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  #1  
Old 12-01-2012, 05:37 PM
armsys armsys is online now
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Vielen Dank für Ihre Antwort.
1. Annual review is uniquely my study habit, which is hardly applicable to other users.
2. I'm a contented user of UR.
3. I find the UR online manual useful and helpful, IMHO.
4. Please kindly name an online manual whish is distinctively better than UR's. Enlighten us.
5. I don't detect any connection between "chacun pour soi" and the UR, but I respect your view.
Have a niece weekend.
Enjoy using your UR.
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  #2  
Old 12-01-2012, 07:14 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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armsys, there's a problem, you ferociously deny KNOWN probs of UR (cf. the web and what people say about UR's accessibility to them, and that's generally the main reason they refrain from using it, otherwise it'd be a more than highly competitive product). I'm not entering your little game who's right and who's wrong here, I'm simply trying to EXPLAIN why people react to UR, in big numbers, as they do, and when I bring examples, it's like I had never written them down.

Such a denial, against the outlined facts, doesn't help the product you are ineptly trying to defend, and which in fact, by constructively critisizing, I potentially (if my voice is heard, that is, and which you try to combat) defend much more than you do, by instigating the actions that are highly needed in order to overcome this double virtual standstill (in sales, in development - a last word here: Those people that are able to COPE with the very special style of UR, already bought it, years ago: meaning, for broadening the customer base, UR has to make accessible its fine feature to us ordinary people, too - or let's face it: some people like elitist programs, and don't like that the plebs will gain access, too, because then, they can't feel as elitist as they felt before - and this variant does certainly apply to some), and in order for you to understand me, I'll make a last try:

You have bought this sw, and you like it. That makes 1 buy, and 1 update here and then. The problems I describe, mean that THOUSANDS of people who consider UR, do NOT buy this sw. So, when you succeed in convincing kinook and forists here that there AIN'T the double accessibility (gui, then "help" file) prob I describe, that means that nothing will ever be done about this problem that every year costs UR perhaps 1,000, perhaps even more prospects refraining from buying UR, which they would otherwise have done.

And this means that for one paying customer having his way, kinook misses about 1,000 sales a year, which means, Standard and Prof combined, and assuming that 50 p.c. would be by bits, 250 Prof 25,000, 250 Standard 12,500, 250 bits Prof 5,000, 250 bits Standard 2,500, sum total 45,000 bucks a year evaporated instead of going to the developer.

I suppose that would pay for LOTS of development - which in turn would bring many new users, beyond just bringing "back" those who too much feared the gui and the "help" file in order to buy in the first place. In a word, your stance potentially (= if you succeed in making others belief your sophisms that is, and so make them stay with their inactivity about it) HARMS the user experience of the rest of us. (And not speaking of kinook being happy or not with the proceeds.) And as for the "help" file, I've never seen any less helpful, so any help file out there is more helpful than this one, but instead of sharing your - as you say, at least partly systematized - knowledge with us, you hold it back. No problem with that, but don't make too many people believe that the current "help" file and gui (it's pleasant, but not intuitive) situations are good as they are:

No, the problems you deny are the main reason this product is not actively developed.

As said, I'm near withdrawel in front of such stubborn ignorance. As said, I'm in constructive thinking, and all this meta-communication where the output is ZERO, is very tiring, for the participants as for the bystanders, let alone the zero gain UR could get out of it.

But now let me be blunt: It will not be me who'll rewrite this (for us ordinary people out there) very unhelpful "help" file. So you better organize some collaborative efforts, or all your whining about disppointing updates will remain fruitless.

The point of departure ov this thread gone astray was system load and such, hence my question re external files and their storage within UR. My question hasn't got an answer yet, and from what I read elsewhere, I'm more and more afraid that UR doesn't offer 3 ways of handling external files, but only 2 ways: Just linking (with no update functionality, hence broken links), and with NO indexing, and then embedding, meaning importing, with indexing of SOME files, but at the cost of blowing up your db. Thus, lots of my description above was probably wishful thinking only, hence armsys stating he didn't understand, and I'd understand him, in this case. Or I'm too negative here, and UR's capabilities are nearer what I described above, than to what I describe here. All the more so a good reason to clarify what UR can do, and what it cannot.

