Why Ultra Recall is so great!

[bkonia]

Over the past several days, I've engaged in a detailed discussion with Kevin from Kinook, who is one of the developers of Ultra Recall. I started out by thanking him for developing such a fabulous and innovative application and explaining why I think Ultra Recall is so great. I then proceeded to BOMBARD the poor guy with a whole slew of suggested improvements.

In my opinion (and I've used virtually every other information manager on the market) Ultra Recall, even as a 1.0 release, stands head and shoulders above everything else out there. It's for that reason alone that I became so excited about engaging the developer in a discussion about ways to further improve the product. Pretty much every other product I've tried, completely misses the point of how information is managed in the real world, and therefore, I wouldn't even bother to get into a discussion with the developers of those products. They're usually too stuck in their limited little paradigms to see what's right in front of them.

To Kevin's credit, he has been extremely forthcoming in responding to my suggestions and he definitely has some great ideas of his own about the future development path of this amazing piece of software. Since we covered so many different topics in our email exchanges, I realized after a few days of this that it would benefit both the users and the developers of this product to move the discussion to an open forum such as this one and I asked Kevin for permission to post our previously private discussion in the forum. Of course he was more than happy to oblige.

Therefore, I've posted below, the original email I sent to Kevin that opened our discussion. Then if you click over to the Ultra Recall -> Suggestions forum, you'll find that I have created a separate thread for each of our discussion points. I invite everyone else who's using, or considering using this product to join in our conversation. I myself am an information management junkie. I spent YEARS searching for the ultimate information management product before I finally found Ultra Recall. If you're enough of an information management geek to be reading this posting, then I'd love to hear what you have to say, and I'm sure the good people at Kinook would join me in welcoming you to the discussion.

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HERE'S MY ORIGINAL EMAIL TO KEVIN:

First, let me congratulate you on developing this application. Over the years, I've used dozens of information management applications and have always come away frustrated. Some of the products I've used include InfoSelect, InfoHandler, PersonalBrain, Zoot, Shadow Plan and many, many others. Each of these applications had certain unique advantages, but inevitably had at least one major flaw that caused me to give up on it.

I think the biggest challenge in developing an information manager is in striking a balance between the rigidity of a hierarchical tree structure and the chaos of a free-form design. For example, the original InfoSelect was completely free-form which made it very easy to enter information and easy to retrieve the information via their search function. However, after using that for a while, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed by the lack of any kind of order to my information database. Yes, I was able to retrieve any piece of information in an instant, but I was unable to do any kind of planning or organized thinking, because the information was scattered everywhere.

Later versions of InfoSelect added the tree structure, but then I found myself too constrained by having to choose where to place each item in the hierarchy. Many items can logically be placed in multiple locations throughout the tree, but InfoSelect doesn't support this functionality. Besides that, their interface design has always been horrendus and the application has become increasingly bloated with useless features. I mean, does a PIM really need to have an image editor built into it??? One thing I love about Ultra Recall is your clean, professional and consistent interface design. I wish more programmers would stick with the standard Windows look/feel, rather than constantly trying to re-invent the wheel.

Of course as you've probably guessed, the main reason I love Ultra Recall and the reason I registered it so quickly is your Logical Linking technology. This concept seems so simple and obvious to me, yet it's amazing how so few outliners permit items to have multiple parents.

The fact that this is only a 1.0 release makes your accomplishment all the more impressive. You probably have your own plans for future enhancements to the product, however, I created a wish list of some specific features that I'd like to see in future versions of Ultra Recall. Please let me know if you're interested in taking a look at my suggestions and perhaps opening a feedback dialog with a (so far) very happy customer!

[PureMoxie]

Brad,

I appreciate your posting of suggestions to the forums. Provides some good food for thought. As I have time, I'll add some of my thoughts to your suggestions.

Like you, I feel like I've tried every information management application out there. I think you hit the nail on the head in regard to Ultra Recall having the proper balance between free-form and structure.

