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Old 11-27-2012, 03:57 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
Posts: 151
I

"And after all - what we're all dealing with here are really just First World Problems."

As I recently retorted here, no sir! Personal computing is now 30 years old, and people who've done good things in the past, do have a certain moral obligation to continue their good work, since we certainly would not come to expect this work being done by minor developers having not done good things in the past either. In every science, there is search for development, from a conceptual pov, not only, "we want it more, we want the existing better", but in search for partial breakthroughs, for totally new ways, beginning by inventive first steps.

The current state of affairs in individual / mini-group IMS ist, development has virtually come to a halt about 10 years ago, today there is NOTHING there that would not have been there more than 10 years ago, all developers combined (I'm speaking from a conceptual pov, while acknowledging that e.g. Zoot today is "better" than the Zoot from "yesterday", with all its 32k, plain-text-only and other limitations) - perhaps the only exception from this rule being CT, but which is a wiki, with (inventive) add-ons, and it's inacceptable to establish a rule by which wikis be "outliners further developed and brought to a new level" or something like that, for the sole reason that there IS indeed some invention there, but not here.

Proof: My writings here in this forum (with their antecedents in those other fori mentioned before) clearly show that the outliner concept (incl. other and interconnected hierarchies like in TB) is far from being defunct - had I the financial means to not only do conceptional work (together with the limitation that I don't have intermediate solutions, but must abstract over several intermediate levels which better might already have been realized to rather work "from there"), but to finance the corresponding coding, that old outliner paradigm would quickly roar to totally new heights never imagined before, and I'm very well speaking of the user experience here - technical realization is one thing (and can be very complicated is you really want things simple AND powerful for the "end" user), but the ease of use, AND the ability to do everything what you might want to do, with sw, in a given work environment, is a challenge that could never be attained or fulfilled by just thinking, give people enough water, enough bread, enough medical assistance as they are in need of, and then only do something for science at such.

I do NOT want to be rude here, I don't want to emply the term "naïve" or such. But I have the right to say: In any matter you can currently study at any university of this world, 95 p.c. of what you can study there, is done, with them knowing very well that it will not have the slightest implication on hunger, thirst, "third world probs that should be overcome first". The same in art: More gifted people than we are, write novels and plays, create paintings, write music, etc. - after A.H. 33-45, the Killing Fields and all this, and BEFORE hunger and thirst in the Third World will ever become resolved.

Back to IMS's: Nope, they don't have to wait for all these much more important problems being resolved once (and Man being how he is, that might never be), before having the right to ask for being further developed, as have any other of all these things that smart and gifted people waste their time upon, instead of better saving Africa. (So, for once, I'm with the "majority pov" here.)

II

"I've been on the lookout for something that is being actively developed that can replace URP. I don't believe I'll find such a thing because the feature set in URP is too dense and unique"

That's what I've seen many months ago - there isn't any robust and viable alternative, and if ever I had to do it all "by myself" (i.e. with my money and with my concepts being put into code), lots of basic things would first have to be realized along the lines of UR as it today - all the more so it'd be a pity if UR didn't get some of my ideas, since what it has done up to now is rock-solid.

Btw, it was for exactly seeing that "no-alternatives-out-there" that a year ago I developed my alternative, hybrid system detailed here, and which is VERY usable and could constitute a viable long-term alternative, except for AO's lacking Boolean search, AO's lacking a search results (= a "hit") table, and the inability of existing indexing search tools to index AO files (meaning my complete searches with non-indexing tools take about 2 min. each for a complete search), and also, the inability of any external search tool to present the "hits" not only within their context (File Locator can do this), but to give me a clickable search results tabe from which I then could jump right into the corresponding item in AO (as is possible with the internal search tools in UR, MI, etc.) - and deep links into specific AO items (as they are possible with UR items) wouldn't harm either.

III

"while you may easily be able to capture all the actual content, you never get to capture all the connections between the content items"

What did I relentlessly preach here? No clones, no tags, since neither will travel.

No pun whatsoever intended.

Last edited by schferk; 11-27-2012 at 04:06 PM.
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