New Licensed user Suggestions

[Will Eatherton]

Ok have been using UltraRecall for past week and went ahead today and bought a license today. It is a very well done (elegant) program and is currently about 90% of what I want as a compliment to outlook. The reasons that I decided to make the plunge and buy were :
-- very impressed with 1st release, hope that is good sign of what is still to come
-- like the fact that the forums seem to have good information flow with developers involved
-- like fact the company has been around for 5 years and has other products (hopefully won't go belly up or EOL this tool and leave me with tons of my time invested in moving my information into a dead-end tool)
-- like the item attributes/child/parent

After using the tool pretty heavily and also reading the forums once over top to bottom here are my suggestions.

Priority 1) Need to be about to SaveAs or pulish text items to HTML. I would like to do thinks like write mini essays or reports in ultraRecall (maybe with figures) and push it out as a single HTML file to either put on my web page or mail out. Right now I can do a print to PDF (I have acrobat) and mail that but it is not as good for posting on the web

Priority 1) Cut&Paste performance : I have been fairly busy moving 100's of IE links, Personal bran nodes, OneNote pages, and PersonalKnowbase text files into Ultrarecall (yes I have been a PIM junky in the past but am now consolidating :). There are frequent pastes of links and files (say 1MB) that take much longer the a similar paste to other programs like OneNote (for Onenote I think it is more copying files into the OneNote directory and making link rather then then moving it into a consolidated database like in ultrarecall, is this the reason for the increase delay ? ). I have seen it hang for 10's of seconds (which for IE links seems very strange).
-- If there was way to improve performance of cut and paste or link imports I think it would be very useful

Priority 2) Ability to publish to server notes as web pages would be nice in that I could eliminate any additional blog tools. I dont have a Mac but I hear Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) is a good combination of PIM and blog tool that makes it easier to quickly publish.

Priority 2) Way to set an alarm clock or tickler on any item (to have item pop up in future)

Priority 2) Maybe if general outlook sync is difficult, focusing on having synch between outlook and UltraRecall for tasks and notes that would get the majority of the benefit. With tasks and notes I believe that would help tie together the most important part of pda, outlook, and UltraRecall (the pda/outlook synch would of course be independent of UtlraRecall). I can't think of any pressing reasons why I need to synch calendar, email or contacts between outlook and ultraRecall (in past week I always have both outlook and and UltraRecall up on my desktop).

Priority 2) {copied from forum suggestion that I agree with } In long documents, it is helpful to be able to link a sentence or phase with another info item (as opposed to just linking the entire item detail to another info item). It would be nice, then, to be able to jump from a place in one info detail to a place in another info detail (or, at least, jump to another info item)

Priority 3) it would be cool to have a personal brain type viewer of the parent/child/sibling relationship in the ultrarecall database (maybe

Priority 3) would be nice on the web page to have maybe a user upload directory for folks to upload example databases, or better yet templates, ability to leverage off of other folks template creation seems very powerful

Suggestions of things not to do
-- I saw someone mention in forum the following which I disagree with, I like ability to save email from outlook in a project in ultrarecall and then later open the message up and reply to it. So please DON"T do : "- don't show 'click here to open message' if imported message was "moved" into Ultra Recall on mime viewer items"
-- I used personal brain for about a year and the docking feature (little circle icon that is always supposed to be on "top" of desktop) is superfically nice but it also seemed to cause a lot of problems (on top of presentations, accidently got clicked, always moving it around). I dont think this adds much value
-- tablet-pc and/or handwriting : I have been using tablet-pc for about a year (yes I am a gadget freak as well as a PIM freak :) and I have really tried to integrate it into my lifestyle but it just isn't working. I personally would suggest given the small market for these not to spend effort on anything special related to handwriting
-- PDA UltraRecall application. If you could do this well between palm/pocketPC I would be all for it, but I have never seen (except outlook) a PIM deploy on both PC and PDA and usable.
-- be careful about infoselect trap of adding kitchen synch (email support really scared me). I guess what most folks mean on this is please listen to me but no anyone else :) Seriously though there is an elegance in UltraRecall that you want to keep.

[kevina]

Priority 1) Need to be about to SaveAs or publish text items to HTML... We do have this capability on our todo list

Priority 1) Cut&Paste performance... When Info Items are created with new information in Ultra Recall, the information is keyworded and if the Info Item contains a url, this document must be retrieved for the keyword parsing, related icon, and for storage (if it is being stored in Ultra Recall). So if you are dragging in urls (especially to the internet), a substantial delay is possible depending on the speed of your connection, the size of the document, and the amount of text contained to keyword. If you are seeing this slow performance (10+ seconds) when cutting and pasting plain or formatted text (no related document), then something is indeed not working right.

Priority 2) Ability to publish to server notes as web pages... I assume this is related to #1 above, but includes Notes as well (and possibly the ability to publish as an RSS feed)? This is also on our todo list.

Priority 2) Way to set an alarm clock or tickler on any item... We intend to either support more native Oulook integration (so Outlook can provide this capability) or some type of reminder functionality within Ultra Recall in a later version.

Priority 2) Maybe if general outlook sync is difficult... As mentioned above, we do have better Outlook synchronization/integration on our todo list (it seems to be a fairly requested feature).

Priority 2) ...In long documents, it is helpful to be able to link a sentence...[Wiki-style Linking] This is also a feature we intend to implement in a future release.

Priority 3) it would be cool to have a personal brain type viewer... We'll add this to the list (first request received)

Priority 3) would be nice on the web page to have maybe a user upload directory.... We added that area to the forum last week...

[Will Eatherton]

I don't have too much to reply since pretty much everything was on your todo list already. Couple followups

* On performance of cut&paste it is not for simple text but on web page links (which you explain is related to keywords) and documents. I guess compared to apps line onenote the lag for MB docs is due to pushing into your single file Vs simple copying into a directory. I will live with it.

* After another week of use I remove my priority 3 request for personal brain type viewer (add-on) to visualize parent/child/sibling relationships. It woudl be nice but the parent/child windows you have actually work pretty well.

* A new issue I have noted in past week is that in text mode the support for bullets and promotion/demotion seems pretty weak (I am a heavy bullet user). I guess the request for in general a bit fancier outlining is along lines of what I think I have seen in some other posts.

* A final thought. I don't know how good the PIM business is, but if the upgrades are interesting I would happily pay 50-100 each year for notable revision upgrades. I paid $100 for oneNote and it had much less overall functionality then UR today (but better outlining at this point) and I am sure you will overtake them in next year. I am very much hoping you guys get good traction with UR and our proprietary databases don't become obselete !! :)
-- Can you give us any input on how things are going so far with user base ?

[kevina]

Better bulleting / formatting is also on our todo list.

We are fairly new to the PIM application market, but we are an established company (in our sixth year with steady growth) with a proven track record of achievement and excellent support. In the two months Ultra Recall has been on the market, it has exceeded our expectations both in sales numbers and postive feedback from our user base.

We have made a long-term committed to the Ultra Recall product, and look forward to continuing our tradition of innovation, exceptional products, and professional support with this new application.

As was mentioned in a similar post (asking about future export capabilities), we do not intend to force users to stay with Ultra Recall by making it a proprietary system with no way out, but rather by staying ahead of the competition (and having customers migrate to our product!) and ensuring that both full import and export capabilities are provided.

To be honest, we have been inspired by the positive feedback we have received for Ultra Recall to date. Thank you for your feedback and compliments for Ultra Recall.