While I outlined the major strengths to me in my blog review (see link in Suggestions forum), frankly it is the sum of all the well-done details that is really making me the most happy about Ultra Recall. It's a very comfortable and powerful app to live in for ongoing daily information management, and I'm actually quite amazed that I haven't hit any frustrating limitations yet.

It's also great that it's not just a v1 release with some good ideas that may come to fruition at some indeterminate point in the future. It's already a very stable, usable tool. As it stands now, I feel good about dumping my stuff in and any future enhancements are just going to be icing on the cake.

[bkonia]

Hi Chris,

I read your excellent review and agree with everything you said. I feel the same way about Ultra Recall. There are many features I'd like to see added to it, but even as a 1.0 release it's better than anything else I've tried. Like you, I almost didn't try it, because at first glance it appeared to be just another simplistic outliner application.

After Ecco was taken off the market, I bounced back and forth for years, between InfoSelect, ShadowPlan, InfoHandler and PersonalBrain. I even tried apps like Microsoft OneNote and Agilix GoBinder, but I always ended up feeling that the information was controlling me, rather than the other way around. Now that I've started putting everything into Ultra Recall, I feel like a great weight has been lifted and I'm finally able to get a handle on all the complexities of my life.

I noticed that you also gave a very favorable review to NoteStudio. Coincidentally, I briefly toyed with NoteStudio prior to discovering Ultra Recall, but I never made a serious effort to use it because I felt that its completely free-form design would lead to my ending up with another big mess on my hands. However, I'm very intrigued by the whole wiki concept and I think it would have tremendous potential if it was implemented within the confines of a highly structured application like Ultra Recall. One of my postings in the Suggestions forum is a long back and forth conversation I had with Kevin about this.

Imagine how powerful a "wiki-ized" Ultra Recall would be. It woud truly give you the best of both worlds. You'd have all your information arranged in a neatly structured hierarchy, yet at the same time, you'd be able to create unlimited associations between items and jump around randomly through the tree by linking any text to any Info Item in the Data Explorer. Other outliners, like InfoSelect, support linking, but only between nodes on the tree, not by creating hyperlinks within the actual content of the node.

[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.

Originally posted by bkonia


Of course as you've probably guessed, the main reason I love Ultra Recall and the reason I registered it so quickly is your Logical Linking technology. This concept seems so simple and obvious to me, yet it's amazing how so few outliners permit items to have multiple parents.

[bkonia]

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.

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.

[PureMoxie]

Yeah, I do like Note Studio for what it is: a very simple, usable tool for completely organic organizing. Ultimately, however, I need a little more structure than it provides, and since I also deal with various types of documents and images in my work, it makes sense to me to integrate a lot of that into one tool instead of just linking to external files for everything.

One benefit of the "single file" approach that Ultra Recall offers is that I can take my work onto my laptop simply by copying that one file and I then have access to all my important documents, project materials, etc.

I also think MyInfo is okay for what it offers, but the main drawback for me was also that I would need to manage quite a few different files to accomplish my information management tasks. The flexibility of Ultra Recall's item attributes lets me do pretty much everything I want to do within one file.

I have mixed feelings about ADM. I do think it offers a unique approach, and I think it does facilitate quick brainstorming. However, the interface just isn't as intuitive or stable as UR.

One of the drawbacks of any of the more storage/retrieval oriented tools, including UR, are that they are less effective for quick outlining for brainstorming, at least in the sense that each brainstormed thought becomes its own item. This is certainly possible to do in the tree, but I find I still BrainStorm preferable for this sort of work. At the end of a brainstorming session, I can simply write the BrainStorm file to a text file and include this in UR for reference.

[srdiamond]

Originally posted by bkonia

* 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.

Actually, I think Idea's learning curve is more apparent than real. It is somewhat unconventional as a Windows program, but there tend to be compelling reasons for its deviations. For instance, to navigate through the tree in the manner you describe, you merely have to check the little box labeled "AF" (Automatic Filter). But you're not the only one who didn't see it, and the documentation hasn't completely caught up with the program. Fortunately the tech support is superb. If you emailed the developer with your filter question, for example, you would probably have gotten an immediate answer.

