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#1
03-31-2012, 11:27 AM
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I just took a look at the roadmap for the development of UR, which was last updated in 2010. I really don't see a lot of features there that are relevant to my use of UR, and those that I do care about are pretty low on the list.
For example, there seems to be a lot of demand in these forums for multi-db search, and I find that very confusing. To me it would be completely useless; multi-db search is something I would never use at all and really do not see how it belongs in this type of software. As a developer, I'm well aware of what a huge amount of development time would be required to implement something like that, in the existing app, especially considering that UR currently opens multiple databases in distinct instances of the application. To top it off, after all the painstaking work to add such a fringe feature, after release it would be sure to be met with tons of complaints from those users who expected it to work differently. In my opinion if a feature like multi-db search should be added at all, it should be a completely separate product that users could purchase in addition to UR. I think a good strategy would be to get back to basics and add the features to UR that are currently found in competing products and could be relatively easily implemented in UR. I'm willing to bet the current roadmap is way out of touch with the actual desires of the average UR user, but perhaps it does represent the very vocal minority. There are many features of UR that blow away competing software, but there are also many very basic features that are lacking and should be prioritized way above current 'top of the roadmap' items. Anyway, just my opinion. Each user of an outlining product is going to use it differently and many will have polar opposite desires for the future of the product. I just think the basics need to be hit first. 
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#2
03-31-2012, 11:42 AM
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<nobodo>
In spite of that, competitive software is evolving and moving past the currently stagnant UR in many ways. But to propose that users should be willing to donate money in the hopes that a seemingly disenchanted developer would suddenly become inspired to do large amounts of new development is purely cabaret. </nobodo> I am using various outliners for many years now, supported and supporting some projects and can only second the posts of Nobodo. It would be nice to read something with content from Kinook. Is it time to move on from here or is it worth it to wait ? It might be time to show some official commitment to keep people on board.
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#3
03-31-2012, 12:38 PM
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Quote:
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#4
05-03-2012, 07:32 PM
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Hello Mark and quant.
(The "boy" was for your "scherk", but exchange of serious arguments is possible anytime, so  Yes, I hijacked this thread, but you did the opposite: You created a new thread for a problem that had been treated in another thread - you didn't add up to that one but authored a new one. I might be considered quite intrusive by many people, but then, if there's a thread to which I can add my additional details, I prefer people NOT having to read those "as they were all new" - might considered paradoxical within an overall view of my various contributions. You're quite right, 100 bucks' sw has nothing to do with 1,000 bucks sw, but the problem is, there is NO such software that might be considered top-notch within this field, not for 100, and not for a thousand bucks, but you find many offerings within the legal field, within that second price range and above, but then, these are specialised tools that would present many quirks, every day, hampering your workflow, if ever you tried to use them for more general - or let's say, other than legal - uses. When I "asked" for donations, it was cynicism (born out of disappointment from precisely that arrogant treatance we're entitled to here, and which you mention by saying "an extreme frustration likely to drive users away if they keep getting met with closed answers like "That sort of outlining within the UR rich text editor is not supported."" when in fact UR is a good product that is in need of much developments in order to cope with the 3rd milennium - it's more and more left behind, a you guys state more or less clearly) I KNOW that this is not a viable business venture. But quant WAS serious about it, so there's no reason to ridicule this ("cabaret" - btw, it had been I who introduced that term here, long ago), but then, I did top-notch IM sw in the late nineties, of which I sold FIVE light versions, and many of its details can't even be found today in high-priced products, so I know a little bit about the intricacies of marketing. On the other hand, as we all know, quant is the real UR expert here, and we're all indebted to him for that. All the better if he's not been in our position to market real good sw but with insufficient means. (Spectacular details of my sw then can be found here, in the MyInfo forum and in the outliner sw forum.) Since I, a non-programmer, built it from a really bad sw language (ToolBook), I had to