking) on web pages alone: No need whatsoever to do heavy drag n drop in any other prog since here, those developers could perfectly do otherwise than forcing you to endless mouse abuse.

Mice are harmful to your health, that's a proven fact. Are you sure you won't get probs, next year or in ten years? Ok, a truck could roll over you in the meantime, but that'd be fate. Problems in your right arm would be pure silliness (of yours, and the developers laugh all their way to the bank (since your "mouse preference" gives them the opportunity to go swim, instead of implementing some keyboard shortcuts, at their office, when outside the sun's shining).

Think again about mouse use whenever you could avoid it.

Have a look into the web: There are special keyboards used in news agencies like Reuters and such, with many additional keys: They are professionals: They know what they do.

And no, it's NOT because their offices ain't big enough, and there'd be no space for a mouse pad ;-)

9

General Software Discussion / Re: Pdf Management

« on: February 08, 2013, 05:28 PM »

Citation from

https://www.donation...x.php?topic=2434.725 :

Darwin
Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
« Reply #737 on: October 15, 2010, 09:12:01 AM » Quote  
"Hmph! I downloaded the pdf and saved it in a folder that X1 is supposed to be watching and fully indexing. I then set X1 to run whether the computer is in use or not and did a manual indexing... three times. As far as I can tell, not only doesn't X1 index the complete file, it's not indexing this one AT ALL!"

Well, that's what I'm speaking about here.

And of course, my post above wasn't precise enough, in sw like Acrobat you "open" a pdf, THEN "search" it, one hit by one, which is useless for pdf M, of course, even if the search capability is ok. I mean, if you have to open 500 files per hand, in order to search them one by one then, even the fact that you don't overlook something will not counterweigh the time you spend with such almost "visual checking everything".

There's also Lookeen, the former Outlook specialist that now doesn't cost 40 bucks anymore, but 60 euro, about 80 bucks, but that searches MS files, and pdf's (also independently from mail).

The thread above has got 31 pages, the search term "search" in DC brings 200 pages (!) of hits, and since it's exactly 200, I assume there are more but which are clipped.

On the other hand, "search pdf" here brings 1 page of hits that won't make you travel far.

I think the pdf format is by far the most problematic format for any search tool, since it's not "stable" / "regular" in the sense of "either the tool can read this format, or it cannot", so here the risk of a search hiding terms that should be hits, is more prominent than with any other file format.

Thus, I'd be quite interested in knowing of experiences with searching pdf's. X1 is visually "best", or at least very pleasant, so it'd be a shame if its pdf search capability wasn't that good, and then, the price of dtsearch (without knowing if it's really better for pdf's) is 5 times higher. (And yes, I think Copernic is ugly and not user-friendly, trialled it several times and was put off by its seeming inability to let you choose what will be indexed - I abhor sw that takes over my system!

Btw, in the other thread, people complain about X1 permanently indexing. I suppose that if you only make it index some folders, with "real material", any good search sw will index any new entries into these folders, and then stop indexing, i.e. you import another big pdf, it'll index it, then another one, but neither X1 nor other good search sw will need to re-build the index again and again, on such occasions, so at the end of the day, it's all about your choosing those folders to be indexed, and then an indexing search tool will behave well and not at all wear out your hdd!

After all, it all comes down to COMPLETE indexing upon which you could rely then, and to have some decent "hit table".

If not even X1 produces reliable results (IF I said, I don't know anything about it) for pdf's, how could you imagine that UR could produce them? And my point is, instead of "relying" on such in-built, "handy" but unreliable pdf search "functionality", you'd better have parallel systems, with a reliable pdf search tool to manage your pdf's.

10

General Software Discussion / Re: Agent Ransack 2010 freeware lightweight - Desktop Search

« on: February 08, 2013, 04:50 PM »

I'd like to add some details:

Agent Ransack / File Locator Light takes, on my system, about 2 minutes for finding things in a folder with several hundred files with more than 1 GB altogether. This is a very long time, from a subjective pov.

But then, I've got hundreds of outliner files that can NOT be searched by the major search tools, and even for Ultra Recall users, AR/FLL/FLPro (which for 39 bucks adds some more Boolean functionality, etc.) is of high interest since UR doesn't have multi-file search (because their philosophy is, "have it all in one big file", and there, search is top-notch).

It even searches for accented characters that are encoded in the form \'ep or \'aj, i.e. if I need to find files with such characters, I enter the term hélène in this form h\'efl\'edne (just an example) in File Locator (you could do this by macro automatically replacing special chars in your search terms), and it will not only really find these files (no wrong "hits", no overlooked occurences, as far as I can tell after some years of use)

but it will also give you the respective contexts of the terms found (multiple for a file if there are multiple hits).

Thus: For normal usage, a "real", indexing, search tool, like X1, is certainly best. But have a look at File Locator whenever you have special needs, it could save your day.

In general, if you have special files to search, don't read the "covered file formats" lists of the different progs, but download all of the available tools and trial them one by one, for / with your special files: Often, the developers themselves do not know what file formats their tools do recognize by accident.

11

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 08, 2013, 03:23 PM »

"tag each one as as SOURCE or DESTINATION"

Ok, the source would be a single lister then, this will make 4 (instead of 5) possible targets within 2 more "windows" (or 6 in 3 more "windows"). Very good. Now please tell me how, between these 4 target "listers", within "windows" 2 and 3, I could switch the target, but without clicking the mouse all over the screen. Key assignment? Which command(s)? And no, you can't find this in the "help" file:

http://www.gpsoft.co..._and_Destination.htm

And neither do they answer you if you kindly ask them for that info; I did, in vain.

And with all due respect, Window's inability to copy / move the same file to more than one target directory AT THE SAME TIME has nothing to do with my wish of being able to switch the target directory in an easy way. "Worked like a charm." - yes, for people who like to move their mouse on screen the extra mile each work day, right? - or is there a COMMAND behind it that I could assign to keys: "make lister 5 the target lister" (= even split up between several commands, then to be combined into a macro).

And yes, I know their command reference, but I don't find the commands needed.

So please tell me how it could "work like a charm" for me, too.

(Sorry, but an illogic point can't be a good point by definition.)

"and use gridmove or whatever to line them up" - that's what I call unprofessional indeed.

12

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 08, 2013, 01:21 PM »

Tomos, allow my joining in for giving kudos, and indeed, I should have a much more thorough look into IQ than I have had in the past! And I think your analysis of DO is spot-on.

40hz, you say, "Nobody is under any obligation to write software just because somebody else wants it." - You're so right, and that's why I insist on repeating what I'm asking for is not "exotic" in any way, but should be available from ANY of these paid file commanders (from which I own three).

Also, when you say, the features are available, you're not entirely wrong since with "sending to tabs" at least, you could do something, by programming; prob is, almost any such file commanders asks for its own special programming language, or terminology, and what the developers easily could implement as code into their respective file manager, you're bound to program first, as a user, and then run / trigger macros every time. It's this way I highly spiced up my IMS, with an outliner, AHK scripts and lots of additional keys, "from the outside", but I don't have enough knowledge and time to do the same for such file manager scripting.

