Recent Posts

6101

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 15, 2006, 11:00 AM »

RE: AskSam

Nope, this is not what I'm looking for.  AskSam is more of a document management tool, kind of like the many desktop searches out there, but more powerful, apparently.  So that leaves me with Zoot, as far the "expensive" programs go.  Here's my quick recap so far:

Zoot:
If you're dealing with a lot of just plain text, this is probably the best program, although I still haven't really used it.  Big learning curve.

Surfulater:
The best tool to capture clips, mostly web clips.  But there are plans to turn it into a full-blown notetaking tool also.  Lot's of potential, lots of flexibility.

Evernote:
Very innovative approach, unique interface.  Functions similar to Zoot as far as automatic assigning of categories.  Not as powerful as Zoot as far as organization.  Can capture webclips very well, and has a lot of modern feature not in Zoot, such as outlining and richtext.  Like Surfulater, it's a young program, and it looks like it will be adding a lot of useful features.

6102

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 15, 2006, 10:40 AM »

By the way, can someone please explain what the big deal about Ecco Pro is?  I understand that it was an awesome program back in the day, but is it still all that awesome even with our modern expectations?

I've tried it many times, and I'm always left wondering what's so great about it.  Yeah, it's outlining is nice, but the whole thing is so old fashioned, I can't get over it.

6103

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 15, 2006, 10:36 AM »

Yeah, I've seen that webpage by John Buckham.  It's pretty good, but like you said, old.  I just went on the Zoot forum and noticed that it is indeed 16-bit, and it is an issue with a lot of people there.  By the way, I noticed that nevf posts there also (hey neville!)

Ultrarecall and InfoSelect, I don't know, I'm not too impressed by them.  They do a lot, that's for sure, but I really feel we gotta get out of the whole tree-heirarchy thing.  That's why I'm liking Zoot a lot right now, and why I feel Surfulater and Evernote are promising.

I'm going to try AskSam again.  I tried it before, but, again, I was only looking for an addressbook at the time, so I felt it was too much.  Now that I'm in a different mindset, I'll try it again.

6104

Best E-mail Client / [The Bat!] How to change displayed email address?

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 11:35 PM »

For my main email, I use a forwarding service address, which is the email address I give to people.  And the underlying actual email address I like to keep hidden as much as possible.  So in my reply-to field, I have the forwarding address shown.  How do I have my forwarding address shown in my "From" field in emails I send out?  I looked at the emails I'm sending, and it's putting my actual address there instead of the forwarding address.

6105

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 05:51 PM »

Wow, Zoot is awesome.  i don't want to get into a fullblown discussion right now but here's my very quick analysis of Zoot:

Zoot is to information collection (text only) as The Bat! is to email.

Really.

6106

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 05:01 PM »

zoot looks quite nice. (http://www.zootsoftware.com/)

-mouser (March 13, 2006, 09:51 PM)

Yes, doesn't it?  I'm finding it more and more interesting.  I've been inspired to go through 60 pages of tutorials.  I will post more later, once I have a better understanding of what it can do.

PS (what's with the 16-bit look?  and that price tag?  eesh!)

6107

General Software Discussion / Re: E-mail clients review

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 12:57 PM »

thanks m_s, that won't be necessary.  I just logged into my own gmail account and found I had 100 of them myself!

6108

Best E-mail Client / Re: Any opinions on Courier email client?

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 12:06 PM »

Excellent!  Thanks for the go-ahead.  I personally use the Bat, but this is for my mother, it's her first email experience...I just wanted to know if it was a decent program, since Outlook is usually out of the question for me if I can avoid it.

6109

Best E-mail Client / Any opinions on Courier email client?

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 11:07 AM »

Since they are giving away free licenses for the time being, I was wondering if any of you had an opinion on Courier email client, the same client that used to be called Calypso email:
http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/Courier/

What are the pros/cons of the program?  Feel free to bash it or give a glowing review.  Thanks!

6110

General Software Discussion / Re: E-mail clients review

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 10:14 AM »

Nice blog, allen.  Yet another reason why I love POP3.  I have complete control of all the files and stuff.  By the way, is there still a way to get gmail invites?  I'm trying to get my mom her first email account.

6111

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 09:38 AM »

OK, thanks; I think I see and that could be quite useful.  But, do you have to know in advance what your keywords are going to be?  Or can you decide at some later date that you need new/different ones and have EverNote build new categories?

No, you don't have to know in advance.  You can do it whenever.  Once the category is created, all the notes will be automatically placed there.  I think that is the benefit of fully indexed searching (I may not know what I'm talking about here!).

6112

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Let's try to get collectorz.com discounts/reviews

« Last post by superboyac on March 14, 2006, 09:36 AM »

sweet!  I love thier software!