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.

I'm not sure I agree with your bias against programs requiring a change in the way you think. A potentially very interesting topic, once we got around to defining what constitutes a way of thinking.

But I see Idea! as a particularly flexible program, that doesn't require much change in the way one works , not to mention changing how one thinks. Basically the process is that one building an outline independently of the list of items, which is organized by dragging the items to the outline topics. The outline topics can then be used as implicit Boolean classes to form conjuncts and disjuncts.

I see Idea! and Ultra Recall as being the most sophisticated structured free form information managers available today. MyInfo may join their ranks with version 3, which is still in beta and I haven't seen, but is being previewed on its site.

But I'm inclined to think that in comparing these products, one should look primarily not at their additional features but at their basic method of cloning topics, which is central to both. The difference is this. In Idea you can "link" items only to elements of an outline structure. This is an outline structure one has presumably optimized for one's purposes. It is, so to speak, a priori, relative to the items that form the data. Documents can only be linked as 'children' to this structure, as contrasted with UR, which lets you link anything to anything but itself. In UR the clone of a parent can even be linked as a child of the parent's child.

Although I'm not privy to the developer's thinking, I suspect Idea! is motivated by recent work in library science on 'faceted classification.' It is quite the in topic in the knowledge management field. It requires an outline structure of keywords which satisfy certain constraints, but as a practical matter for personal knowledge management, these constraints, such as independent parent concepts, each with a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of children, are relaxed. You can see why an independently constructed outline would be necessary to implement this vision. I would at least suppose that this vision actually animates Idea! UR, on the other hand, appears to be animated by a purely original insight into the most direct way to impose hierarchical linkages on items with the least artificial constraints.

If anybody has any thoughts or information that can be leveraged to compare efficiency of Idea! and UR with different kinds of free form data, that could be very useful to everyone. A preliminary guess is that Idea! might be superior to the extent that the data can be approximated by a faceted hierarchy, but that begs the real question: how close is close enough.

InfoHandler implements a more rigorous version of faceted organization. I think it may do better with collections than free form notes, but I haven't actually tried it. It's hard to know how good any of these approaches really are without trying them, but trying involves a pretty major investment of effort. Clarifying the differences analytically, one can only hope, may bypass some of the trial and error.

[srdiamond]

Originally posted by bkonia

* 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. … 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.

ADM tries to unify the brainstorming, information gathering, and even the writing phase of a project. People differ on whether this ambition is best viewed as bold or as grandiose. Maybe it's encouraging that some veteran's say the DOS program GrandView had already once achieved this.

So far the price of unification is inferiority to the top products design for a single purpose. As someone else mentioned, BrainStorm is a lot better for brainstorming; I would say that UR and Idea! are clearly better for data gathering. If you want a unified approach, however, it may be the only product on offer for Windows. And the outliner is very powerful, probably the most powerful Windows outliner today. The problem is it isn't very ergonomic, although it's not bad for simple brainstorming. Pure outlining, unfortunately, is more about ergonomics than anything else. Not only BrainStorm but NoteMap does better.

What I most miss in UR is the ability to outline within a note. ADM doesn't have this either, but it's outlining is sufficiently robust that the outline pane can be used for notetaking purposes. In Windows today only MS OneNote gives you outlining within notes, but then, it lacks outlining of notes, a pretty basic shortcoming.

Just as writers have different styles, that make some products more suitable for some or make flexible products suitable for all [is there a division of schools of thought on this question?] so developers have different ways of organizing the development process. Or so it seems to me, a non-programmer. I don't think it is necessarily illegitimate to first proliferate features and then figure out how they are best organized. This seems to have been Microsoft's style, particularly in the development of WinWord and MacWord. It encountered a lot of criticism in the first phase, but the consensus today is that Word has become a pretty good product. The interface was refined later rather than first. To me--again a non-programmer--this makes some sense, because the optimal interface will be a function of the feature set, not the other way around.