And again, these should be basic functions, so why ain't they available to programmers, i.e. to people able to do such scripts in reasonable time?

Tomos, since you speak of images, I should have added - in fact, I had searched for this, some months ago, in two dozen or so image "viewers" and such - that not a single such image "viewer", i.e. file managers specialized in pictures, has got such functionality either, and I finally wrote some very basic ahk scripts in order to facilitate their respective "copy / move to folder xyz" functionality, which is very un-elegant and time-consuming since in any case, it implies flashing dialog boxes and such.

Dormouse, thank you for the hint to ShellLess Explorer - I had trialled about 20 such file commanders (and bought three of them), but this one had been unknown to me. (Is 30 bucks, no prob, could buy a fourth one.) Will have to trial.

As for Q-Dir, there is no functionality for copying / moving files around between its four panes, except by mouse, of course.

And finally, since there's also this thread about the difficulties of finding a decent image browser, let me say that for viewing images, there's nothing better than "Fast Picture Viewer", but there are several flaws:

- It's in version 1.95 or such, and major upgrades are paid, so for some time now, it's definitely not been the ideal moment for buying

- With XP, you only see the one big picture displayed, since for the strip of previews on the top of the screen, the prog relies upon some Windows functionality not available before Vista

- The tree component of this prog (for determining the source, and the target folders) is abysmal, never ever found something that bad.

But as said, as a viewer, its a class of its own (and I also own Lightroom - with which I'm very unhappy btw).

40hz, again, "Nobody is under any obligation to write software just because somebody else wants it." - I've got a slight problem with that stance, "I want this feature, another one wants that feature, and the developer will implement a third one."

In fact, when it's not exotic features, it would be really helpful that users back up their respective feature wishes; it's "divide et impera" that enables developers to work on irrelevant features, when at the same time they never do the work that'd be needed.

Then, let me add that FB (FileBoss) is even more expensive than DO, for professional use! (I'm waiting for their new version, in order to check if "distribution functionality", other than by mouse, has been introduced there.

40hz, re-reading your passage, "The features are available. But apparently it was the people that wrote Directory Opus who saw the potential and put in the time to write a program that provides them. And they (correctly IMO) guessed that those people who truly wanted - or actually needed - those features would be willing to buy D-Opus. Everybody else would just make do with whatever else they could get."

- ??? From my trialling, these features are NOT available! "Distribution", perhaps, by scripting, but they won't script it for you. And for more than two panes (= "listers" in their terminology), neither: It'd be more than one "window" as they call it, that'd be something like several instances of a file commander - now write some script juggling around files between those.

That's not slick, that's not professional.

No, the fact is simple: Even if you are willing to pay 120 bucks for a fast file "distribution" feature, it's not on offer, anywhere, and shifting around files is CORE functionality of a file manager, so it should be assisted, and it isn't.

In any sw category, I can give you examples of missing core functionality: It's a shame, 25 years within the pc. These developers are just too lazy to implement some 80 lines of rather simple code: It's insulting. (We're not speaking of cloning and hoisting, let alone multiple tree re-arrangements in outliners (cf. Bonsai): there, you'd need real good programming capabilities for. We're speaking of core functionality and of implementation taking 2 hours of these developers' time, make it 4 incl. debugging. Njet. Not for 100 bucks apiece. And then, as tomos says, and as others have said before, DO seems to have got some probs with images, anyway.)

13

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10

« on: February 08, 2013, 09:12 AM »

I know many people here like DO a lot, and I see that both it's "pretty", and that you can do a lot with it. But then, I have never ever understood why there isn't one single of these "big shots" in file M (= DO, FB, SC, TC, X2, XY - these are in alphabetic order here) to offer more than just two panes in one screen / instance / "window" / whatever. To my knowledge, there isn't but that ugly, MS-like free thing (I looked it up for you, it's "Q-Dir", with up to 4 panes), without any serious functionality that offers 3 or even more than 3, but the combination "good functionality, professional offering, and more than just 2 panes" isn't available anywhere.

Why would this be so important? Because many users (= me included, but it's far from an "exotic" wish) often do a lot of "distribution" of files, from a "source" directory, into several other, target, folders, often with photos (if it had correct functionality here, XY would be ideal for that because of its rather new photo preview pane) and doing this by mouse is very stressing to any developing or outgrown "mouse arm".

So, "put selected item into pane 2/3/4", by respective key-assigned commands, would be a big relief (and would be a much faster workflow even for people who don't have any "mouse problems" (yet)) for lots of actual use of a file manager, but this would imply the intro of a third and fourth pane to begin with.

And yes, you could do it in a similar way with tabs, so additional panes ain't really necessary, for this (while coming certainly very handy for multi-source-mult-target shifting around of files), but then, commands for copying and / or moving the selected file in the active pane or tab, to the directory in tab 2/3/4 (let alone further ones) are NOT AVAILABLE in any of these more or less expensive (and otherwise, quite good) "major" file commanders.

So we have LACKING CORE FUNCTIONALITY in any of those, and that means, why should you buy the most expensive of them, when even that one isn't any better in this very important respect, even dozens of years after its creation?

So there's room for big improvement here, with DO, and with more reasonably priced competitors.

Let me add that of course I asked for such features, in vain, before complaining to third parties.

Or then, explain to me why I'd be totally wrong again, by asking for features that should have been available for the last 15 years.

14

General Software Discussion / Pdf Management

« on: February 06, 2013, 03:25 PM »

In this thread,

http://www.kinook.co...hp?p=20178#post20178

Kyle, the man behind kinook, says, in answer to a complaint by a user that Ultra Recall doesn't find text in pdf's that are not imported into UR, but just referenced by UR (which is the much smarter way imo, cf. my "Passion" thread here),

"Note that some PDF files aren't parseable for text content. One PDF text parser vendor indicated, "Some PDFs will simply never parse the way you would expect them to for various reasons. There is NO PDF to text converter in the world that can work with every PDF file ever created. Even Adobe itself cannot convert all PDFs to text properly." The PDF parser we use works with most files we have tested, but I believe that if the text in the PDF file is encrypted or stored in a non-standard format, most tools can't parse text from them."

This brings the idea to me of the respective reliability of those pim's or other pdf managers (e.g. of the "university kind") that index referenced pdf files since it's clear as day that people who store many such papers want this to be done automatically and without then having to wonder about the quality of the built-up index, i.e. if you store pdf's, thinking you'll be able to search them afterwards, you obviously rely upon this manager building up the index properly - if afterwards, it will not find but some terms, in an aleatoric way, whilst it won't find others, but not even indicating to you that many terms could be there that it has not been able to index (= and to search now), you might be in deep trouble:

In ancient times, we had to read books and journals in order to scan for possible "hits"; if you just store pdf papers now, relying on the search feature of your pdf manager to produce these same hits, and if this manager doesn't find but some of them, you'll end up discarding papers that could have been central to your subject or "overlook" important parts in them.