A last word: If it's really an invariable fact that the "big guys" do rather few things, at the end of the day, instead of being developed in a way that after some years, they do almost all you would want them to do, why not going back to something lightweight, instead, and conceive your own hybrid system. In other words:

When there is really not so much to wait for, why then wait, in the first place?

Hope I'm wrong here.

Last edited by schferk; 12-01-2012 at 07:54 PM.
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  #3  
Old 12-02-2012, 01:01 AM
armsys armsys is online now
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schferk,
I appreciate your kind words.
I appreciate your utmost sincerity in helping Kinook to enhance the UR so that all users can benefit.
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  #4  
Old 12-02-2012, 11:43 AM
PureMoxie PureMoxie is online now
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It's true that if you link files and then move the folder they are in outside of UR, you would have broken links. But if you always keep the files in sub-directories of the same path as the UR database, you can synchronize those folders to UR and never have broken links:
http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Ma...ronization.htm

Linked files ARE searchable by UR (assuming they are of a supported file type like text, html, pdf, etc.).

Quote:
Originally Posted by schferk View Post
I'm more and more afraid that UR doesn't offer 3 ways of handling external files, but only 2 ways: Just linking (with no update functionality, hence broken links), and with NO indexing, and then embedding, meaning importing, with indexing of SOME files, but at the cost of blowing up your db.
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  #5  
Old 12-02-2012, 02:37 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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PureMoxie, thank you very much for this double info that both look very encouraging.


Sideline: I tried to understand the help file bit you thankfully linked to: Another example of very abstract style with which I have very big probs - which gives me a new: I did NOT understand this help bit, except for the fact that I clearly understand it's proof to what you say (not that I doubted) - I suppose that if I didn't just look at it for some minutes, but for 70 min. or so, incl. doing heavy notetaking in all the bits referenced there, I would understand much more of it (but not necessarily so).

Hence, my idea: This UR help file style, evidenced in your link, is very certainly very high-brow, and it demands lots of intelligence to write in this style (= another element in my thinking that whatever you ask an IMS to do, kinook is able to deliver it (which doesn't mean, as we all know, that they are willing to deliver it).

But: Many a people do not understand it, or do (partly or wholly) understand under the above-described circonstances, 70 min. or so for just a little bit. This means, kinook seems to deliberately try to restrict the access to this fine (but not yet optimized in every detail) prog to very intelligent people, and were it not for the forum, kinook would even succed in this policy.

In other words: By writing some 12 lines (in this case), instead of writing perhaps 40 lines but that would be immediately decipherable for us ordinary people, they would succeed in making UR's fine functionality available to many people, whilst today, they succeed at limiting its scope to sort of an elite - how many people are willing to surf around 70 min. (or make it 50, and then perhaps abandon) in order to understand just ONE bit of its functionality?

Ok, some people could then tell me, well, that's your prob, you're just dumb. Ok, I'm willing to accept that. I've said this, my IQ is about 120, not more. But then, many people are just "average" here, 100, 105, whatever, and would like to better organize themselves notwithstanding. Does kinook hate these people, or is kinook just unable to see it closes the door to all these people to begin with?

The same goes for my ideas re opening up UR to a little bit of real office use, incl. doc M (have a look at Treepad Enterprise: they have access M for workgroup needs (but Treepad is a very special case, not even an English-speaking forum, but a Portugiese/Brazilian newsgroup (no, that's not a joke))) - UR, with the current help file (and weirdness of some commands), couldn't hope to be implemented in many offices as a workgroup's general working tool, since the people working there, simply do NOT understand how it all works. So there's call for action here.

As said here, a long time ago, it's outright crazy to organize a "competition" for a better help file in which the first price is 200 dollars, or was it a free Prof licence?

