topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Thursday March 28, 2024, 10:20 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Author Topic: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012  (Read 13352 times)

milenix.com

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2008
  • *
  • Posts: 19
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« on: April 21, 2012, 07:26 PM »
Our product MyInfo will be available with a great discount (61%) on April 23, 2012 at BitsDuJour. The offer will be good for both editions. Standard edition will be $19.48 and Professional edition will be $38.98.

MyInfo is a personal information manager for Windows. It will help you capture, organize, edit and share ideas, documents, tasks, and web pages.

Platforms: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

MyInfo at BitsDuJour (April 23, 2012)
More about MyInfo
« Last Edit: April 21, 2012, 07:34 PM by milenix.com »

rgdot

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2009
  • **
  • Posts: 2,192
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2012, 07:33 PM »
Pretty happy with my current info manager but may try MyInfo. Thanks for the deal :)

barney

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,294
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #2 on: April 21, 2012, 09:52 PM »
I've been going through a number of such products for about a year now.  MyInfo is superior to anything else I've used.  It has some foibles in regards to search (e.g., cannot search on flagged items- at least I have yet to find a way) and save (saving tends to lock the system, albeit briefly).  That said, it's the best such product I've found in a year or more of intensive searching.

No, I'm not affiliated  :), and yes, I paid full price for it  :(.  For my purposed, it just works  :Thmbsup:.

MerleOne

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 957
  • 4D thinking
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #3 on: April 22, 2012, 09:03 AM »
Recently tried TreeProjects, also proposed on BdJ, and I really like it : light on resources, efficient.  Lacks encryption at the moment but the developer has added many features in the past few months, hopefully this one is in the roadmap.
.merle1.

Curt

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 7,566
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #4 on: April 22, 2012, 11:30 AM »
I have studied MyInfo and am impressed. However, it doesn't stop me from saying that this kind of application, PIMs and alike, in general is much too expensive for me. MyInfo as well; the Bits du Jour price should really be the normal price, for me to be a customer.

However, THANKs for stopping by and telling, milenix.com!

berry

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2011
  • **
  • Posts: 51
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #5 on: April 22, 2012, 03:54 PM »
I have studied MyInfo and am impressed. However, it doesn't stop me from saying that this kind of application, PIMs and alike, in general is much too expensive for me. MyInfo as well; the Bits du Jour price should really be the normal price, for me to be a customer.

However, THANKs for stopping by and telling, milenix.com!

+1
However as a developer, speaking from experience, I'd like to add that a more reasonable (inexpensive) pricing model often leads to fewer sales. Our society assumes if pim1 sells for $49.99 and pim2 sells for $9.95 there's no way pim2 is going to be any good, so you get very few downloads and even fewer sales for $9.95 than you would at say, $29.95.

The psychology of selling software is mind boggling.

Curt

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 7,566
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #6 on: April 22, 2012, 04:40 PM »
The psychology of selling software is mind boggling.

-especially because some will say one or another free open source version is the better version.  ;D

My beef with these PIMs is that they basically are tabbed RTF editors using a proprietary format

-which is why I use the much simpler PageFour from softwareforwriting; plain rtf !
edited: but of course it isn't a PIM, but a software for writing ;-)
« Last Edit: April 22, 2012, 04:45 PM by Curt »

milenix.com

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2008
  • *
  • Posts: 19
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #7 on: April 23, 2012, 06:44 AM »
Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

The deal is now on:
http://www.bitsdujou...com/software/myinfo/

milenix.com

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2008
  • *
  • Posts: 19
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #8 on: April 24, 2012, 07:31 AM »
The deal is valid for today too.

yaroslavp

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2012
  • *
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #9 on: April 28, 2012, 04:20 PM »
Recently tried TreeProjects, also proposed on BdJ, and I really like it : light on resources, efficient.  Lacks encryption at the moment but the developer has added many features in the past few months, hopefully this one is in the roadmap.

Glad you mentioned it! TreeProjects 2.5 with encryption/password protection will be released in a couple of days.

rgdot

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2009
  • **
  • Posts: 2,192
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #10 on: April 28, 2012, 04:40 PM »
Glad you mentioned it! TreeProjects 2.5 with encryption/password protection will be released in a couple of days.

 :Thmbsup:

J-Mac

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 2,918
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #11 on: April 29, 2012, 01:55 PM »
I went ahead and bit on the MyInfo deal.  Now I can't find a way to import data from most other PIM/outliner software.  >:(

I'm not starting anything new with MyInfo until I find a way to get my Ultra Recall data into it. And if that's not possible then I guess I got another candidate for the round file. Getting tired of this same old shit.