cope with a 32 k limit of any item's main content field, and even today, that sw language comes with the same 32 k limit (interesting here: Zoot was marketed with such a limit up to 2011, it's only now that they overcame it). So I went away from my own product, using askSam instead (which I had used earlier, then programming my own thing in order to have something "better" - better in many, many ways, but certainly not in AS' core functionality of fast and complicated search, of course). It hadn't been but in 2008 - just 4 years - I had been so fed up with AS that I bought the very first and easy outliner I could get hold of, which was ActionOutline: It's not able to "do anything", but creating a sibling, creating a sub, is unbelievably "natural". I quickly got aware of its multiple shortcomings, so I evaluated "better" outliners; my choice went to MyInfo. In its day (5.07), it presented good searching capabilities, i.e. "search current db", "search open db's", "search all db's". It was buggy, it wasn't that stable, so I had several MI db's - I acknowledge that with UR's stability, you easily can do a monster db, hence the lesser need for trans-db search capability here. After a time, I considered MI the "lesser" product to UR (two main reasons to that: MI's GUI which I think was really ugly (now with 6.07 it's become just a little bit less so), and the absence of any "super tree", i.e. no way to load multiple "projects": it's always "the whole big stuff" that clutters your screen, and that clutters your mind - be assured my own system, 15 years ago, had been almost incredible in this respect (you would be highly mistaken to infer from my saying that I'm a non-programmer, to any kind of simplemindedness in the realization of that product), so I imported my stuff to UR. This is my 73rd post here, so some people here at least know that from beginning in, I was stuck with the - excuse me - INCREDIBLE un-intuitiveness of UR, and nobody could pretend I wasn't willing to share good ideas here in order to really improve this product. When I asked for a "recently-viewed items list", I was told there were too many subframes in the UR frame already, and this with 24" screens becoming ubiquitous, and without my having asked for mandatory display of such a list. Main problem with UR is the monster file. I've got about 90 k of items in my workspace, with several hundred additional items every week. Not having any positive feedback when I asked for a super tree within the UR db here, and not getting any positive answer when I asked to leave at least the very first tab of several one (when hoisting in the prof. version) the way the user wants it to be, which would have made a "super tree" by doing all sorts of cloning there, then you would open just that sub-tree = "project" there you need at that very moment, and perhaps some other, "reference" parts of that primal tree), I was NOT able to do real PM (project management) with UR since whenever you open a (hoisted) subtree in any other tab, this expanding will be reflected within the very first, global tree, which by that can't serve you as a reference point within the chaos anymore. My departure from UR was delayed by my "discovery" of the possibility to mis-use UR's related items pane as an "intermediate" pane (cf. the "tips and tricks" section here), and I tried to do all my work within that pane, in the middle now, leaving UR's tree as a "super tree" only. But then, the sparse functionality of that related items pane wasn't that suited to do all work there (i.e. no tree, not even a graphically acceptable indication if an item has children or not), so, in the absence of any chances to have some really good PM functionality within UR and within reasonable time - please understand that the functionality is there, and that I know that: you can do multiple clones of subtrees and create a "perfect" PM system this way, but graphically, it's so terribly cluttered then that I simply cannot cope with such chaos; if you guys hadn't had similar problems on a further-down level of things, you'd never had asked for hoisting, right? -, I finished by cutting up my UR db's from 1 to 5 to 50 to more than 100... if I remember well, it was quant who incredulously asked how in heaven I could imagine such a collection of UR files to be "working". And indeed, it did NOT work for me. (In my last months with MI, I had done almost the same there, cutting up my db into many db's, hence my "need" for a trans-db search function.) Within brackets: A search add-on for trans-db search in UR? Well, the big difference is not the additional payment, the big difference is that such an in-built function (cf. MI - but there's no Boolean search in MI, which makes it worthless for my needs) guides you to the very item in which the hit is found, whilst by using an external search tool (and even today, there are several such search tools able to search UR files, and even processing European characters correctly!), you will then have to open your UR db and do a second search within that db in order to identify the corresponding item.
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#5
05-03-2012, 07:32 PM
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Another consideration of mine was, how would UR work on a slate, considering my almost 2 GB db? Ok, cut it up into 100 or more db's, so technically it would be feasible... but would it be reasonable? Of course not.