On the other hand, if kinook DID real development again, and development that would assure UR, at the end of that (not-to-be-interrupted!) process, to become absolutely first-rate in every respect, well, I think that some UR users would indeed be willing to collaborate on such a help file AND accessibility of commands rehaul (both are needed), in order to get really top-notch sw.

So, in the end, we do NOT have a catch-22 situation, but just lacking good-will, it seems, and with that good-will entering the arena, lots of progress should be able to be achieved.


Back to topic :

a) If I understand well, there is linking, with the synonym (?)of "attaching" (attachment), and there is embedding, with the synonym (?) of importing, so we have 2 concepts here.

b) Both allow for indexing of those files that can be indexed by UR (so there is no difference in this respect?).

c) Embedding/importing will blow up the db, of course, whilst linking/attaching, of course, will not.

d) So, the only (???) reason to embed/import would be, avoidance of possibly broken links,

e) but if you pay close attention to what's be needed to be done in order to avoid broken links (= the help bit I didn't understand but of which I'm happy it exists, meaning "it CAN be done (if you understand how, which is the real challenge here)"), you can avoid these, even with the linking/attaching.

f) Thus, except for special cases where people would like to exchange specific UR db's containing "all the stuff", instead of quite simply transferring the UR db plus a certain file system folder, with its content: As long as you pay attention to do it right, prefer linking/attaching, since there is no further advantage with embedding/importing, but the big prob of it blowing up your db.

g) Just my assumption: In order to get the respective elements from these indexed, "attached" files, out of the UR index, when moving these files away from these "UR attachment folders", you should not process them (also for renaming and for deleting) in the file system, but from within UR.

I hope this is all correct. (As said, without understanding the respective help bit. As said, that's my "fault" - not smart enough -, but it's UR's prob: Not enough customers to be on par with UR's demands on them - this is "better" even than an asking price of 2,000 dollars barrier if you want a prog stay elitist.)
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  #6  
Old 12-02-2012, 04:11 PM
PureMoxie PureMoxie is online now
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Any file item can be linked or stored. Even imported files have the option to only be linked.

Let's say your UR db is in c:\data. If you put files in c:\data\files, you can then link to those and even if you move the whole c:\data directory somewhere else, the links will be maintained.

Whether to link or store really depends on what you are trying to do. There is some benefit to having your files stored in the database, because then you can back up or move only the UR db and still have all your files. However, if you are dealing with thousands of files, prefer a single UR database, and are disciplined enough to keep everything in the same directory path as your database, it seems to make more sense to link.
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  #7  
Old 12-02-2012, 06:19 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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"Let's say your UR db is in c:\data. If you put files in c:\data\files, you can then link to those and even if you move the whole c:\data directory somewhere else, the links will be maintained."

That's as you'd expect this. Of course, this doesn't resolve problems by renaming. (I, e.g., do lots of renaming, because of adding / changing multiple "tags" in filenames (I have stopped to do them as "comments" within ntfs metadata).

"Whether to link or store really depends on what you are trying to do."

That's confirming what I said. But you mention another aspect, which is backup. Since UR doesn't offer versioning (yet), even for backup reasons, it could be preferable to have these files stay external, and let your synch routine doing the rest, incl. versioning within your archive folder.

"Any file item can be linked or stored. Even imported files have the option to only be linked."

OMG! PureMoxie, I'm generally not into semantic nitpicking (cf. the reprimand I get when in outlinerswforum I dared use the terms "programming" and "scripting" as synonyms when in fact all I wrote about was scripting), and I'm grateful you try to clear things up, here, with me, but in this extreme case, please allow my asking again: "Even imported files have the option to only be linked." - huhhhhhhhh????

Meaning, I don't even understand what that could mean, besides the fact that I try to distinguish the different possibilities by their respective terminology, too.

And btw, UR seems to use "store" and "import" as synonyms, but I also discovered another term (I cannot find again, on top of all those to be found in my post above).