Hence my questions:

- What are such pdf managers (except for the obvious ones, i.e. pdf "editors" from Adobe and its competitors), and which index referenced pdf's? (I know about UR, then TheBrain, and not many more.)

- What about the "pdf quality" of those standard search progs, e.g. Copernic, X1, dtSearch, etc.?

- Have you got some experience with these reliability questions, with what sw?

- Is there sw that will check the global file size or such of an indexed pdf, and inform you of possible discrepancies between this overall size and the possible sparcity of terms it found in it, in order to be indexed? I.e. are there progs that at least "warn you" when doing the indexing? (I mean when they encounter probs or when they assume there are probs?)

- If not, do these progs at least warn you, on indexing, when they can't "read" the file to index? (I mean when a file is "secured" or such and cannot be indexed at least, vs. problematic parts "only", in the first alternative.)

- Of course, Kyle from kinook in his cited answer tries to reduce the problem to such pdf files that "cannot" be read, but then, in other respects, Kyle is not into expensive components for his prog, so his pdf parser is probably not the very best on the market either (a similar prob in UR: the quality / lacking speed of its html storage, cf. the "specialists", Surfulater and especially WebResearch), hence my idea that there will certainly be big differences in the quality / completeness (or absence of it) of this indexing pdf's.

For the reasons cited above - today, you often rely upon technology to "read" for you, so you should better know if the technology you rely upon is trustworthy or not - this - rather overlooked - subject seems to be of high importance. Any insights or sources?

At the end of the day, it could come down to Adobe Acrobat and / or dtSearch, i.e. the most expensive, specialised offerings, but perhaps we get valuable info on more practical offerings - some pim (and its in-built pdf parser) could be as good in indexing pdf's as could be Acrobat... all the more so since many pdf's are not created with Acrobat, so the Adobe solution might not necessarily be the best of them all, for "reading" / indexing, and it's certainly not a very practical one -

Pdf editing is rather advanced now, and there are many low or medium priced offerings. But reliable pdf M seems to be a thing needing further discussion, especially in the light of the possible harms of

a) absence of indexing, and
b) partial indexing only,
when in neither case the user is informed of the lacking index entries.


EDIT: I'd wish to add that many pdf's are compounds of various sources, i.e. different parts in it might have been created by very different means. So within the same pdf, different "cases" of processing needs might apply, and I hope a "good" parser will properly evaluate this and react accordingly, whilst a cheap parser probably will just skip the "difficult" parts, and worse, without telling you it just skipped them.

15

General Software Discussion / Re: On data storage and applications going cloud (Surfulater, Mindjet et al.)

« on: February 06, 2013, 06:31 AM »

Ad 2 et seq. supra

Today, in German papers, they speak about MS Office 2013.

a)

It seems you can buy a non-subscription home version, and individual non-subscription versions of Access, etc., but I'm not sure these are non-cloud-synch by that, and even without such cloud synching, how much data could they transfer "home" anyway?

The main offering from MS is a subscription scheme, of course, for individuals, small business, and corporations (public authorities of course), and here, there's some info: There'll be continuous synching of your data on / with the MS servers; for small businesses, it seems the subscription, incl. the cloud storage, is 12 bucks 50 per month and per seat.

b)

It seems evident for me that this way, U.S. authorities (= NSA, etc., or more precisely, the NSA plus all the authorities and big (or specialised!) corporations that regularly get "their" data from them) will now have constant, regular access to any data processed by MS Office 2013 and further on. Perhaps there is some automatic simili-"encryption" in order to make the technical aspect of the out- and inbound transfer "safe" against your possible competitors and third parties, but I assume that in your comp, and on arrival on the MS cloud servers, the "real" data is processed, and not something encrypted MS "synch" sw cannot read and "understand".

This means I assume they've now "found" a way, by offering the cloud storage AND REAL TIME SYNCHING "themselves" (= MS plus NSA behind them), to prevent "you" (= professionals and corporations small or big) from effectively encrypting data you store within the cloud, offering perhaps some "protection" against third parties, but no protection whatsoever against the GLOBAL EVIL BODY.

Or am I mistaken here? Could you use this MS Office 2013 cloud synching system with data encrypted by your own encryption sw (and then hopefully with strong encryption keys)?

c)

As said, I doubt this system would "take" such data - and even if it pretends to do, why not assume this will double your data flow then: One flow of your encrypted data, forth and back, in order to reassure you, and then the real data, in real time, you "Word" or "Excel" or "Access" files, etc., perhaps "encrypted" the MS / NSA way, ready to be processed by these bodies.

Why this is so harmful?

d)

Even with their "patent frenzy" (cf. their allowing for "patents" for things not new at all, but just because you have the necessary money to pay for the "patent" of these processes et al. perhaps known for years; or have a look at U.S. sw "patents" which cause scandal world-wide in the "industry"), the U.S. do invent less and less, and with every year, this become more apparent. Thus, the U.S. government is highly interested in "providing" their big corporations of "nation interest" with new info about what would be suitable to make some development on (= forking findings of third parties), or simply, about what U.S. corps could simply steal: Whilst a European corp is in the final stages of preparing patents, those are then introduced by their U.S. competitors just days before the real inventors will do it.

e)

It's not only the Europeans who are harmed: Whilst the Japanese ain't not as strong anymore as they had once been, it's the Chinese who steal less and less from others but who invent more and more on their own and who risk to leave trailing the U.S. industry anytime soon.

f)

I spoke about passion in general and in programming in the forked thread, and I saw that indeed, individual passion in sw excellence is dead, speaking of a possible win-win situation where the developer has got the satisfaction of producing a work of art, thus providing functionality excellence (in the meaning "functionality in the workflow of the user", not sterile technical functionality within the sw itself) for his customer.

On the other hand, it seems that more and more developers (= individuals as in the case of Surfulater and many other sw's, and sw houses with thousands of programmers and sw "architects") more and more strive to attain excellence in features WORKING AGAINST THE CUSTOMER: No win-win situation anymore, but taking the "man who pays for it all" for a ride.

g)

And it's not just inventors, etc., abroad that are at risk: It's perfectly sensible that some innovative, small U.S. companies are spied for the benefit of big U.S. companies, be it for simple stealing their ideas alone, and / or for facilitating their taking over for cheap.

h)

Of course, it's not only and all about inventions, it's also about contracting (Siemens in South Africa? Why not these same contracts be going to General Electric, by using core info? I just made up this example and I'm not insinuating that GE might want or go to "steal" from Siemens, but yes, I'm insinuating that some people might be interested in "helping" them to do so.)

i)

I don't know collaboration sw / groupware ("IBM Lotus Notes", etc.) well enough, but I suppose you'll get similar probs here, and as we see by now, even sw for individuals, like Surfulater, tries to excel with "features" that could possibly harm the users' interests.

j)

So it might be time, about 30 years after Orwell's "1984", to store "old" comps (Win 8 and Office 2003, anyone? har, har!), "old" sw, and to divide your work between comps that are connected to the net, and those that are not, and to transfer data between them with secure USB sticks, in readable, "open" (and not proprietary) data formats (perhaps XML instead of "Word", etc.), in the end.