6113

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 13, 2006, 05:16 PM »

Has anyone here used the Zoot software?

It looks very interesting, and I tried it once but never got my head around it and gave up.  Part of the reason why I gave up was because I thought it would be useful as an addressbook, but it turned out to be way too much for just an addressbook.  However, as a general note management utility, it looks like it's very powerful, and I know in the yahoo group, people are very big on it.  Can someone give a quick, in laymen's terms, summary of what is unique about it and why it is useful?

6114

Living Room / Re: 10 coolest alarm clocks

« Last post by superboyac on March 13, 2006, 12:57 PM »

Anyone besides me find the lack of good, functional alarm clocks out there?  I find most alarm clocks to be pretty basic and lame, except for their cool looks.  Alarm clocks should have:
--digital tuner
--digital display
--presets
--at least 2 alarms
--good battery backup (lasts more than 5 minutes, good luck finding this one)

I have an RCA clock that does everything above, but the battery backup sucks.  I swear, I can't take it from one room to another without it resetting.  It's really annoying.  But otherwise, it's a pretty good clock.  I got it at Costco a couple of years ago.  I can post the model type if anyone's interested.  Costco now sells a Timex alarm clock, which is pretty good, but I felt this RCA one was better.

6115

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 13, 2006, 10:54 AM »

EverMike,

Do you really mean "keywords," i.e. specially assigned words, or do you mean searching full text for particular words?

I'll try to answer for him.  What he meant was, when talking about automatically assigning notes to categories, you can set up a category to include all notes that have certain keywords in them.  So if that keyword is anywhere in the note, that note will automatically be placed in that category.  For example, you can set up a category to include all notes that have the word "rjbull".  If you click on that category now in the list on the left side of the screen, then the notes will be filtered down to all the rjbull notes.

6116

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 13, 2006, 12:33 AM »

Glad to hear of the developments, EverMike.

I have been enormously tempted to transfer all of my main notes to Evernote many times, but I just can't do it yet.  Hopefully, with the new features I'll be more comfortable.  Thanks for you ears!

6117

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 12, 2006, 02:53 AM »

EverMike, thanks for adding to our discussion!  By the way, that would probably be me that made the comments you mention about Evernote.  Don't get me wrong, I think that Evernote, like Surfulater, is an extremely interesting addition to the notetaking category.  My criticism, like the comments I made about Surfulater, are more of just me thinking out loud and brainstorming about how I would like this genre to progress in the future.  I truly mean it in the most constructive manner.

Now that I have the qualifications out of the way...

Evernote, of all the notetaking software I've tried recently, was the one software that made me perk up and say, "Wow, that's really cool!  I never would have thought to do it that way."  Honestly, I think the program has A LOT of potential, and I also believe that it is still in it's primitive stages as far as a highly practical and robust notetaking software.  About the chronological order thing, if you read my original post more closely, I already mentioned that notes can be automatically categorized and manually, also.  What I meant was that even AFTER the notes were categorized, the notes can only be shown chronologically STILL.  I mention this because after using Evernote for a while and amassing a large number of notes, I found that even once the views were reduced to specific category views, I felt that I'd still like to have some manual control as to how to order the notes.  Whether it is alphabetically (with some sort of title text), or just a totally manual placement of notes.  That is really what I meant from my comments.

Also, as far as auto-assigning of categories, the variety of methods to do this is (in my opinion) pretty limited.  I will look into it more, but I'm sure some people here who are more familiar with tags and labeling methods will have better suggestions on what kind of features they would want in something that is automitically assigned.  I can't remember what I tried doing a while back that I felt limited by...if I remember I will post it here.

All in all, Evernote is one of the very few notetaking softwares that I am holding my breath for.  I use it on a Daily basis, but in a limited manner, because of the chronological thing.  I use another software for my main collection of information, but I still use Evernote as kind of my virtual post it...when I don't want to think of how to organize information or just write something down on the run, or to capture a quick web thing, I use Evernote, because I know that I can quickly retrieve it with the best-in-class search feature.  Here's what I would like Evernote to do in the future:

--Have more control over organization of notes displayed.  I understand this can be a complicated problem because unlike typical tree-heirarchy notes, where it's easy to move things up and down, in Evernote, categories and labels are used, so notes can appear in multiple places, so defining a "solid" position for a note is difficult.  Personally, I have no idea what the solution is, I'd just like to see it happen!

--In the tree on the left where the categories are, I'd like to be able to show some kind of title text for each note so I can see which notes are included in that category.  Right now, notes have no titles, it's just the content of the note.  Sometimes, when there are a lot of notes in the category, you're not sure where exactly that note is, or even if it's in that category, and if the notes themselves are large notes, you have to scroll around forever to find it.  (I know the search can quickly filter the notes down, but sometimes you're not even sure what to search for!)

