Just purchased 5.0

[wordmuse]

Despite my dissatisfaction (http://kinook.com/Forum/showpost.php?p=19662&postcount=12) with the changes in 5.0, I just purchased it anyway.

The reason is relatively simple. Assuming Kinook does continue development of the product, then it will be 5.n that shows the improvements; not 4.n.

Since I continue to greatly like and admire this product, despite my disappointment, I've concluded that it is the right thing for me to do.

It also gives me, perhaps, some small legitimacy in publicly stating my hope that the things listed on the roadmap will be implemented. Multi-database search, the keyword pane, and the several other things that I and others asked for and were quasi-promised on the road map - my desire to see these things get developed is stronger than ever.

I am hoping that by buying this release, that Kinook agrees that there is a handshake of sorts in play. And it appears that this may be the case in that I see that the roadmap has been recently updated: http://kinook.com/Forum/showpost.php?p=19662&postcount=12

- Bal

[igoldsmid]

The initial V5 clearly puts Win V8 up front. I don't know how significant (and costly to Kinook) the changes to the product would be to support Win V8 - perhaps substantial if Kinook is intending Ultrarecall work on touch screen pads & slates.

Hopefully Kinook is going to support Ultrarecall such that it supports all the touch operations, finger gestures etc. of pads/slates - and that the UR application & URD files will transfer seamlessly between desktop & mobile. That would be really great and well worth the upgrade price, and then some.

[wordmuse]

I agree fully with you in terms of hope. But even if the hoped for changes are not in the offing, the gamble on the other features in the roadmap was enough to make me hope that all our suggestions were not for naught.

- Bal

[Jon Polish]

And it appears that this may be the case in that I see that the roadmap has been recently updated:
- Bal

I hope you are right. However, I am not sure what "next release" means. Does this refer to 5.x or 6.x? These features were supposed to be included in this release. My faith is dwindling. Maybe I'm wrong - I sure hope so because I really like and depend on UR.

Jon

[tfjern]

Wordmuse!

I'm sure Kinook will be very pleased with your heartfelt tithe, but it in my opinion is completely undeserved. Version 5.0 does not by any stretch of the imagination deserve the title, "New Version." You upgraded because of what Kinook has done in the past -- UR is still a relatively good program, but now a little long in the tooth -- but the programmer (who will know what is meant by cheap grace) has kept the program virtually stagnant for the past few years, at least since 2008, coinciding with the financial crisis.

Do I get this right? You are making a 50-dollar contribution in the hope it will stimulate Kinook to begin working on the items it has listed long ago on the roadmap? Kind of risky.

[wordmuse]

Wordmuse!

I'm sure Kinook will be very pleased with your heartfelt tithe

tithe... nice reference. :)


but it in my opinion is completely undeserved. Version 5.0 does not by any stretch of the imagination deserve the title, "New Version." You upgraded because of what Kinook has done in the past -- UR is still a relatively good program, but now a little long in the tooth -- but the programmer (who will know what is meant by cheap grace) has kept the program virtually stagnant for the past few years, at least since 2008, coinciding with the financial crisis.

You got it partly right. I do have a certain affection for this program. And I agree it is long in the tooth. And I agree that Kinook often seems to be something of a stick in the mud.

But until this one time, Kinook has come through for its user community. And who hasn't been hurt by this unnecessarily prolonged recession? On that basis I do cut Kinook some slack - and hope.

Do I get this right? You are making a 50-dollar contribution in the hope it will stimulate Kinook to begin working on the items it has listed long ago on the roadmap? Kind of risky.

If you change the words "stimulate Kinook to begin" to "help enable Kinook to continue working", that's about right.

Also - as I said in the opener, if there are to be further developments, they will be on Version 5, not version 4. Unless I'm missing something. Upgrades for interim releases have so far been free. So it seemed easiest to be an early adopter of this version.

I may have acted foolishly. I wouldn't be the first time; won't be the last. But I didn't bet the farm, and time will tell.

- Bal

[schferk]

Ok, gals, let's put this straight.

Musing about the possible intentions of UR is futile; the developer is alive and monitoring this forum: it's time he gave a short statement. It's two corners of a coin, though: If he says he's obligeing to the roadmap, he'll trigger a lot of updating proceeds, but he'll feel bound to his words, then; so, staying quiet, he'll stay free to decide tomorrow or after tomorrow, or even will stay unaffected by his made decision to just do the strict minimum henceforward, as he's done for the last four years now, as has been stated above - since he gets steady revenu from his professional developers' environment, it could be that he judges proceedings from UR not sufficient to invest a lot of work here - I explained in length in the first part of that other thread.