I suppose that using Win 7 and Word / Excel / Access / PowerPoint 2010, on non-cloud-connected pc's, could be a viable intermediate solution for the years to come. (In a corporation, you could even install "parallel networks", i.e. many such pc's but of which none is connected to the outside world.)

k)

The purpose of this post is to show that I'm not speaking out of paranoia, but that reality (here: brand-new MS Office 2013, probably the biggest impact in sw for the coming years, except for operating systems) outstrips fears by far.

You see, when it's the passion of torturers we have to speak of, instead of passion of people wanting the good for the community, we're in trouble, and this point in time seems to have been reached, sw-wise.

16

General Software Discussion / Re: They're Still Standing or On Passion in Programming or The Soultron Lesson

« on: January 27, 2013, 05:07 PM »

"Ahh...but see there's where you are mistaken.

You don't have to write the guts anymore. That's out there, what you lack is the boobs (of the concept) to attract the right mix of contributors to your vision.

It's crass but it's true."

Paul, that's why I said, in the other thread, that you're my friend (I'm yours, in any case.). We both seem to have big probs in style, but we both have to "GIVE something" to this world, and are often mistreated, bec/of our style that hampers our message. You're perfectly right here (again), and I know this. We all have to live with our limitations, haven't we? But that's no reason for not trying to overcome some of them, I suppose. You defended tags over "hierarchies" / trees, and I have been a little bit mean over this in the UR forum: It's you that were mistaken here, but I beg your pardon for the style I answered you in. Further comments will follow, but let me say here that people who try to change this world for the better often end up crucified, human nature doing this, and it's the tragedy of this world that will eventually bury it, hence my love with excellence, passion and real suberb, and I perfectly know about the missing "market value" of these criteria, hence my search for people who are like those I cited in my intro post here: People who're in search for excellence, notwithstanding the financial outcome. Here and then, I try to be a cynic, as I've got to know that being cynic is the way of the world, but then, I cherish the gifted heroes who do put their heart in what they do, and thus, it's not a coincidence that almost all of those artists I cited are young or very young: The drama of human existence being that for adult life, financial considerations MUST take over since without shifting your priorities, you won't be able to take care of your family: Society makes whores, and there's nothing that could ever be done about it, cf. these "free love" communities of "1968" that failed because of the "big shots" attracting the females, as in any traditional society formation, and the "neglected" men jumping out from an idea of "equal society" ( I don't bring links to sources here, but there's plenty of them).

I fact and to tell everybody (who didn't already get it), I'm one of these "romantic fools" who seriously think that human nature, applying the right argumentation, is able to be changed for good, when in real life, we all know this is impossible, genes preventing every possible change to a better human nature.

I conceived and propammed "Manuscript" in a way of endless improvement, implementing lots of high-brow features totally unknown at the time (and some of them, even today), and then, I got 5 "sales", for the crippled (I limited the number of possible items there) versions, and I thought by myself, "are these people buying my light version in order to steal my ideas, to do "re-engineering"? Which is to say, I didn't take the smallest "satisfaction" from these 5 sales, but they made me fearful, more fearful that I'd had ever been. (Thus my current emphesis on "legal" questions, since I'm fearing that some of my ideas in "Manuscript" could be - or have already been, without my knowlege? - could be patented by the U.S. Patent Office, so that in my own future pim prog, I would be a "criminal" to use my own ideas from 1995.)

Unfortunately, I choose another subject in university, beyond "IT" / programming, and I'm too old now in order to really learn programming from scratch. I've to admit that I feel some envy on being informed, by somebody like Neville, by his editor's price, and the number he claims to have sold this editor, when then making my multiplication. But then, I've never envied, in my whole life, people who did something really good, something really "completed": I CHERISH mastering, but I've got lots a probs with cold reasoning.

My "music" examples were about people who "went the extra mile", and who didn't mind if the financial outcome was on par - hence my departure with Vidgen in that competition and the same Vidgen later on, trying to "collect". Some months ago, I tried to convince "kinook", the people / man behind Ultra Recall, that "doing better" was to give him real financial benefits, when in fact, I don't really know about this.

Truths is, the "financial returns" aspect in programming doesn't interst me that much: As soon as you can make your living / survive with programming, you've got all your chances

TO MAKE PROGRAMMING AN ART.

And that's my subject. Conceiving "solutions" that will survive you, creating programs that will make you a "name" in the history of this civilisation: Doing perfect sw, as is "Guernica" a perfect painting.

Hence my suffering, any day, that my own, personal programming facilities are not on par with what I'd create, had I got this technical expertise. And hence my "hate", better, my scorn, for these delevopers who're striving after the "bucks", instead of trying to get their name printed into the IT "hall of fame".

And yes, I would make "my coder", here and there, code some irrelevant lines which on further thinking of mine, will have to be dumped, but then, there won't be so many of them: Trust me, as a sw conceptionalist, I'm not devoid of some gift: I'm far from sadist who'd make you code futil: It's not about becoming millionaires, it's about delivering a first-class piece of art to these humans, and then, with a little chance (but which wouldn't be our target), we didn't loose our money in this venture.

And Paul, you're of my kind: We're some some people who try to be helpful to this world. We're one of a kind, when most people deciced to be nourrish their family. I can't even blame them, but then, I've got the right to be deeply disappointed with the way of this world I so much would like to improve. And to hell with cynics on outlinersoftware.com.

Trying to get a coder, a brilliant one: One well assorted to my ideas.

And yes, I'm speaking about endless, hard work. And yes, I'm speaking of immortality, and of contemporaries still standing to us. Your programming language: Python, or such? Let's conceive big, notwithstanding the fact that whatever we'll do together, we'll never attain that mastering level of an Al Kooper.

And people who place some symbols in sole response to what a Paul Keith has to say, aint' but idiots, sorry for being being blunt again, and I say this not in order to attack, let alone to hurt, but in order to make you think again.

IT, in its current state, is a shame. Thus, I beg you, some excellent coders coming my way: I'd treat you well, i.e. with duly respect: All the more so since I got early aware of my limitations in coding.

