Just purchased 5.0

[Metta]

For what it may be worth, I took at look at the phantech application earlier this afternoon, and although it does appear to have a robust and versatile text editor, it has none of the task and project management features in Ultra Recall and upon which I heavily depend....

This means that, as a new UR user, I will continue building out my UR database since I have yet to find another application that provides the breadth and depth of functionality in UR.

[wordmuse]

For all its shortcomings, I still think that URP is one excellent program. The only program that I've tested (and I have tested a few) that provides a decent match to URP is Personal Brain Pro, which I also have.

What would be super, but will probably never be in my lifetime, would be to have a program that provides a superset of UPR and PB.

Even if Kinook doesn't provide what's on the roadmap, UPR is still better (IMO) than most other programs in this niche.

Obviously, your mileage may vary.

- Bal

[Metta]

Thanks, Wordmuse!

I couldn't agree with you more in terms of value URP provides -- and, FYI, my frustrations with the limitations of TheBrain (Personal Brain) are what actually lead me to the discovery of URP. Of course, the "superset" you mentioned really would be the best of all worlds.....At least we can dream.

In the meantime, I'm curious how you use TheBrain in conjunction with URP. Since TheBrain provides none of the project and task management functionality I need, and since URP has such a fabulous search function, I've been wondering now about even continuing with TheBrain since I prefer NOT having all my bookmarks/links/resources distributed in multiple applications.

In addition, since TheBrain's "notes" feature is notoriously unstable, I'm hesitant to use it at all.

In light of this, any thoughts/feedback you might care to share would be genuinely appreciated.

Also, just out of curiosity: have you had any experience with the Chaos Intellect application coupled with the Docs2Manage (3rd party) plugin?

[schferk]

Again, my irony has been lost...

But seriously, in the outliner forum they whine about contenders closing down, the world is bad and cruel, etc. ... and today or yesterday, they considered bitsdujour offerings, - 35 % vs. - 50 %, musing if it was reasonable or not to decide SOLELY on the respective price. Bitdujour takes 50 % of the price users pay, and that is after the usual processing fees of the payment organizations. So a program that is 50 bucks, offered with 50 % off, is ELEVEN BUCKS for the developer.

As you can see here, those people ain't serious, and ain't coherent in what they want, and it's so evident their stance doesn't hold... (More details in my white paper here.)

In that white paper, I spoke of Thunderbird vs. Outlook, the latter being integrated in some way into UR. I more or less touted TB but from a layman's pov. I tried to import my stuff into TB (from various accounts in the web). I encountered BIG BUGS almost immediately, so I tried OL - and it worked!

Of course, there are a lot of potential probs with OL, especially so when your mail goes into tens of thousands, and filing your mails with OL alone is a pain, OL's "rules" being a joke... but all these probs have been handled by lots of people, long ago, i.e. there is sort of a very large knowledge base, spread over the web of course, and there are lots of ridiculous (and often ridiculously priced) add-ins, but also some add-ins that are certainly worth their money.

So their is a real ecosystem around and behind OL, so if you are willing to buy OL, and to buy add-ins that will double the price, you can have a fine system that will do LOTS of things you want it to do.

(On the other hand, a specialised offering like "The Bat!" seems to have a very rude developer, and seems to be buggy like hell, those bugs not being exterminated for many years now - details can be found on donationcoder.)

So, for the last 3 weeks or so, I have been using OL, after having discarded TB very quickly (= one afternoon).

It's TODAY - and that's the reason I'm writing here - that I see that TB will not be further developed, and that in fact they have ceased development some six months ago.

My reason to discard TB some 3 weeks ago was to encounter these big bugs, and I said to myself, they are doing this for a very long time now, so if there are so big and evident bugs you encounter after 10 minutes trying to "work" with that program, that's not for me - that's amateur work.

Now, I see that I was perfectly right in "going back" to OL, even when my overall opinion of MS is so bad.

At this time, virtually every developer is either "going cloud" or more or less "closing business", i.e. doing the strict minimum in order to not lose his customer base altogether, but he's not investing in big new functionality into traditional sw anymore.

So my last post above was right on the spot, as TB proves today, and sadly, UR users should get accustomed to the fact that their beloved sw will not be spiced up with really big things, to say the least - well, that's my presumption, not official kinook fact.

Another example - far away from outliners - is ViceVersa, my preferred synch tool. You wouldn't imagine they did introduce "smart" processing of renamed folders / files, let alone delta copying, and "all" their loyal (and rather high-paying) users asking for such features for years now? They simply don't do it, pretending it's too difficult (when even free contenders do it), only one month ago. The simple fact, but which nobody seems to be able to address, is: Business is taken over by cloud services, so for the respective developers, it's simply not worthwile anymore.

