Quote:
Originally posted by srdiamond
In addition to UltraRecall, the following outliners permit items to have multiple parents: MyInfo (www.milenix.com); ADM 3 (www.adm21.com); Idea! (www.sycon.de.com) There might be others, but none I am aware of.
Have you had the opportunity to compare UltraRecall to any of these programs with regard to 1) their implementation of multiple linkages or "cloning"; and 2) their other features.
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I had tried ADM previously and after reading your post, I downloaded MyInfo and Idea! Here are my comments on each:
* ADM - The developer claims that ADM will "change the world," but this program is a complete mess. It has a hideous user interface and I tried on several occasisions to figure it out without much success. It's one of those programs that has tons of features, but the design is so poorly organized that it's pretty much unusable.
* MyInfo - This program has a clean, intuitive user interface, and would probably be an excellent choice for simple outlining tasks. It does support cloning and it allows you to create your own fields, but the fields are the same for all the records in the database. So you would have to create a separate database for each type of information that you want to manage. I liked the design, but it's obviously in early development and at this point has a very limited feature set.
* Idea! - Idea! seems to be more of a document manager than anything else. It could certainly be used for outlining and task management but the user interface design makes you do a lot of work to accomplish simple functions. It makes a clear distinction between categories and objects, and it supports cloning in the sense that an object can be assigned to multiple categories. It's certainly a lot better than ADM, but nowhere near as clean and intuitive as Ultra Recall. The learning curve looks fairly steep and I'm not sure that there would be a payoff to spending the time to really learn it.
Idea! kind of reminds me of InfoHandler in that all the objects are created in one big list and then you assign each object to one or more categories in the category tree. Maybe I'm missing something, but there doesn't appear to be a simple way to navigate through the tree and have the filters automatically update when you click on a particular branch to only show items relevant to that branch. Instead, you have to go through a convoluted process of dragging the branches into a filter area in order to define the filter for the object list.
I have a strong bias against any application that makes me change the way I think in order to use it effectively and Idea! definitely falls into that category. One of the strengths of Ultra Recall is that it adapts to the way you think, rather than forcing you to learn the way it thinks.
In comparing the feature set of Idea! with Ultra Recall, I would say that both applications have features that the other lacks. For example, the paid version of Idea! supports full Outlook integration, which is of course a huge advantage. However, Ultra Recall has numerous features that are not present in Idea! If Ultra Recall didn't exist, I would definitely spend more time evaluating Idea! but from what I've seen of it so far, it doesn't seem to be worth the effort.
One other point I'd like to make is that it's easy to add features to any application. However, if the fundamental design of the application is not conducive to an easy, intuitive workflow, then all the features in the world won't make it better. So far I've submitted over 20 features requests to the developers of Ultra Recall, but even if they didn't do a single one of them, I'd still be satisfied with the existing functionality.