17

General Software Discussion / Re: They're Still Standing or On Passion in Programming or The Soultron Lesson

« on: January 26, 2013, 06:48 PM »

Paul, as always, there is much truth in what you say. In outlinersoftware.com there, they do endless discussions about the perfect outliner, but then, nobody anywhere does any real work in order to attain it, and I wrote so much on this subject in the past, I simply don't have the guts anymore to do it again. It's right what you say, clipping and outliners drift apart - that's because most outliners ain't suited to proper clipping (hence those millions of people going to Evercrap). And yes, some day I should search for a programmer for good! (I didn't even polish my post above yet, you know...) Of course, I suppose that people should know about Zoot, and all these outliners, in order to be interested in my post re sw - for people not particularly fond of outliners, the links will do, and indeed they link to some of the most pleasant (and largely unknown) music available today - unfortunately, all these magazines like Time, L'Espresso, Nouvel Observateur, etc., etc. do NOT hint their readers to splendid, "unknown" music, thus ensuring things remain as they are for such wunderful artists, and so I took the liberty here of presenting some obscure artists who largely deserve to be much better known than they are, as illustrations of my point that without passion, there is no excellence and no superior quality - which is, as I also tried to express, a question of "design", not of technique - all of these artists, even Gene Harris, show technical flaws, but the overall performance is simply magnificent, in every case I cited here.

My music examples were meant as counter-examples to what's going on in the sw industry: Utmost quality is possible, but of course only when your heart is brought to the venue, and that's not the case with progs like UR that are indeed rather "good", but that simply stop at this point of diminishing financial returns, and thus will never be really good. (As said, all the ugly details, and my ideas, in all these innumerable posts in these fori - I decidedly have to create a blog, in which I must bring together all these.)

EDIT : "Remember nowadays notes can be voice notes" - Zoot introduced some voice recognition, but in fact, DNS has got the monopoly on this. It would lead nowhere to develop special functionality, poorly executed, when there is a brilliant market leader as in this case. On the other hand, it'd be smart to introduce, for ordinary-DNS users, much DNS functionality into your program, i.e. DNS has got a very expensive "professional" version normally needed for macros and such, whilst it would be of high interest to have the normal (and accessibly-priced) DNS version do lots a things within your specific program - could perhaps be done by paying them 20 bucks for each prog you sell with this inbuilt functionality (I mean you sell two versions, the normal one and the one that for people having got normal DNS, then offer lots of additional command triggering that in normal DNS isn't available as such - so your customers would have DNS Prof functionality within your prog by just owning the regular DNS version). Whilst Zoot, if I understand well, has some proprietary "voice command" functionality, but if the user wants to dictate contents, he's to rely on that external DNS then. Such a mixture is exactly that kind of hybrid chaos I'd never accept in a decent workflow.

18

General Software Discussion / They're Still Standing or On Passion in Programming or The Soultron Lesson

« on: January 26, 2013, 05:19 PM »

I

I've said it in another thread here: helmut85 is clean. It had never been my intention to make trouble or bother people, it just had been a very unfortunate mishap that my two introductory posts here, more than a year ago, had been mistaken for "spam" when it was totally evident that they couldn't be considered as such, hence my anger that threatened to bias my judgement further on, hence my choice to write some 50 further posts as helmut85, in order to perfectly calm down things. Of course, I cannot totally deny my nature, so things tend to run high, under whichever pseudonym I could ever post (cf. hits for "On data storage and applications going cloud" from which this thread's a spin-off).

In fact, I'm a little bit ordealed in a way: I'm an amateur programmer who in the late Nineties, did a very fine pim, "Manuscript", flawed by the use of an inferior programming language, the one in "ToolBook" (= Paul Allen, from MS), with a 32 KB field limit and, especially, lack of stability by lack of proper memory M, so that any way of sophisticated programming didn't do anything to overcome the programming language's inherent instability (I have "proof" of this by numerous complaints of third parties in these times; the 32 KB limit seems to persist even today).

The name of "Manuscript" was daring, but then, the original Lotus "Manuscript" trademark hadn't been used for 5 years, so I didn't name my product in any illegal way (btw, the text processing sw of my choice then hadn't been Lotus Manuscript, but XyWrite, an incredibly sophisticated prog marketed by North American SW, that company that also marketed askSam in Europe at the time). From a conceptional pov, it was outstanding, i.e. it was a cascade of indentations, instead of a tree, since my programming capabilities always fell short of my my conceptional  mastery, and thus my work produced some very original solutions to common problems: I wasn't able to properly program the standard solution, so I had to look out for alternative ones, and often I found rather smart ones.

Anybody interested in a description of this outstanding and obscure sw, or in further ideas of mine, is invited to refer to the defunct askSam forum, searching under "fred", to the MyInfo forum ("fred"), to the outlinersoftware.com forum ("fredy", "fred" was taken), and to the Ultra Recall forum, under "schferk".

You bet that, when designing and programming "Manuscript", I delved deep into theory, hyperspace and all that, all the early research on information technology; later then, Yourdon, Warnier, etc., and, being a stranger to programming, I did "Manuscript" in object-oriented programming style notwithstanding, and applying at least some sw engineering standards to my work.

Then, I sold 4 or 5 "light" versions of this prog (= before (my introduction to) the net, by bookstores - some bookstores, at the time, sold sw beyond books and women's devotionalia, like greeting cards, candles...).

But you bet that with not even 300 bucks for more than 1 year of hard work, I left this field...

II

And then, I hoped that superior programmers would deliver some superior pim, perhaps not as good as mine had been, by conception, but something decent and technically superior.

Well, we're more than 15 years later now, and nothing really good has been done (except, perhaps, in Zoot).

These last days, I had the incredible chance to stumble upon some "Got Talent" and such posts on YT.

There's no doubt that YT is an International Treasure (pun intended to "National Treasure", of course), not because it gives free access to classic performers you otherwise had to pay for, but because it gives access to obscure performances that are world-class, and which otherwise, you'd never had a chance to even know of, let alone appreciate and fall in love with.

I'm not going here to invite you into obscure French Art Cinema, knowing that sw-affiliated guys (and the one Lady here) are much more rooted to the soil, which in itself hasn't to be something bad. But then, I need to explain something. It's the nature of passion.

Have a look at this YT vid, http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=g0IxVocQZiw

It's about Jack Vidgen, 14 years old winner of Australia's Got Talent 2011, a compilation of his 3 great songs in that competition, especially the first one, "I Have Nothing", brought to fame by Whitney Houston, written by David Foster and Linda Thompson and without no doubt one of the utmost works in the history of pop music. Now watch 14-year-old Jack delivering this song: From a shy beginning to incredible mastering, and you literally see him "thinking", sensing:

This is possible! And this, encore! And just a pitch higher: Everything is possible here!

It's an incredible crescendo into utmost mastering and one of those reasons YT must survive at all cost (and yes, I'm in love with the accent of this boy, as I had been in love, many years ago, with the accent of a young Irish girl singing) - "at all cost" meaning, I'm certainly prepared to pay 20 or more bucks a month for YT whenever this will become necessary to have continuing access to it.