The irony here is that I'm cloud-adverse and always have been, but then, that's no reason to not see what's going on, and hence a far better understanding of our deepening disappointment in our general sw environment if I may say so.

If we want traditional sw, we're bound to have it from some traditional developers (i.e. OL, not TB, apart from the latter's being buggy), and we must fear that we'll get it for a very short time only; then, we can only pray that our "residual sw" will work on further operating systems, as-it-is, or we'll buy old pc's for the remaining of our lifetime - and let's face it, for many of us around here that's a perfectly viable alternative.

Two days ago, I had some more info about Win8, and, frankly, it's so much of another piece of sh** (= after those 2 MS slates revealed some days ago that ain't worth anything) that I was so shocked that I bought another (used) XP laptop (1,3 kg, 12,1", 10 hours with special battery, neat, tiny and slick, and with a keyboard).

As for mail, in the future, most people will go for something like Google, which is to say that Google, and the usual secret services, will have total access to ALL you write, design, exchange with your business contacts or prepare in order to get that contract, whatever, and here and then, a thousand or so of your mail or other files will get lost, and you'll start anew.

Wasn't it for my scripting capabilities, I'd leave my 30-years MS / "Win" ecosystem altogether for that competing one by that corpse from Cupertino I hate - with all this "new deal" they force upon us anyway, you can as well resign yourself to the "original", don't need to do with a LESSER system but that won't offer you any more specific advantages, i.e. "Windows" is as dead as it gets, and in the future will not even provide you file processing on your own hardware, or then, processed by sw that are many years old - in fact, I know what that means:

Owning several "modern" editors, I do most of my editing work with "The Semware Editor", it having some special functions I'm in need of; another example: I bought Adobe Illustrator, only to shelve it, and I do my work with the last version of Freehand, which is now more than 10 years old (Adobe bought it in order to bury it, so that their own inferior prog was sole on the market).

That FH example is a very instructive one since I also use, here and then, FH 4, which is about 20 or 25 years old (bought it back then), whilst the intermediate versions can not be installed on XP...

So all of yours who prefer to work with traditional sw face exactly this dilemma now and for the years to come, and I can only urge you to do as described here, instead of giving all your competitive knowledge over to the authorities, and your bigger contenders which will be at the receiving end of that total sellout.

Since most people don't even need these collaborative functionality they are so fond of, it must be the "new girl in town" effect - people simply did work too long with traditional sw: long enough in order to have seen they just have to think for themselves, as in old times, 30 years of sw use notwithstanding. So they conjure up a breath of fresh air to their mostly suboptimal thinking by cloud services now... will take another 10 or more years, I'm sure, before they realize that their thinking quality will not be enhanced by writing their thoughts to the cloud either.

As for my white paper, Win slates will come, so UR stylus operation will be of highest interest, and hence the interest of UR adopting my "first 20 %, last 20 %, all the rest of a line" space triggering different commands.

And no, I don't pretend to be mother teresa, it's simply that I introduced that concept 15 years in a sw only marketed in Germany at that time, and I'm afraid some thief with money will take a US patent on this (since it's of high interest for slates), so that in the future, in programs of my own, I won't even be allowed to use my own GUI specifics I had found and adopted in the late Nineties.

Sharing your ideas is one thing; not even owning your own ideas anymore is quite another.

I think that even within the above-described framework, a UR slate version won't be too much work and could bring some good to kinook, notwithstanding my staying with my file M system and that crappy, very basic outliner that doesn't even dare speak his name in a UR environment.

Metta, know that the "Brain" people are heavy, fast censors; I could have told you so long ago, and in the outliner forum it's freshly related by people that nobody would ever suspect to be censored anywhere.

And I think their graphical representation of things that at first sight literally enchants you, quickly loses its promise once you get real stuff in it (i.e. in realistic quantity also). Yes, they display some monster "brains", but you wouldn't expect to be able to do effective - or just real, even inefficiently - work with those?

Yeah, let's get real: In 5 years, most of yours won't work with anything else but cloud applics, and with the "Brain" people reading some of yours' stuff.

