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!