Now look what our young Vidgen did then, after winning this contest and the 250,000 australian dollars that came with it. Well, he's an adolescent, don't blame him - blame his managers, his entourage. In this Australia's Got Talent performance, watch Brian McFadden (the judge on the left): He's falling in love, and rightly so, splendour is a thing so rare you HAVE to immediately react. And afterwards, it's "marketing", it's about making money, it's about maximizing profit - the spell's long gone.

It's of no interest to discuss if the passing of Whitney Houston, or the passing of Amy Winehouse, was that utmost loss in music these last months (and yes, Nickolas Ashford passed away, too), but there's no doubt "Whitney Houston songs" are among the treasures of today's music (and I cite the composers expressly since some dumb people out there really think these songs are written by the singers, and that actors write the scripts of films they starr in). Have another look at YT: Here comes Aliyah Kolf, 11 years old and the future definite Soul Queen:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=DlWHQXnF3KA

It's the same song - ok, the voice isn't there yet, but this voice leading and this timbre is world class (and I'm deeply in love with this accent, too: this "look" here, shortly after the beginning, I haven't heard anything as cute in my life, except in Vidgen's interpretation of the same song) - again, a screscendo into pure joy, into sheer heaven.

In quite another range of music, there's Emily Elbert, whose performances are very uneven, whose voice is sub-standard most of the time, and whose highs very easily can get on your nerves. But then, two of her songs she wrote herself, at her very young age, Dialed In & Opened Up,

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=i54XX1mg3KE

where nobody could claim it hadn't got the right groove in it, and then, her masterpiece so far, Michelangelo, which, had it been written by Joni Mitchell, everybody'd call world class, and since it's written by some young Emily Elbert, only some cognoscienti know and appreciate:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=vhmOFjcl-4w

Don't be mistaken, this is some of the very best of music that has been written in this century, and in the last one combined (I said it, her peaks are ugly, don't let you be mislead by such irrelevancies).

And it hasn't got anything to do with looks: Of course, I've fallen head over heals for this gal, some time ago yet, and I wouldn't hesitate to make a dozen of children to such a splendour if she ever was consenting, but then there's some Azerbaijanian jazz pianist called Isfar Sarabski who settled down to some more traditional jazz / "ethnic jazz" now, but his beginnings are filled with some false notes, and lots of passion which enabled him to do some of the most extraordinary piano solos I've ever heard in my lifetime (and from my youth, I cherish, and up to my deathbed, recitals from masters like Wilhelm Kempff, Emil Gilels or Sviatoslav Richter): Just search for "Isfar Sarabski Barnsdall" or "Isfar Sarabski Vibrato", especially the part 2 where pure joy easily overrides those wrong keys he presses here and then:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=7R41OHlLKKI

Or then, Isfar Sarabski at the Baku Jazz Festival 2010, from minute 56:00 and for the next seven and a half minutes, very sweet and to be classified Art, with a big A:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=E7srIho2CpU

Or in a more traditional range, what about (George Gershwin's) "Summertime" by the Ray Brown Trio, i.e. the late Gene Harris on piano?

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=YuW26BKVJ3U

All these do NOT do it for the money, they are in LOVE with what they are doing, and it shows. (And no, I'm not bothering you with Schubert and Schumann (Kreisleriana, anyone?) here - there dead and forgotten by the plebs.) But have a look at this guy: Danny McClain's interpretation of "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know" (which is from 2004, he should be an international superstar by now, and he isn't: see my point?):

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=1wxEV4M1rSU

(And no, it's not by Donny Hathaway, nor by Gary Moore, but by Al Kooper from Blood, Sweat & Tears.)

III

Now back to sw. We now see, by direct comparison, that most programmers are NOT driven by passion, and that they stop whenever they ain't paid enough anymore for their work (my case being extreme and thus not representative here).

And this brings me to a conclusion since the French have a saying, which is,

Ne demande à chacun ce qu'il peut donner.

Meaning, don't ask people what they ain't able to deliver.

The other way round: I didn't stop "Manuscript" because of these 4 or 5 sales-only, but because I would have to do it all again within a decent programming language, and not being a programmer, and not knowing of the existence of programming components at the time, I simply gave up, facing my missing programming capabilities and not knowing where to start anew, and on the other hand, I don't think anymore, today, that most programmers are perfect sw designers, and thus one-man shows in the sw field do have a big problem: Technical brilliance is sometimes there, but then, design quality is often lacking, and worse, they don't even listen to you when you explain to them how to do it instead - ok, as a naked assertion, this must sound incredibly pompous, but then, proof's plenty in those aforementioned fori, and when, in a rather sophisticated outliner like UR, there isn't even formatting within the tree, and for many, many years, stinginess and shortsightedness of the developers become apparent (= such trees are components, at different prices, you know... - same for the edit fields, etc., and most developers prefer them to be free...)

But this standstill of the industry (cf. UR and many more, e.g. Surfulater and his creator, Neville Franks, who anytime returns fall under his "acceptable" level, does something else) revolts me.

IV

So, I'm looking out for a top-notch programmer now. There's some money I can invest, and be sure that man that will take the other 50 % of proceeds, only 50 % of proceeds going to you, is one of the best sw architects out there when it comes to IM (cf. AS, MI, outlsw.com, UR fori) - and yes, the "Manuscript" source code is available for people with credits. Contact me by private message.

It's time we all get a decent outliner, 35 years after the intro of the pc. And that means development up to state of the art level, and not the Neville Franks / Ultra Recall / Mindjet / Controllers Rule way. Without love, in art and in programming, there's no excellence to be found.

And yes, the best female composer of all time is Carole King - or then, is it Laura Nyro? You got my point, hein? Money isn't everything, especially after you'll be dead. And yes, I consider Robert Carr's Framework, conceptionally-wise, the best sw of all time. "Better" sw's, then, built up on that masterpiece. Today, they serve us crap, mainly.

19

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012

« on: January 05, 2013, 12:20 PM »

J-Mac, I'm aghast !

In fact, I always assumed UR was rock-solid since for me, it was, but I only put lots of data into it, never having been fond of importing web sites into anything: If you must web sites for legal reasons, you must do it differently anyway, and for collecting data, I've got plenty of macros (explained in the UR forum and formerly in outlinerswcom) to preserve just the text clippings I'm interested in, together with the url's and any picture I need with the text: Thus, my reference system is outstandingly neat, clean (pun intended, no, my avatar isn't about ex-alcoolism or such) and standardized: hence, I never found anything attractive in Surfulator, e.g.

This explains why I simply never encountered any of these problems of importing raw data into UR, myself only having imported cleaned data into it; btw, in my time (AS forum, MI forum, outlinerswcom, UR forum), I made a lot of advertizing for this style (which implies, directly after importing or afterwards, clip any left clutter out and bold passages important for you), but had to realize that nobody followed me here: They all want the original data preserved to a max, with all the clutter it brings to your system.