And, let's face it - I explained in length in the second part of that thread there -, UR lives, to this point, with three conceptual or design flaws that prevent it from being able to do a real market breakthrough:

- bad accessibility for first-time users (since we ain't listened to when we specify and enumerate little things that could easily be changed but would make UR less so of an IQ test (not speaking of your endurance testing))

- missing superstructure for neat PM and neat (reference, etc.) document M (but which could be introduced, more or less, by preventing UR's "main" tree to follow expansions / collapses of its various hoisted sub-trees)

- UR making you wait for several seconds, on years-old pc's, after the slightest editing of an item (and if it's an item with much of content, all the more so - cf. MyInfo which is another relational db, with an index (or with multiple indexes) as UR is, but which handles this partial re-indexing after edits much better than UR does up to now, so UR could certainly do it better with further development - and this current behavior of UR will prevent it from broad usage on the slate market, since, as explained ibid., that's a market for slick, light programs not asking for much of processing power since slated need to work 10 or more hours in a row while weighting not even two pounds).

So, we have three conceptual flaws in UR that need to be addressed before anything else if UR is to make some living in the PIM market of tomorrow, but again, three design flaws that could rather easily be amended. And then only, a stylus-driven GUI could be envisioned, and could indeed make UR's fortune in that market since it would be the only self-contained offering for power users in need of such a system there... and as soon as one such a system will work smoothly, any businessman, etc. on the road would be happy to have it (there's a lot of CRM systems' development going on, so UR would be well advised to be a better storage system than those, in a 800g device, but without leaving out any such CRM functionality, and again, functions must be accessible, not only programmable).

But please: Mitt on screen? For UR? Good joke, man: It'd be an absurdity.

[Nobodo]

I've been a UR user for almost exactly 2 years now. I downloaded/installed version 5.0, and was surprised to see that even though it is almost exactly the same as what I bought 2 years it comes with a $50 price tag.

I see a lot of areas in UR that could be improved (and most are not in the roadmap), but sadly I do not see enough improvements over that timeframe to be comfortable shelling out another $50. I've tried making some enhancement requests, but they are met with either no response, a brief "not supported" response, or some extremely lengthy diatribe from another forum user.

Anyway, it's time to move on. Good luck to Kinook, and also to those paying in the hope that the future will bring renewed enthusiasm for the product.

Mark.

[seanferns]

Hi Mark, when you say that you are moving on, what are you moving on to ? I have tried several other competing products and don't find anything quite as flexible.

[schferk]

Price-sensitive, upgrade-reluctant users look here:

http://www.phantech.com/index.html

Or here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1uv-w5quH4

Or here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykp9QSY-feg

Which is to say, strategy must prevail in a market where there's need for cloud collaboration and for "having your things in your tablet with you when at your customer's desk" - whilst traditional offerings won't survive.

[Metta]

For what it may be worth, I took at look at the phantech application earlier this afternoon, and although it does appear to have a robust and versatile text editor, it has none of the task and project management features in Ultra Recall and upon which I heavily depend....

This means that, as a new UR user, I will continue building out my UR database since I have yet to find another application that provides the breadth and depth of functionality in UR. :)

[wordmuse]

For all its shortcomings, I still think that URP is one excellent program. The only program that I've tested (and I have tested a few) that provides a decent match to URP is Personal Brain Pro, which I also have.

What would be super, but will probably never be in my lifetime, would be to have a program that provides a superset of UPR and PB.

Even if Kinook doesn't provide what's on the roadmap, UPR is still better (IMO) than most other programs in this niche.

Obviously, your mileage may vary.

- Bal

[Metta]

Thanks, Wordmuse!

I couldn't agree with you more in terms of value URP provides -- and, FYI, my frustrations with the limitations of TheBrain (Personal Brain) are what actually lead me to the discovery of URP. Of course, the "superset" you mentioned really would be the best of all worlds.....At least we can dream. ;)

In the meantime, I'm curious how you use TheBrain in conjunction with URP. Since TheBrain provides none of the project and task management functionality I need, and since URP has such a fabulous search function, I've been wondering now about even continuing with TheBrain since I prefer NOT having all my bookmarks/links/resources distributed in multiple applications.