So there remains some semantic chaos, for the time being!
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  #8  
Old 12-02-2012, 09:28 PM
seanferns seanferns is online now
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PureMoxie, not quite. UR doesn't recognize that files have been moved but rather considers the file to have been deleted and recreated elsewhere. You can see this by adding Item Notes to a linked file. On moving the file to another subdirectory the notes are lost. So then UR just functions pretty much like an explorer window with file searching capability. On the other hand, if the file is not going to be moved then linking it elsewhere in the outline become very useful.
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  #9  
Old 12-03-2012, 01:37 AM
schferk schferk is online now
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Then I suppose the same is true with renaming?

In a general, this absence of even simili-monitoring of changes (renames, moves) in the file structure, of "managed files" by the prog in question (UR, MM and many others), is extremely unhandy in everyday use, and worse, it's annoying because you perfectly know how easy it would be to implement this simili-monitoring.

I perfectly understand that real monitoring would be a little bit over-the-top, i.e. to ask from such an "external" prog (= external to that file format) to monitor file changes done within the file system (from your file manager, or from within the native prog of the given file type) - in fact, good synch progs (GoodSync and Syncovery (ex-SuperFlexible) do this, but of course, they are specialised in such a task - as said, you wouldn't expect such functionality from UR, MM or such.

But simili-monitoring should be possible!

In fact, there isn't any monitoring involved here, you, the user, just refrain from ever make changes (rename, move) to such a file (= linked by UR or MM, etc.) from both the native prog of that file (!), and from within your file managers, and you'd do any such changes from within UR / MM only - which is unhandy enough.

But under this condition, it should be possible to avoid broken links from within such progs pretending to have file M functionality, too.

Btw, would be interesting to know how TB handles this task, in view of the fact that TB outrightly advertizes the file M capabilities of the prog.

As said, I very often rename files, especially those I'm working with, and so I've got a max of broken links in in AO and MM (or if I switched, in UR and MM), the most nasty problem here being that you cannot see from the link target from where (or IF, to begin with) it has been linked to.

That prob should not constantly spoil our "working experience" 30 years after the intro of the pc.

And after all, it's not even simili-monitoring. It's simply that these prog miss a function that updates the link when the prog "KNOWS" the link should be updated, since, as said, you'd do the rename / move within that very prog.

Oh yes, and then you link to one file from 2 progs, and get probs nethertheless...

It's all the fault of MS; such functionality should be implemented into the file system (NTFS), and not every single applic showing its limits. Btw, this very prob of broken links, even with native .lnk links, got me abandon my clones-within-the-filesystem system, thus my "tagging" (= codes in the file names), and hence my need to rename files again and again.

Anyway, it's so big a prob that in my numerous files, instead of linking, I just do "SEE xyz", with a description of xyz that will hopefully remain valid even after renaming xyx a little bit, and then I rely upon quick access by entering the starting chars of the file name within my file manager - a good folder system (and in which "standard" folders are accessible by one key pressing) helps here.

But it's all so cumbersome for us, because "they" do it all so amateurish. No reliable links, 30 years into the pc age, that's devastating. (Hence, the upblown db's, linking avoidance because links are managed so badly.)
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  #10  
Old 12-03-2012, 10:21 AM
PureMoxie PureMoxie is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seanferns View Post
PureMoxie, not quite. UR doesn't recognize that files have been moved but rather considers the file to have been deleted and recreated elsewhere. You can see this by adding Item Notes to a linked file. On moving the file to another subdirectory the notes are lost. So then UR just functions pretty much like an explorer window with file searching capability. On the other hand, if the file is not going to be moved then linking it elsewhere in the outline become very useful.
Thanks for the clarification. I rarely move or rename my files, so linking in UR works well for me. It's good to know all the caveats, though.

It would be interesting to see if having two synchronized folders in UR would allow moving a file item from one to another - within UR - while maintaining the UR record and also moving the file on disk.
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