But you need to have some confidence in the developer--a lot of confidence--to buy into a product on the implied promise that it will eventually become ergonomic. It is easier to trust a company like Kinook, which doesn't release its product unless it has matured significantly both in feature set and interface.

[srdiamond]

Apart from linking, UR has other features available only in the top organizers: selection of multiple, non-contiguous topics; tabbed interface (or the equivalent of one: with multiple selected notes, the child list turns into an open topic list); and unlimited undo.

In fact, UR is to my knowledge the only multi-pane outliner on Windows with unlimited universal undo. It may be the only database application period with this feature. Microsoft has gone far in implementing undo widely, but in OneNote most but not all operations are subject to the undo and redo commands.

I don't know why programmers fail to implement undo in the tree portion of a multi-pane outliner, but this is true even where the program displays souped up outlining features that cry out for undoability. In ADM the tree is simply not subject to undo, and in notes there is only a single undo possible. Universal undo gives the user the greatest freedom to experiment, vital to this kind of program, and it seems that Kinook alone sees this necessity.

[srdiamond]

Originally posted by bkonia
<deletion>
Imagine how powerful a "wiki-ized" Ultra Recall would be. It woud truly give you the best of both worlds. You'd have all your information arranged in a neatly structured hierarchy, yet at the same time, you'd be able to create unlimited associations between items and jump around randomly through the tree by linking any text to any Info Item in the Data Explorer. Other outliners, like InfoSelect, support linking, but only between nodes on the tree, not by creating hyperlinks within the actual content of the node.

I would prefer an approach that's more consistent with UR's core approach, logical linking. A hyperlink is just an _undirected_ logical link. I suppose it could be faster if you want to link siblings without creating a parent, but the price is that you have potential elements of a hierarchy to which you can't apply much of the machinery of logical linking.

The way to set up a fully cross-indexed hierarchical database is to use multiple outline hierachies that cross-classify the data. (As in the cutting edge knowledge management approach called 'facet analysis.') Instead of hyperlinking, the poor cousin of logical linking, what UR needs is a way to send clones to multiple points in the data structure at once.

Stephen R. Diamond

[bkonia]

Stephen,

I couldn't disagree with you more.

In my view, UR's logical links are not links at all...they are clones. Clones are well-suited towards creating the cross-indexed hierarchical database you described, but this is a completely different concept from linking.

A hyperlink is a way of associating keywords, in-context, with related information that may be located in other topics. For example, suppose I was writing an article on New York restaurants. The article might mention many different restaurants, and it would be convenient for the reader to be able to click on the name of each restaurant and be taken to a page containing more detailed information on that restaurant. This hyperlink could either take the reader to the restaurant's website, or it could take him to another topic within UR containing information on that restaurant.

This is one of the advantages that MyInfo 3 offers over UR. MyInfo does provide cloning, but it also allows the user to create hyperlinks to other documents within the actual text of a document.

[srdiamond]

The "logical linking" alternative is to clone the references to each restaurant as subordinate to your article (article parent, clones, children).

If the article is for the internet, hyperlinks would probably be the way to make the connection. In a outliner-based database, it seems to me that the economy and elegance of a single approach--and the superiority of logical links in denoting relations more specific than that they are somehow linked--should take the front seat.

There might be a slight efficiency gain with hyperlinks in reading, but clones (or logical links) will be much faster to create. You just select the various restaurant references, discontiguously if necessary, and then drag together to subordinate their clone to your article.

But it should be equally easy to do the reverse--to send one restaurant as a clone to multiple locations at the same time.

Stephen Diamond

[bkonia]

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. You cannot use logical links to perform in-context linking. A logical link can only link two objects at the object level. It cannot be used to form a link between a keyword within a document and some other document.