In addition, since TheBrain's "notes" feature is notoriously unstable, I'm hesitant to use it at all.

In light of this, any thoughts/feedback you might care to share would be genuinely appreciated.

Also, just out of curiosity: have you had any experience with the Chaos Intellect application coupled with the Docs2Manage (3rd party) plugin?

[schferk]

Again, my irony has been lost...

But seriously, in the outliner forum they whine about contenders closing down, the world is bad and cruel, etc. ... and today or yesterday, they considered bitsdujour offerings, - 35 % vs. - 50 %, musing if it was reasonable or not to decide SOLELY on the respective price. Bitdujour takes 50 % of the price users pay, and that is after the usual processing fees of the payment organizations. So a program that is 50 bucks, offered with 50 % off, is ELEVEN BUCKS for the developer.

As you can see here, those people ain't serious, and ain't coherent in what they want, and it's so evident their stance doesn't hold... (More details in my white paper here.)

In that white paper, I spoke of Thunderbird vs. Outlook, the latter being integrated in some way into UR. I more or less touted TB but from a layman's pov. I tried to import my stuff into TB (from various accounts in the web). I encountered BIG BUGS almost immediately, so I tried OL - and it worked!

Of course, there are a lot of potential probs with OL, especially so when your mail goes into tens of thousands, and filing your mails with OL alone is a pain, OL's "rules" being a joke... but all these probs have been handled by lots of people, long ago, i.e. there is sort of a very large knowledge base, spread over the web of course, and there are lots of ridiculous (and often ridiculously priced) add-ins, but also some add-ins that are certainly worth their money.

So their is a real ecosystem around and behind OL, so if you are willing to buy OL, and to buy add-ins that will double the price, you can have a fine system that will do LOTS of things you want it to do.

(On the other hand, a specialised offering like "The Bat!" seems to have a very rude developer, and seems to be buggy like hell, those bugs not being exterminated for many years now - details can be found on donationcoder.)

So, for the last 3 weeks or so, I have been using OL, after having discarded TB very quickly (= one afternoon).

It's TODAY - and that's the reason I'm writing here - that I see that TB will not be further developed, and that in fact they have ceased development some six months ago.

My reason to discard TB some 3 weeks ago was to encounter these big bugs, and I said to myself, they are doing this for a very long time now, so if there are so big and evident bugs you encounter after 10 minutes trying to "work" with that program, that's not for me - that's amateur work.

Now, I see that I was perfectly right in "going back" to OL, even when my overall opinion of MS is so bad.

At this time, virtually every developer is either "going cloud" or more or less "closing business", i.e. doing the strict minimum in order to not lose his customer base altogether, but he's not investing in big new functionality into traditional sw anymore.

So my last post above was right on the spot, as TB proves today, and sadly, UR users should get accustomed to the fact that their beloved sw will not be spiced up with really big things, to say the least - well, that's my presumption, not official kinook fact.

Another example - far away from outliners - is ViceVersa, my preferred synch tool. You wouldn't imagine they did introduce "smart" processing of renamed folders / files, let alone delta copying, and "all" their loyal (and rather high-paying) users asking for such features for years now? They simply don't do it, pretending it's too difficult (when even free contenders do it), only one month ago. The simple fact, but which nobody seems to be able to address, is: Business is taken over by cloud services, so for the respective developers, it's simply not worthwile anymore.

The irony here is that I'm cloud-adverse and always have been, but then, that's no reason to not see what's going on, and hence a far better understanding of our deepening disappointment in our general sw environment if I may say so.

If we want traditional sw, we're bound to have it from some traditional developers (i.e. OL, not TB, apart from the latter's being buggy), and we must fear that we'll get it for a very short time only; then, we can only pray that our "residual sw" will work on further operating systems, as-it-is, or we'll buy old pc's for the remaining of our lifetime - and let's face it, for many of us around here that's a perfectly viable alternative.

Two days ago, I had some more info about Win8, and, frankly, it's so much of another piece of sh** (= after those 2 MS slates revealed some days ago that ain't worth anything) that I was so shocked that I bought another (used) XP laptop (1,3 kg, 12,1", 10 hours with special battery, neat, tiny and slick, and with a keyboard).

As for mail, in the future, most people will go for something like Google, which is to say that Google, and the usual secret services, will have total access to ALL you write, design, exchange with your business contacts or prepare in order to get that contract, whatever, and here and then, a thousand or so of your mail or other files will get lost, and you'll start anew.