My system also included links to folders, i.e. from my PIM to my file system, but in most cases, as said, to folders, not to individual files: Instead of having to maintain 5,000 links or more, I maintain some 120 or 200 of them (plus, ok, some 150 links to individual files I use for referencing, again and again) - and they are simili-links, i.e. coded entried in the tree and processed by my macros, so they're perfectly exportable from one PIM to any other. (I will not replicate detailed descriptions here, but of course, beginning tree entries with dots, commata, semicoli or other special chars with which otherwise entries would not begin, can "mean" lots of different things for your system, especially when your macros then also analyze the further "architectecture" of your entry: e.g. which suffix, or even which special chars within the "comment", the "comment" part of such referential, "link" entries being everything after the first space within such lines; even my "enter" and other keys do completely different things according to this analysis, and on top, there are key combinations, e.g. show a folder within a specific pane of a specific file manager, open a file in its original prog, and so on - as soon as you begin scripting in AHK, you'll never stop - and you don't rely as much on the inherent functionality of your respective PIM anymore, which will by that factor alone become much more "expendable", "interchangeable" - only prob here: there isn't one really decent such PIM out there, any one of them is ridden with big probs.

Sideline: Susi on outlinerswcom wasn't even dissuaded from importing tons of ("stolen"?) pictures into MI, which will make her system more than just unstable (she says she has an art history blog, but let's assume she's smart enough to NOT re-publish all these downloaded pictures but just stores them for her own reference purposes, then all is legal and safe, from a non-technical pov), and nobody told her that her fear that links (instead of importing all this stuff) would be of too much fuss, was unfounded: There are relative links, you know (= YOU know, she didn't), and in case, there's also the subst command if ever really necessary. The same goes for any such db: Don't import, just link, but in the smartest way possible of course, and that implies even cloned links, links to links, etc. - there are lots of possibitilies, no need for blowing up your db up to unmanageability!

So I had just "normal things" in my MI db(s), and it was buggy like hell, and it's getting worse, for every bug exterminated, there seems to be a new one, or several new ones, here and there (this lone developer obviously does without sw engineering, and it shows) - whilst in my - limited, as I must admit - use of UR 4.2b (= latest 4 version), even with much, much bigger files, UR was rock-solid (but not as fast as I would have it liked to be).

In the UR forum, I'm the most poignant critic of UR, so if you want my advice on UR, read my criticism there, and I'm rather angry that kinook doesn't do anything valid about UR's not being as outstanding as it should have been for a very long time now.

And then, extensively explained by me in the MI and the UR forum respectively, neither of these progs have real PM, when UR in fact isn't far from it but simply doesn't invest those 3 weeks of hard programming labour in order to create something unparalleled: They simply don't see it, when technically, they are so near such functionality. (Ample backing of my assertion in their forum.)

So :

You're right, J-Mac, I cannot continue to praise UR everywhere for its rock-solidity when in fact, by "normal" use (my limited use not being representative of what most PIM users want from their PIM), UR shows its real flaws - that's even worse than the current PIM market as I saw it before reading you (we all know development on the "big players" has been more or less stalled).

If it were only for web pages, I'd preach, do them my way, and thus avoid any such problem that internal processing of web pages, in any such PIM, is necessarily sub-standard compared with dedicated browsers, but even if you do it my way, thus avoiding these additional problems, not a single PIM today is a little bit satisfying: All of them are really, really bad in many ways, and most of which you could amend by doing one afternoon of programming, meaning  20 or 30 such afternoons invested by a programmer (of a current heavyweight, that is), and he'd get an outstanding, brilliant piece of sw that would sell much better than what he's offering today.

On the other hand, this web site problem, well, even doing abstraction from my very different way of doing this: Is it reasonable, sensible to block such amounts of programming efforts of the respective developers, by asking them to follow the newest - endless - developments in site programming, when even long-standing browsers like IE, FF, etc. have got more and more probs to follow here, and to get by?

In my experience, even stored .mht's don't work necessarily without fault; saving as a webpage (.html) seems best, and as soon as users accepted that even very serious PIM's do NOT offer internal processing of web pages anymore, but just technically store the respective elements to be processed again then by their respective browser, lots of "man months" each year, on the developers' side, would be freed up for more constructive, real development work.

Of course, we're in a situation where in fact most developers (MI, UR, many more) try to get their components for free, instead of paying, for a good tree component, 2,000 dollars, or for a good editor component, 800 dollars, hence our never-ending discontentment with what they deliver.

Thus, I'm personally more and more interested in specialised sw, case M sw and such, where you often pay 500 if not 800 dollars a year, but where there is much more "intelligence", i.e. smart help with your work, built into the prog, than in today's PIM's.

Of course, you can try to implement such additional intelligence / smoothness by external scripting (and that's what I try to do with my stuff and with the help of AHK), but this is only possible to a degree.

A perfect example, both for the possible degree of sophistication, AND for the limits of such external efforts, is ResultsManager for MindManager (now "MindJet") - I discussed the possibilities here in length in my thread "UR and MM" or something in the UR forum (it's easily to be found under the "Suggestions" rubrum there and only gets really instructive towards the end) - the executive summary here: Yes, you can add lots of functionality to such progs, BUT: instead of having instant, real time results, - and no, this is NOT a joke! -, settle for stacks, that will be worked off early in the morning, before work begins, and then again during lunch (calculate 45 minutes).

And all this, more than 30 years after the intro of personal computing - and with progs that get multi-million dollar results every year. Btw., the developer of that program (RM) recently told me that his add-on doesn't even function with the latest MM / MJ versions anymore, i.e. instead of introducing trans-map clones (they don't even have clones within a given map, when FreeMind has got these at least, lately), they change their program in a way that even a highly elaborate add-on that provided much enhancement to their core product in a corporate environement (and hence big return for MM / MJ in such environments: by making MM/MJ useful not just for 3 strategists but perhaps for a workgroup of 25 people, making it 25 MM/MJ licenses instead of 3), will not work anymore.

The prob behind all this, as I see it, is simply that most developers out there don't strive enough for ultimate programming excellence, but just see the "numbers", the dollar number, that is, and even here their vision is short-termed.


EDIT : And I think the definite word on TB has been uttered some weeks ago by Superboyac here:

https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=32928.0

Re: thebrain
Reply #3 on: November 21, 2012, 06:18:51 PM

I've tried this one out 3 times over the years, the most intensive workout I gave it was a few months ago.  It's a unique product with a fantastic interface and pretty productive.  I don't know what to say about it, though.  It's like...in the end, it doesn't matter.  I've spent a decade trying to wrangle in my own personal information management system.  I'd put it this way, if your JOB requires you to know a lot of random bits of information and you are required to keep track of it, etc...then it's a good thing to get.  It would also be good for professional collaboration in information collection and analysis is the goal.

But for personal use and if you think it's going to help you keep track of things, i think you will quickly find yourself using it less and less.  But this is not unique to the Brain.  This has been my experience with all PIMs.  Also, no matter how nifty things get, I can't ever break myself away from the old school tree structured PIMs.  I use RightNote now almost exclusively, not because it's amazing...just because.