--There's something weird about attaching pictures to the notes and trying to resize them.  Usually they are too big, and resizing them was really difficult.  It should be a matter os simply grabbing a corner of the picture and dragging.  Now, you have to go into fullscreen mode, and do some fairly non-intuitive dragging around the border or something.

For those of you that haven't tried Evernote...try it.  It is truly unique and may be exactly what you are looking for.  By the way, Evermike, Evernote rocks!

6118

Living Room / Re: Updating the forum software to 1.1RC2

« Last post by superboyac on March 10, 2006, 10:18 AM »

I'm going to have to agree with mouser on this.  While that article makes sense about links opening in new windows, and I agree with it, I think forums are different than general websites.  I've been on all kinds of forums and I prefer it when links open up in new windows (or tabs).  Rarely, if ever do I go to a link from a thread and not return to that thread, so having to come back to it is a waste of time. 

Not only that, but the general flow of forums is not the same as the flow while navigating the web in general.  Usually, links in forums are like "Oh, check this out" or "here's their website"...it's more of a footnote usually in the discussion.  So it's not like you're going to click the link and now that begins a new  journey that will continue farther, and you won't return to the forum.  That's why it's different than, say, a normal google search or web browsing.

In other words, please keep the links opening in new windows.  It's different for forums, and the example that the author gave in that article, as you can tell, are definitely not forum examples.

6119

Found Deals and Discounts / Let's try to get collectorz.com discounts/reviews

« Last post by superboyac on March 08, 2006, 03:36 PM »

I think the http://www.collectorz.com/ products are high quality and stuff that a lot of people in general would use, maybe we should try to get them to join in here for freebies/discounts?  I know I've promised to do an addressbook review, but I can do a good review for mp3 collector also after that.

6120

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 08, 2006, 10:13 AM »

OK, so I just tried UltraRecall, and it has lots of features and can do just about anything.  But it still organizes everything in the typical tree-heirarchy.  If that's the case, then I'd rather use Surfulater for it's more sophisticated organizing enginer, and if I am going to stick with the typical tree format, I'd use Mybase because it's just simpler for general notes and webpage capturing.

Ultrarecall and Surfulater are similar in that I think you can create templates for different kinds of information.  In Mybase you can only do two things, capture a webpage or store text.  In fact, each "note" (or item) in Mybase has two tabs, one for writing text in and another for a webpage.  I think the idea is you just don't use the webpage tab unless you have to and you write whatever you need in the text tab.  And if you do capture a webpage, you can add additional notes to it in the text tab (but you can't edit the webpage, it's a snapshot).  In Surfulater, you can actually edit the webpage you captured.

6121

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 08, 2006, 09:58 AM »

I don't understand what Dialog does...I'm on their page right now.

6122

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 08, 2006, 09:47 AM »

I remember trying both AskSam and UltraRecall recently, but I think that at the time, I was looking for an addressbook program and both of those were too much for that.  I'm going to go back and check it out again.  One thing I remember about AskSam is that it is one of these programs that has come up with a creative and unique way to collect information, and I felt it might be a bit too creative for the casual user.  But I have to go back and see.  Another program like AskSam was Zoot, also a very creative way to organize information.

And, rjbull, as far as fully indexed searching, well...YES!  Why?  Because fully indexed searching will allow the program to have the search-as-you-type filter feature, which people here should know, is my number one all time greatest most favoritest thing ever.  OK, time to check out some software!

6123

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

« Last post by superboyac on March 07, 2006, 10:27 AM »

I never knew about Scrapbook, it's awesome!  The only problem now is what I mentioned before about using several programs to collect information, because each does something a little differently.  Now, I am usually totally against all-in-one solutions, but in this category of software, namely information collection and organziation, I really feel that web collecting, note taking, and organizing all have to be tightly integrated into a powerful solution in order to take this to a new level.  There are a handful of programs out there who are attempting to tackle this problem, but none of them have really blossomed to a mature state yet.

6124

General Software Discussion / Re: Mp3 catalog/database programs

« Last post by superboyac on March 07, 2006, 09:45 AM »

Yeah!  Toaster is cool, I think I just found out about it a few months ago.

As for the winamp plugins for organizing albums and stuff, I used to do that back when I had only about 500 songs.  but once you get much larger than that, you have to have something more powerful.  And remember, not everything is always on the hard drive, some are backed up on other media as well.

6125

Developer's Corner / Re: Tour of Programming Languages

« Last post by superboyac on March 07, 2006, 02:10 AM »

It's funny to hear you say that mouser.  He pretty much had me convinced, but like I said, I don't know jack about programming.  Oh well, I loved reading it, it was so freakin funny.  I think it made me realize what a cranky, computer geek I really am.