Wasn't it for my scripting capabilities, I'd leave my 30-years MS / "Win" ecosystem altogether for that competing one by that corpse from Cupertino I hate - with all this "new deal" they force upon us anyway, you can as well resign yourself to the "original", don't need to do with a LESSER system but that won't offer you any more specific advantages, i.e. "Windows" is as dead as it gets, and in the future will not even provide you file processing on your own hardware, or then, processed by sw that are many years old - in fact, I know what that means:

Owning several "modern" editors, I do most of my editing work with "The Semware Editor", it having some special functions I'm in need of; another example: I bought Adobe Illustrator, only to shelve it, and I do my work with the last version of Freehand, which is now more than 10 years old (Adobe bought it in order to bury it, so that their own inferior prog was sole on the market).

That FH example is a very instructive one since I also use, here and then, FH 4, which is about 20 or 25 years old (bought it back then), whilst the intermediate versions can not be installed on XP...

So all of yours who prefer to work with traditional sw face exactly this dilemma now and for the years to come, and I can only urge you to do as described here, instead of giving all your competitive knowledge over to the authorities, and your bigger contenders which will be at the receiving end of that total sellout.

Since most people don't even need these collaborative functionality they are so fond of, it must be the "new girl in town" effect - people simply did work too long with traditional sw: long enough in order to have seen they just have to think for themselves, as in old times, 30 years of sw use notwithstanding. So they conjure up a breath of fresh air to their mostly suboptimal thinking by cloud services now... will take another 10 or more years, I'm sure, before they realize that their thinking quality will not be enhanced by writing their thoughts to the cloud either.

As for my white paper, Win slates will come, so UR stylus operation will be of highest interest, and hence the interest of UR adopting my "first 20 %, last 20 %, all the rest of a line" space triggering different commands.

And no, I don't pretend to be mother teresa, it's simply that I introduced that concept 15 years in a sw only marketed in Germany at that time, and I'm afraid some thief with money will take a US patent on this (since it's of high interest for slates), so that in the future, in programs of my own, I won't even be allowed to use my own GUI specifics I had found and adopted in the late Nineties.

Sharing your ideas is one thing; not even owning your own ideas anymore is quite another.

I think that even within the above-described framework, a UR slate version won't be too much work and could bring some good to kinook, notwithstanding my staying with my file M system and that crappy, very basic outliner that doesn't even dare speak his name in a UR environment.

Metta, know that the "Brain" people are heavy, fast censors; I could have told you so long ago, and in the outliner forum it's freshly related by people that nobody would ever suspect to be censored anywhere.

And I think their graphical representation of things that at first sight literally enchants you, quickly loses its promise once you get real stuff in it (i.e. in realistic quantity also). Yes, they display some monster "brains", but you wouldn't expect to be able to do effective - or just real, even inefficiently - work with those?

Yeah, let's get real: In 5 years, most of yours won't work with anything else but cloud applics, and with the "Brain" people reading some of yours' stuff.

[schferk]

(Edit above not possible since > 10k)

Addendum:

Since my irony was lost, above: The very first link there wasn't to that inferior and buggy prog in general, but to an offering where currently it's offered for 5 or 6 dollars; if they offer it for any "normal" price in the future again, please bear in mind that my link was to a 5 or 6 dollar offering. I wanted to express: You can always get it for less, and less, and even less, near to nothing, but don't expect developers to stay in business in such circumstances. When in my white paper, I spoke of 1,000 dollars for really good sw, people here were scandalized, but that's what's going on with crm sw and with case M sw (= lawyer sw): 6- or 800 dollars p.a., and upfront even more. On the other hand, there's a lawyer, discussing on bitsdujour prices and their advantages / justification within the 10-dollar range, and some day, he even complained about a(n about) 10-dollar (might have been 12) sw he bought there, but was proud to inform fellow bargain hunters that in the end, he was luckily reimbursed! Again, we're speaking of sw costing 10 or 12 dollars. It's this stance that ruins special sw offerings that ain't adopted by the masses. BTW, in the "family and student edition" of MS Office 2010 marketed in Europe, MS has now got Word and Excel of course, then OneNote (!) - again, MS has an offering (and for "free", here), so why should many people buy alternatives? -, and PowerPoint...

Ooops, that leaves OL out! So, whilst OL is in many corporate installations, MS does NOT think any more that individual users ("student and family") would be interested in having their mail "done" with(in) OL. There seems indeed be an agreement, "individual users go cloud whenever possible anyway".