[schferk]

(Edit above not possible since > 10k)

Addendum:

Since my irony was lost, above: The very first link there wasn't to that inferior and buggy prog in general, but to an offering where currently it's offered for 5 or 6 dollars; if they offer it for any "normal" price in the future again, please bear in mind that my link was to a 5 or 6 dollar offering. I wanted to express: You can always get it for less, and less, and even less, near to nothing, but don't expect developers to stay in business in such circumstances. When in my white paper, I spoke of 1,000 dollars for really good sw, people here were scandalized, but that's what's going on with crm sw and with case M sw (= lawyer sw): 6- or 800 dollars p.a., and upfront even more. On the other hand, there's a lawyer, discussing on bitsdujour prices and their advantages / justification within the 10-dollar range, and some day, he even complained about a(n about) 10-dollar (might have been 12) sw he bought there, but was proud to inform fellow bargain hunters that in the end, he was luckily reimbursed! Again, we're speaking of sw costing 10 or 12 dollars. It's this stance that ruins special sw offerings that ain't adopted by the masses. BTW, in the "family and student edition" of MS Office 2010 marketed in Europe, MS has now got Word and Excel of course, then OneNote (!) - again, MS has an offering (and for "free", here), so why should many people buy alternatives? -, and PowerPoint...

Ooops, that leaves OL out! So, whilst OL is in many corporate installations, MS does NOT think any more that individual users ("student and family") would be interested in having their mail "done" with(in) OL. There seems indeed be an agreement, "individual users go cloud whenever possible anyway".

[schferk]

It's just a day later, and another partial contender is stripped to its bones. Surfulater-Desktop biting the dusk, that's not news, in fact the developer told people so some 10 months ago. (I did never buy the prog since I can't stand its colors, make me vomit.) An outliner contributor having put some stuff into that prog now links to the developer's site where latter says, in particular,

"I’ve tried to extract the essence of what is in Surfulater and simplify it as much as possible without sacrificing functionality."

Well, I was too tired yesterday to add that detail I invariably saw in desktop-to-cloud portations, Evernote being the best example of this phenomenon: As soon as a serious prog is put into the cloud, not only for the very first months it's stripped to its bare bones, as I said above, but the developers really think that will be like that forever, and good enough for the dumb cattle from which they finally charge a monthly fee (paid in advance in yearly installments, of course).

That monthly charging was not the case before since people didn't accept with desktop sw; now with cloud applics, they happily pay. If this makes you remember the content charging trick for slates when nobody paid for that very same content downloaded from the web into normal pc screens, you're right, so the shift is triple:

Make people pay for content, and make them pay, each month anew, for apps that have been stripped to the core, and that will never get some flesh on their bones anytime, since those developers pretend the cloud crowd is too dumb for giving'em some sophistication.

So, Neville Chamberlain's (or something's) "I’ve tried to extract the essence of what is in Surfulater and simplify it as much as possible without sacrificing functionality." is basically a lie or let's call it wishful thinking, and indeed,

Surfulater-desktop had a tree, with clones, and even tags, lately, whilst Surfulater-cloud will have a tag tree: gone will be the real tree, together with its tags - that must be very funny for people who got dozens of thousands of items in Surfulater-desktop, let alone the clones (you remember me saying here, some 8months ago, that UR's clone feature is perhaps its best detail, but that I didn't use clones, for fear of probs when putting my stuff elsewhere?).

Anyway, I see a big shift, from real applications to "simili"-sw, that "does" something for the user, but that does NOT really help the user to do real good work, so it's a paradigm shift from software-as-tool-for-smart-people to software-as-service-to-consumers.

We owe this in great part to the man I jokingly call "that corpse from Cupertino" - for another saying, refer above ("the cloud crowd"), but the tragedy is that everybody else swears he was right in anything, and especially, low-brow, MS now:

They also try to take 50 p.c. of developers' revenu from their "marketing" gate, and they also want to defer any applic they don't like (e.g. because they have a contract with a bigger contender that offers a minor competiting app but that will get Apple there, MS here much more money yet) from gaining access to the market, so developers are, and more and more will be, at the mercy of the "heirs" - top managers - of "God" there, Dollarbill here.

This being said, the primitive approach of developers to the cloud crowd is a very big chance to any traditional sw's developers since in making available real excellence, sophisticated details, complete functionality, they won't simply not surpassed by those cloud amateurs. (I said it here in the past, look what Evernote's developers do with all their mult-million dollar revenus: They have certainly a good life, but reinvestment into much better than so basic sw: njet.)

There is very well big real estate on the marketplace for traditional offerings... but only if they see their strength, and build up on it... not by giving the battle up and doing the strict minimum only in order to satisfy their customers.

P.S.: Gods don't die, do they?

[tfjern]

Schferk, please keep it brief, or at least briefer.

[igoldsmid]

I have to now say, that given all the threads on the new Version 5.0 with many expressing disappointment with what seemed to be a promise broken by the developer relative to the Product Roadmap - and the fact the the developer hasn't spoken up at all about any of this - having purchased an upgrade in trust and without question, I am now feeling quite betrayed. Not good.

[dasymington]

Yes, I too am regretting paying for the upgrade as a gesture of loyalty to the product and to support future development.