There may be various alternatives, such as the method you proposed above, but none of these alternatives will link within context and that is my entire point. I also think it's a bit ridiculous for you to refer to hyperlinking as the "poor cousin" of logical linking. The "wiki" organizational paradigm is very different from, yet complementary to the cloning paradigm. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and each serves a very different purpose. Cloning is more structured, yet also more limiting. Hyperlinking is less structured but provides for an infinite number of possibilities for linking objects by providing the user with the ability to link from specific text within the object.

I've always felt that the ideal application would be one that could offer the best of both worlds - the structure of an outliner with the power of a wiki. MyInfo has accomplished this and at this point it is the only application I'm aware of that has both outlining and wiki capabilities.

[srdiamond]

The road to software hell is paved with wishes
for "the best of both worlds." Features that work well apart--cloning and hyperliking--limit the power of each when combined. Of course the user can simply refuse to use one, but the desire to accommodate features serving "very different purposes" will hamstring the developer, as he tries to accommodate an incoherent combination of functions.

You are discussing this at too concrete a level, when you infer that logical linking is inadequate because it can't accommodate references to contextual links. The question is how well it can accommodate the knowledge management function that they serve. Obviously, if you start with the premise that you need contextual links, you will end with the conclusion that you need hyperlinks. But if you start with the premise that you need to be able to easily access matter related to particular references in your note, you might conclude as I do that the most efficient and effective way to do that is with child logical links. UR gives you immediate access to the children in their own window, for god's sake. UR should build its features in an integrated way, not introduce the redundancy of hyperlinks and encouraging users to link in ways not supported by UR's core machinery, which is built on logical linking.

You said you didn't like programs that changed the way you think. I'm tempted to say, in light of your tone ("ridiculous" etc.) that you also don't like _arguments_ that threaten to change the way you think. But I'll limit myself to saying that you may resist doing things by a superior means, logical linking, that you are accustomed to accomplish with hyperlinks.

Stephen R. Diamond

Originally posted by bkonia
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. You cannot use logical links to perform in-context linking. A logical link can only link two objects at the object level. It cannot be used to form a link between a keyword within a document and some other document.

There may be various alternatives, such as the method you proposed above, but none of these alternatives will link within context and that is my entire point. I also think it's a bit ridiculous for you to refer to hyperlinking as the "poor cousin" of logical linking. The "wiki" organizational paradigm is very different from, yet complementary to the cloning paradigm. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and each serves a very different purpose. Cloning is more structured, yet also more limiting. Hyperlinking is less structured but provides for an infinite number of possibilities for linking objects by providing the user with the ability to link from specific text within the object.

I've always felt that the ideal application would be one that could offer the best of both worlds - the structure of an outliner with the power of a wiki. MyInfo has accomplished this and at this point it is the only application I'm aware of that has both outlining and wiki capabilities.

[bkonia]

Actually, I enjoy arguments that change the way I think. The problem is that your argument is weak and your tone is dictatorial. I'm not sure who appointed you the ultimate arbitrer of outliner software design, but I flat out disagree with your assumptions and I find your logic to be flawed.

You accuse me of discussing this at "too concrete" a level. I'll counter that by stating that you are discussing this at too theoretical a level and furthermore that your underlying theory is simply wrong. This is because you start with the assumption that in-context links are of no use. OK, that's your opinion and perhaps you yourself have no use for these types of links. Many other people would disagree with you and would find these links extremely useful.

You then go on to state that if "you need to be able to easily access matter related to particular references in your note, you might conclude as I do that the most efficient and effective way to do that is with child logical links." YOU might conclude that, Stephen. I might conclude otherwise!

Yes, logical linking has its place and yes it's a very useful feature. However, it doesn't take a genius to see the value of being able to link from within a document, rather than creating child links outside the document and having to search through all your child links to find the one document that is related to the keyword of interest.

Ultimately your primary argument seems to be that adding hyperlinking capability to UR would somehow detract from its logical linking capability. Once again, you're in realm of the abstract rather than dealing with reality. It would be no great programming task to add hyperlinking capability and it would not detract in any way from logical linking. I wonder if you could explain to me how the hyperlinking in MyInfo has detracted from its cloning capability?