[schferk]

It's just a day later, and another partial contender is stripped to its bones. Surfulater-Desktop biting the dusk, that's not news, in fact the developer told people so some 10 months ago. (I did never buy the prog since I can't stand its colors, make me vomit.) An outliner contributor having put some stuff into that prog now links to the developer's site where latter says, in particular,

"I’ve tried to extract the essence of what is in Surfulater and simplify it as much as possible without sacrificing functionality."

Well, I was too tired yesterday to add that detail I invariably saw in desktop-to-cloud portations, Evernote being the best example of this phenomenon: As soon as a serious prog is put into the cloud, not only for the very first months it's stripped to its bare bones, as I said above, but the developers really think that will be like that forever, and good enough for the dumb cattle from which they finally charge a monthly fee (paid in advance in yearly installments, of course).

That monthly charging was not the case before since people didn't accept with desktop sw; now with cloud applics, they happily pay. If this makes you remember the content charging trick for slates when nobody paid for that very same content downloaded from the web into normal pc screens, you're right, so the shift is triple:

Make people pay for content, and make them pay, each month anew, for apps that have been stripped to the core, and that will never get some flesh on their bones anytime, since those developers pretend the cloud crowd is too dumb for giving'em some sophistication.

So, Neville Chamberlain's (or something's) "I’ve tried to extract the essence of what is in Surfulater and simplify it as much as possible without sacrificing functionality." is basically a lie or let's call it wishful thinking, and indeed,

Surfulater-desktop had a tree, with clones, and even tags, lately, whilst Surfulater-cloud will have a tag tree: gone will be the real tree, together with its tags - that must be very funny for people who got dozens of thousands of items in Surfulater-desktop, let alone the clones (you remember me saying here, some 8months ago, that UR's clone feature is perhaps its best detail, but that I didn't use clones, for fear of probs when putting my stuff elsewhere?).

Anyway, I see a big shift, from real applications to "simili"-sw, that "does" something for the user, but that does NOT really help the user to do real good work, so it's a paradigm shift from software-as-tool-for-smart-people to software-as-service-to-consumers.

We owe this in great part to the man I jokingly call "that corpse from Cupertino" - for another saying, refer above ("the cloud crowd"), but the tragedy is that everybody else swears he was right in anything, and especially, low-brow, MS now:

They also try to take 50 p.c. of developers' revenu from their "marketing" gate, and they also want to defer any applic they don't like (e.g. because they have a contract with a bigger contender that offers a minor competiting app but that will get Apple there, MS here much more money yet) from gaining access to the market, so developers are, and more and more will be, at the mercy of the "heirs" - top managers - of "God" there, Dollarbill here.

This being said, the primitive approach of developers to the cloud crowd is a very big chance to any traditional sw's developers since in making available real excellence, sophisticated details, complete functionality, they won't simply not surpassed by those cloud amateurs. (I said it here in the past, look what Evernote's developers do with all their mult-million dollar revenus: They have certainly a good life, but reinvestment into much better than so basic sw: njet.)

There is very well big real estate on the marketplace for traditional offerings... but only if they see their strength, and build up on it... not by giving the battle up and doing the strict minimum only in order to satisfy their customers.

P.S.: Gods don't die, do they?

[tfjern]

Schferk, please keep it brief, or at least briefer.

[Roaster]

I'm still holding back my order for V5 as the changes from V4.2b to V5 are not worth upgrading, unfortunately.
I'm not planning at all to install Windows 8 so far and will wait for Windows 9 which will hopefully revert the UI changes made in Win 8.

I don't understand the version numbering either as there is IMO nothing big which would justify this jump.

Just my 2ct, btw.
Michael

[tim]

schferk, 1 vote for keeping it long! You make valid points and worth the read.

Re: legacy hardware, wouldn't it be good if someone, somewhere created an open PC platform that could run old OSes and apps. There's always Linux, but why does it have to be sooo hard.

[igoldsmid]

I have to now say, that given all the threads on the new Version 5.0 with many expressing disappointment with what seemed to be a promise broken by the developer relative to the Product Roadmap - and the fact the the developer hasn't spoken up at all about any of this - having purchased an upgrade in trust and without question, I am now feeling quite betrayed. Not good.

[dasymington]

Yes, I too am regretting paying for the upgrade as a gesture of loyalty to the product and to support future development.