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Old 02-05-2006, 02:35 PM
srdiamond srdiamond is online now
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Join Date: 11-23-2004
Location: Los Angeles
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Quote:
Originally posted by sobko


my personal opinion is that UltraRecall is *too* freeform -- instead of trying to solve specific task problems, you provide a very flexible method for solving any problem, but in a suboptimal way.
I think you are saying two somewhat separate things here. Both have merit, but imo, one has more than the other.

It is true that where specialized database programs are available for professional use, they are often better than the jack of all trades products. But isn't there a need for the latter too?

But UR is in some small ways excessively free form, imo. Is there a need to allow an infoitem to contain a clone of itself? Too often i inadvertently create these, only to discover these nuisances later.

Quote:
Originally posted by sobko


All of the programs i've tried have this problem. I think that's why people love to play with these outlining programs, but noone seems to consistently use one to run there lives.
A most interesting observation. "Flexibility" has become a catechism. For better and to a slight extent for worse, UR--unlike many--actually delivers on this promise.

It seems to me, though, that UR and Mind Manager are so different it almost misleads to call them each 'outlining' programs. Outliners so-called fall in two broad classes, more fundamental than the graphical/textual distinction--thought processing programs for organizing one's ideas from a perspective; and information organizing programs, for retrieving data. Mind Manager--so it at least seems to me--is primarily the first and UR the second. UR, though, at least doesn't try too hard to be an outliner in the first sense. Whereas Mind Manager, despite being essentially an outliner in the first sense, tries very hard to cover the second function too. So it seems to me, Mind Manager is perhaps one of the worst offenders when it comes to being excessively flexible. (I think the best dedicated outliners in the first class are actually Brainstorm and NoteMap. Of the graphical outliners, Visual Mind seems to do best at maintaining its focus as a thought processor. An information organizer that is by design slightly less flexible than UR is Idea!) At least that's how the terrain looks to me.
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