[schferk]

Some years ago, we all craved for (real, "major") updates. Then came the MS "ribbon", and many of us were less eager to update our sw's since we realized a new digit before the dot did not necessarily mean new (useful) features, but in many cases, cosmetic changes only (and often in a way few people were fond of), but, of course, fresh money for the developer(s).

Which is to say, there has been a point in time where users's eagerness (!) to pay for updates, and developers' wish for update money, spread apart, and that was precisely that point in time where developers realized that in delivering good stuff in their majors updates did not bring them the money they expected and hence did not continue to deliver real good new stuff in their updates anymore, and so we've had a sort of a wage-price spiral, downwards, in sw quality, in sw prices (60 p.c. off on bitsdujour twice a year, with 50 p.c. of the remaining 40 p.c. going to bits), and, yes, in our willigness to pay "decent" prices for sw, when - I said it - before, we had been really EAGER to pay, in order to get all those new things and goodies and sweets:

From children (with lots of pocket money that today goes elsewhere) eager to spend our dimes on sw (updates) that were able to enchant us, we've become cynics who coldly look at so-so sw, judging that yes, it's worth 20 p.c. of the regular price going to the developer, especially in view that we pay double that price.

Just have a look at the demise of a once interesting sw, InfoSelect (versions 8 good, 9 nothing new, 10 catastrophical and a real affront to the users - search for IS in the donationcoder forum to learn the details).

Here, with UR, there have been offerings from enchanted users to help with a comprehensive help file, but from enchanted users who wanted some "consideration" in return, that meaning the developer starting development on real enhancements that would have made "worthwile" the engaging of such users into the marketing AND development process. Such offers were received with cold silence (and once there was a further affront by the developer, proposing 100 bucks for the winner of a "contest" for a better help file).

I came rather late to this, and I quickly discovered that splendid ideas (e.g. alternative views in the tree, Bonsai - development brought to a halt - being the only outliner of my knowledge to this day offering such alternative views) had been discussed within this forum many years ago, to no reaction whatsoever from the developer who obviously considered his work done, i.e. his offering good enough.

Today, I'm deeply frustrated: I've got so many good sw's on which development came to a (real or virtual) standstill years ago; I'm EAGER to spend my money for sweet new functions I'd crave for... and then I hold my money back since, yeah, I could buy updates, but I'd get the same sw for my money I already own!

So, in some instances, I updated, in pure frustration, by wishful thinking, by magical thinking, i.e. I somewhere hoped, in vain of course, that by my spending bucks, the sw in question would somehow become more "valuable" to me. Since these experiences of unnecessary spending only enhanced my frustration, I quickly gave up on such foolishness, and today, I'm spending new money for new (useful) features that enhance my sw experience; if there are none, I hold my money. As you can imagine, I'm spending almost nothing on sw nowadays, given my new criteria.

I've explained it elsewhere in this forum: UR must first do its "homework", and I mentioned four problems that deeply affect the usability of this otherwise heavyweight program:

- do away with that awful response times anytime you've edited an item, i.e. have the updating of the index delayed (by option at least) when you switch forth and back between some items, in order to do editing work; cf. MyInfo where there is an index (or multiple indexes, or, I think, one big index but also intermediate indexes in order to alleviate the charge), but no such response problem

- have a better editor to begin with, i.e. the absence of functioning of the mouse wheel within the editor is absolutely unforgivable; any cheap crap program does this right, while UR, one of those "heavyweights", just can't do it, after all those years; problem is, you scroll with the mouse wheel everywhere, so you "try" it in UR as well, only to "discover", again and again and again, that here, it's not possible; this detail works as a crippling interference to your workflow, it's not only non-intuitive, it constantly gets you off from what you're working on; as said, there are better editor components like this that a developer can buy for 500 to 800 bucks, one-time payment

- allow for formatting of tree entries. I lost all these formattings (bold, underline, italics) when importing my stuff into UR; I've been so happy ever since after re-exporting my stuff into that minor contender: anytime I need to look again into an item, have it as a temporary reference or whatever, I do a quick control-b, and it's extremely helpful and "natural" for me to have such "natural" immediate-access items, within their normal context, where creating a clone in some special "category" would be totally over the top, most of the time. It goes without saying that most of the contenders except for the most basic ones offer such formatting within the tree as a matter of course; these three details deeply affect the usefulness for new users, as does the fourth one:

- a better help file (but if UR's developer did fulfill some of our wishes, there would be more than just one benevolent contributor to a better help file, we all know this)

- whilst a real pm functionality would be preferable, as a first step it would be extremely helpful to have the very first tab in the row contain (by option in order to not constitute an offence to any legit user, but what user would not be happy to use that option from day 1 on it would be made available?) left unchanged in its expansion / collapsing state you have brought it into, by your manipulations there, unchanged by any manipulation you do to trees / subtrees / hoisted trees in any other tab (= by this making available a "super tree" for pm, not in a (preferable) special pane, but as an alternative view of your normal, big tree (users could then open this tree in tab 1, open an equally big = complete (but "living") tree in tab 2, and do their work in tabs 3...n); this missing functionality is not similar to the others mentioned above, i.e. most newbies to UR will not miss it instantly from trial day 1, but as soon as you'll have put "all your stuff" into UR, such an "unchaotic tree one" would quickly become the most important detail in UR for every current (and future) user, more important than user attributes, more important than tagging/keywords, more important than cloning, more important than everything else; the current, unavoidable synchronicity between the complete tree and any sub-trees displayed in alternative tabs, is catastrophical to UR's claim as an info manager for big data and renders that use impossible

If UltraRecall does not address the points mentioned here, it will fall into oblivion. And have a second look at MyInfo: It once was the inferior sw to UR, but with UR having been determined to be left trailing for some years now - or how are we supposed to interpret the non-introduction of features we'd be EAGER to spend our bucks on? -, the day will soon come where for every but very special uses, MI will have to be considered the superior program.

It'd be an offence to the user base to pretend that anyway, users nowadays ain't willing to spend good money. We've long been fed up with spending our good money for programs that don't fascinate us anymore, SO we want it all for cheap. If the whistles were there again - and if we didn't have to live with annoyances like those enumerated above for ten years or more in a row -, we'd happily spend our bucks again. We're EAGER to spend our bucks, but we ask for a little bit of excitement:

We wanna smooth user experience. And then we'll pay. Easy.