John, if I knew how to properly cerate the ini files, I would.  But Martin doesn't have any instructions for this on his web site.  I guess he designs purely for programmer-types.

-J-Mac (July 18, 2008, 11:13 PM)

Jim -- I can assure you, I'm no programmer. But I know my way around a computer by now and I'm familiar with writing keyboard macros (which is the most difficult bit in creating LWA ini files). The ini files are not too difficult to put together. If you'd like some help, I'm happy to do it by PM. But I agree, Martin should at least offer a wizard to guide people through setting up an ini file. The section on ini files in the LWA help file is, well, not very helpful.

The ini files are actually LWA's trump card. While LWA's direct rival, WebResearch Pro, is much more powerful and advanced in many ways, it doesn't have an equivalent of LWA's ini files, so you can't create your own import filter. So, for example, WebResearch doesn't support Thunderbird natively, so you have to export to eml, blah, blah. Swings and roundabouts...

I'm not actually familiar with Ultra Recall but I'm wondering - seeing as it now has good web capture, is it simply a case of you looking for the best out there, or is there something in particular missing in UR?

Tying in with that question, I'm also curious what you mean by "information management" as said in first post

-tomos (July 16, 2008, 03:57 PM)

Good questions -- wish I could give a clear answer! I don't think my needs are very complicated. You're right -- now that Ultra Recall has sorted out web capture, it's a very strong contender. The only question mark over UR is speed, which I'd define here as "snappiness" (is that a word?). I used UR for quite a while in versions 1 and 2, and it always had niggling delays in data capture. Nothing horrendous, but saving web pages was a good example -- it would always take a few seconds longer than any other program to save a page.

I haven't used v3.5a long enough to make a decision, and I still have an open mind. But I have noticed, for example, that when you open some stored (archived) pages, loading them takes quite a few seconds. A little dialog pops up saying "please wait -- creating temporary item file". You have plenty of time to read it. Scrapbook or LWA load stored pages pretty much instantly (as they should).

I use information management as a slightly more elegant way of saying "data dump". Somewhere I can stick short, medium and long-term data, text and images, everything from project research to software registration data. I want that data indexed and tagged. I want the database to be scalable. Not industrial strength, but I want it to hold a normal person's data, work and personal, over several years without choking.

The more I search, the more I think that looking for one piece of software to do everything is silly, and maybe even counter-productive. When I think about the pieces of software I most enjoy using, they tend to do one simple task well.  AM-Notebook as my note-taker, for example. Not flawless, but a nice, small focused program (and interestingly, by the same person/team as LWA).

Slightly off the beaten track, but may be of interest to some following this thread: one program that has been a "slow burn" for me in this area is  Connected Text, a "personal wiki". That phrase alone will put some people off, and I know wiki-style editing is not for everyone. But it's a well-thought out piece of software. I've used it for some research on long-term writing projects, and it's been reliable, A good developer who fixes bugs quickly, and good forums.

http://www.alcenia.com/webswoon/index.php?page=what
open source

-cmpm (July 15, 2008, 08:52 PM)

cmpm -- Webswoon (and most of the other programs you have mentioned) are really completely different animals. They simply capture an image (picture) of the page. That obviously has some uses, but the programs I looked at in the first post have a different purpose. They actually capture all the page content from the web server (or local cache) and "re-build" the page locally. This has many advantages as I have mentioned before -- editing, printing, indexing, live (clickable) links, etc.