Anyone here familiar with MyInfo?

Jim

barney

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,294
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #12 on: April 29, 2012, 05:45 PM »
J-Mac, you might check the UR export/MI import capabilities.  I can't test right now, on Android away from home.

I still have Info Select (IS), Ultra Recall (UR), and MyBase (MB) installed, as well as MyInfo (MI).  I have ~15 years of data in IS, maybe a year's worth in UR, ~six (6) months in MB, and another six (6) months in MI.  I'm not about to spend the time - and the frustration  :o! - to move that data into a new product, particularly when the data prolly won't completely fit  :(.  So I have access to my history in fairly short order, even though I no longer use those products on a daily basis.  Might be something to consider, provided your usages will allow it  :-\.  (For my purposes, MI comes closest to doing what I did for years in IS.)

J-Mac

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 2,918
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #13 on: April 29, 2012, 09:24 PM »
I did and to be perfectly honest - unless I am misreading them - they both suck big time. With UR you can export documents and rich text items to a folder, item attributes only to a CSV file, text items only to a rich text file, item notes to a rich text file, or items to an XML file. MI can import IE Favorites, and it looks like plugins are needed for most other imports; yet I only see two plugins on their site: askSam or Diary 2012. Of course the XML export from UR would be the thing to use, but... MyInfo doesn’t do XML. Been promising to look into it for some time now if I believe the dev's comments in his forum, but no action on it ever.

IMO, they both bite because of their poor transfer of data capabilities.

Thank you.

Jim

barney

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,294
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #14 on: April 29, 2012, 09:48 PM »
Yeah, I've been underwhelmed by the import export capabilities of any of the so-called pims  :P.  Those functions always seem to come across as afterthoughts, and seldom seem very well thought out  :mad:.  Kinda surprising - to me, anyway - considering how long XML has been around  :huh:.

[Aside:  I hate OSKs  >:( :P.]

clean

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2012
  • *
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 32
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #15 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.

J-Mac

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 2,918
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #16 on: January 05, 2013, 10:58 AM »
Thanks clean!

I agree with your statements in general though there are a few things I don’t fully agree with.

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.

Oh, yes I can blame them! I hate software that tries to hold you hostage! That said, I don’t think UR falls into that category. UR does have a lot of ways to export your data, and you can get it all out and into another program. But it ain't easy doing it piecemeal the way they have their export setup. But the true "Hostage-holding" applications are the ones that keep all your data in a proprietary format and refuse to allow any exports that aren't in that format. That way you can import the data into other copies of UR, but no other program. My opinion, anyway.

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

I never could quite see what others see in Personal Brain. If I want mindmaps I use MindJet. There is nothing else in Personal Brain that I found particularly useful. For me, that is. Takes a lot of graphics memory but I don’t see a benefit for it.

  <snipped>....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.

Well, while MI is definitely missing some important features, it accomplishes most of what I need. I'm sure it doesn’t do that for everyone, but it gets most of the stuff I need done. Or at least better than most of the other UR alternatives I have tried.

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.

UR is still installed here, though NOT v.5; I am not yet willing to pay $50 for that no-new-features, no-real-bug-fixes "major" update. Actually upon reading the forum posts there it appears that v.5 has introduced a whole new set of bugs!

Unfortunately the latest update to v.4 that I am running is still not working well for me here. A lot of freezes while doing nothing unusual in it; far too many web sites captured do not render well, if at all; and programs that once opened internally in UR now don’t. Or - and this is probably more frustrating than anything else - they sometimes do and sometimes don’t. About two thirds of the email messages stored in UR will open internally; the rest insist on opening Outlook, and some even insist on trying to open Thunderbird - which is no longer installed! All have the same attributes, the same URL, are the same format - which is associated with Outlook on my box. Why the mixed actions? Who knows. Also, trying to open a PDF file - whether internally or externally - freezes UR AND explorer. (Because explorer is the parent process when opening UR). Never used to do this. Evernote opens all the PDFs I have stored in it flawlessly. UR presntly is just very unpredictable and Kinook doesn’t seem very inclined to help.

Thanks!

Jim

clean

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2012
  • *
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 32
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: MyInfo organizer 61% discount on April 23, 2012
« Reply #17 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.
« Last Edit: January 05, 2013, 12:35 PM by clean »