40hz, my recommendation is to continue using whatever hodge pdoge of information is currently working for you.  I use rightnote for serious notetaking.  I use everything to search my files.  Archivarius to search inside files.  And for organization, I use file naming and folder structuring techniques.  This is all I need.  I keep trying to add niftier tools like the Brain into the mix, but they don't stick.  If you were to use the brain seriously, it would interfere with your file/folder organization because I think you'd feel the need to duplicate that effort inside the brain.  And then you will get tired of it.  And then you will find out that it's not as good/flexible/easy as file/folder organization.  I have never been able to sustain "virtual" organization such as tagging systems and fancy PIM interfaces nearly as long and comfortably as file/folder organization.  Too much work and too virtual.

20

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Action Outline on offer at Bits du Jour, 2011-11-21

« on: January 05, 2013, 09:57 AM »

Steven: "I could not find much in the way of lauding or criticism on the Net." - Well, that was before the cnet review which says it all: You couldn't be more comprehensive in stating the problems with such kind of sw.

At the end of the day, there's two features which would constitute a strict minimum in such sw:

- A hit table. Meaning, not having to jump from one find to the next, perhaps 60 times before you finally get what you need, but have sort of a table, a list, possibly with attributes but not necessarily so, but with the context of your finds. You can replicate this feature wherever it's missing, with a good external search program (for AO, this would be File Locator / File Locator Light = Agent Ransack, and even for European characters if you don't mind entering them as 4 special chars instead of your ä or é), and you'd even get the context of your finds. Problem is, back from such an external hit table, you can't jump back to the corresponding line within the item in question, but you'll then have to go back to your PIM (here: AO) first, go to the file in question there, press control-f, enter your search term again (and presumably with its immediate context, in order to avoid false finds)... So an internal hit table, be it multi-file (as in MI) or just for the current file (as in UR), is absolutely necessary, from there, with a mouse click, you'll be in the line you need to work on.

- Boolean search. Less necessary than point one, but also extremely important. Why? Because of all these false hits you'll get with Boolean search missing. Most general searches (= will be different when you search for customer names or such, e.g.) will be about rather general terms, with some other probable terms within their vicinity, but with the control-f in AO and such progs, you'll never ever find them - or you'll have 60 or 180 "hits". Hence the interest of external progs like File Locator above, in spite of the incredible fuss to then get to your real hits, manually: They not only give hit tables, but hit tables of finds in the form of "abc [AND] xyz [OR] jkl [NOT] mno" - you will not appreciate this functionality enough before having to search, one by one, 200 or more finds in the form "abc" only, in programs like AO and without having a knowledge of the existence of progs like File Locator.

So, as explained above, external search progs can help you out from sheer madness when using progs like AO, but I think it will have become evident that you should avoid any prog that doesn't offer both of the aforementioned features.

Any other elaborate feature should be considered "nice to have" in comparison, but unproper search is dealbreaking.

And then, we've got all these annoyances with otherwise sophisticated sw, e.g. the continuous absence of formatting in the tree of (rock-solid) UR (whilst MI offers this feature but isn't stable enough) - etc., etc., etc. - there isn't any one decent of such progs. But AO and such might work for people who've got 1,000 or so different items - in many weeks, that'd be my weekly output.

Anyway, if ever you've got your stuff in such progs like AO, have a very close look on tools like FL that could save your day, and many days in a row.

21

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012

« on: January 05, 2013, 09:30 AM »

J-Mac, if you ever want to do it the other way round, use Treepad: Install the Treepad trial, export from MI into TP, then import the TP file into UR: Works like a charm (whilst being illegal). But as you've seen already, UR's export facilities are much less than its import facilities, and you can't blame them: They facilitate new customers' coming to them, but then want to retain them.

Interesting here, PersonalBrain, or, as they call themselves lately again, TheBrain: Here, it's almost impossible to get data INTO their software.

Now, I often mused about their possible reason for this: Hate of new customers? Nope. Let's say you have 10,000 items to import. In UR, this would be a breeze (no, not the import, that takes ages, but afterwards). In MI, it would show some stability problems (after importing that is) - not so good. In fact, MI was very unstable in version 5, and it's again buggy as hell in version 6 - all new sorts of bugs (= absence of proper sw engineering?).

Now back to PB/TB: If ever you had a chance to import 10,000 items into it before buying, you'd probably never buy it!

I know they show some carefully prepared monster maps in the big advertizing and propaganda section of their site, but of course you won't manipulate these, just look and say, ahhhh!

Whilst with material of your own, you'd quickly realize that managing big maps is a terrible chore in PB/TB. So you just trial with those some dozen of items you'll enter manually, and some of yours are sufficiently pleased to buy from this very limited experience.

Hence my assertion: The absence of serious, valid import in PB/TB is by purpose. Back to MI: Here, it's just the same sloppiness and lack of design and programming you'll encounter at every detail of this program.

In outlinersoftware.com, a certain Susi just asked for very heavy duty sw of this kind. Well, she ended up with MI (which also clearly shows the level of advice you'd get there were you in real need). Good luck to her.

Hence, J-Mac, be happy with what you've got in UR and don't try to put it into lesser sw that could give you some headaches further on. If it does, remember how to re-export, as explained above: That move out at least will be easy (and surprisingly reliable).

Which makes me wonder if TP might be a valid solution for some. (Ok, it's ugly as s***.)

As for MI's AS import, well, any macro can do this, and would also preserve your text formatting, which their AS import from Switzerland doesn't - but that's a country on the decline anyway.

22

General Software Discussion / Re: Synergy Virtual KVM

« on: December 31, 2012, 05:12 PM »

Renegade, you missed that one - you should have read my post (just above the "Please drop it" one). ;-(

23

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: December 30, 2012, 02:33 PM »

I took the liberty to notify this UR discussion to kinook here:

http://www.kinook.co...php?p=20151post20151

24

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: December 14, 2012, 04:47 PM »

Some musings on tags here:

http://www.kinook.co...p;posted=1#post20142 (posts 17 and 18)

25

General Software Discussion / Re: Two classes of membership here?

« on: November 24, 2012, 09:19 PM »

Wiener, you left out the punitions part, where paying customers can be cut off from any help if they dare say something not finding your approval, e.g. praise a competing product or criticise yours.

Oh yeah, people coming to you with their Photoshop problems, I almost wet my pants. No sir, you simply apply all means at your disposal to hide the ugly fact that your product isn't superior to those you can buy combined without reaching the price of yours alone: x2, XY, SC. Do as you like, but don't take us for debrained imbeciles swallowing your claim (to put it in a friendly way instead of speaking plain English) you're afraid of simpletons mistaking you for an information bureau. That would be too insulting, Wiener.

(Sorry for the edit but the figure "swallowing" instead of "taking" was absolutely mandatory here.)