TreeDBNotes vs. Ultra Recall

[mikeg]

I've read discussions about TreeDBNotes over the years. The current appearance on Bits du Jour prompted me to do a quick comparison. Let's just say my positive feelings about UR were only strengthened. Here are my comments posted on Bits du Jour, but I'm leery about doing quick-n-dirty evaluations. Any significant mistakes or omissions? I could have gone into even more UR features, but these are the things that stood out for me:

----- Comments on Bits du Jour -----
As a long-time Ultra Recall user, the positive comments about TreeDBNotes finally inspired me to take a quick look (by no means thorough or in-depth).

TDB definitely has superior rich text editing capabilities. UR's rich text editor is limited, but gets around this by letting you view/edit any document type in it's native editor and save directly back into UR. This approach is less convenient and self-contained, but gives UR more power and flexibility.

In addition to text, rich text, DOC and HTML, Ultra Recall handles a wide variety of file/document types including PDF, XLS, XLSX, DOCX, image files, etc.

Furthermore, it's possible to copy or link items into UR with drag and drop or copy and link buttons integrated into IE and Outlook. TDB appears to have only copy and paste or import of the text, rich text or html file types it supports.

I heard TDB allows multiple trees within a database which I see is true. However, it appears each tree is limited to a single template such as note, task, contact or password. UR has one tree per DB, but any type of item can go into the tree. So, for example, with UR you can have tasks in separate folders or together with related notes, docs, web pages, images, etc. without having to navigate to a separate tree.

I like the reminder/alert function in TDB better--nicer looking and includes a calendar which UR does not currently have.

UR appears to do a significantly better job of storing web pages and html-formated emails at closer to original fidelity.

UR search includes powerful full-text search and also finds words, phrases, tags anywhere within the DB. With TDB my search returned notes containing a particular word, but not contacts. Could be my search options are not set properly.

Overall, TDB seems easier to get started and use as a beginner and offers a little more in the way of eye candy. I believe UR has more power and flexibility overall, but it takes more digging and experimentation to find and use it all.

Please comment/correct any areas where lack of experience with TDB may have affected my impressions or perhaps comment on relevant plans in TDB's development roadmap.