So, as many of yours know - since I related my export adventures here in this forum -, I finally went back to AO, from which I came four years ago. Now it gets interesting, since at this time, some 6 months after my transition, I've got about 500 AO files; of course, these binary files are much more suited to such file multiplication than single db's: 500 or more UR db's within the same system, when you say, you can't understand why people would have more than a single one? And by the end of the year, I'll certainly have a thousand or so. I know that out there, there are some advocates of the "single file" theory, preferably within the ASCII format, i.e. without formatting, and they go to great lengths explaining you that outliners just offer something the file system already has on offer for you. Well, these people are tremendously mistaken. Does anyone imagine you could manage 100 k of single files within a file system, in any manageable way? Storing, yes, but processing? (The advocates of such systems praise various naming conventions by which you then could filter, and yes, they squeeze multiple tags into one single file name, easily...) In fact, my AO files contain anything from 20 to perhaps 800 items, and if in doubt, I avoid additional sub-levels, inserting separator lines instead: This gives me a good overview of something which "normally" would be an intermediate (but unnecessary) level: Grouping things, clustering things is always preferable to subordinate things (and my cutting up a monster db into up to now 500 single files is another embossing of my underlaying philosophy. You will observe that I'm here in the vicinity of that old debate "outlining or tagging"?, but than, as with "100 k of single files" vs. "1 monster file with 100 k of items", there's always the right thing to do FAR AWAY from these extremities. Yes, today I'm against monster files, and I would never come back to them, seeing that their developers are unwillig to supply them with a "super system" that allows for immediate handling of projects, of reference needs, and so on, but continue to force you into their "chaos systems" (cloning and hoisting is very good for a start only, but when you'll have got 2,000 cloned sub-trees, you'll have got an impenetrable jungle, not an information management system of any value anymore). But this, in no way, will make me desaffect trees, outlines! I've got two principles in cutting up: Make it self-contained; make it as tiny as possible (and a third one, derived from the two, would then be: and don't bother if one has got only 10 items and another a thousand: don't try to "normalize sizes"). And then, for everything "pm", I use the file system, which offers, as you all know, (sub)directories / (sub)folders, links (= references = "clones"), and, among others, the "comment" attribute. Then, you have some rather good file commanders, and whilst others can't even display these columns, some of them are able to filter by various "tags", trigger codes, etc., and with an extensive macro / scripting system (and with additional trigger keys, e.g. those of your numeric keyboard, simple, with control, with alt...), you'll realize a really good workflow indeed, and whenever I switch from my browser back to AO (i.e. with all the content I need, within multiple clipboards), my systems brings my back to a screen where AO has three fourths of the screen real estate, whilst a file commander, just showing a simple list of file names together with their "comments", takes the fourth fourth of my screen. But then, most people out there didn't even replace their Alt-Tab with a simple key, or put their shiftlock key to a better use. Now compare with my system that's perfectly scaleable, as said before, in both directions: No problems with slate computers, and a big corporation with 10,000 or more staff can rely on such a system easily also. Nobody can blame me for not having tried with outliners, cf. my contributions for a better MI, than for a better UR - but instead of just complaining, I've got the means to do my own thing. I don't critizise UR for what it is; as said, in ancient times I created my own monster file application. But since I didn't get ANY help or encouragement whatsoever in my tremendous efforts to make other people's monster file applications really good, I stepped back from that concept I today consider obsolete. It has been today that somebody on the outliner sw forum pretended, in writing, that UR had stopped development, and that brought me here, in order to check for any news on that. There wasn't any, so I seized the opportunity to relate my findings, grosso modo, of these last months without UR now: I finally got my 3-pane outliner. And you know what? At this very moment, I'm considering begging file commander developers for enhancing their products, since of course my system, as elaborated as it might be in direct comparison with traditional, self contained "outliners" like UR and similar ones, is always a little bit rudimentary as I see it, but even if these file commander developers let me down, as have done outliners' developers, I'll do just more and more scripting, and I'll all get what I need even for the most elaborate standards. And I even have got divider lines within my file lists there, i.e. I managed to group files within several groups on the same level of subordination, and any combination of data is now available on my fingertips... and ONLY that. I only see those 30 or so outlines I need for my immediate work, and if ever there's missing something, I just do a single further key press, and these parts of my information system get available, too. I've said it a thousand times within this forum and the other ones: The problem of IM (information management) is not a technical one, but a conceptional one, and not being heard is not necessarily being wrong. In the outliner sw forum there has been a discussion re granulation of information recently, i.e. how = up to which atomic level information should be cut up (I'd been heavily into these questions 15 years ago, so nothing new for me here). When you, Mark, want to do an outline within an item, it's exactly that problem you're discussing; when MI user (and history prof) "wsp" touts MI (and rightly so) within the outliner sw forum for the former's ability to reference not only items (as UR does) but paragraphs, it's again information granularity he's discussing. There might be a lot a theoretical possibilities to that, and indeed, on that champ de bataille, I've got my very precise ideas also (just for a start: cut it up into sentences as the atomic level; do 1 sentence 1 line within monster text files (any formatting being encoded by special characters that are resolved accordingly, afterwards); do heavy referencing, cut up the monster text files into as many monster text files as you need for your big corporation... but do all the technical processing on a referential level, processing "atoms", not any more half-way physical combinations, and half-way references to other parts in other physical combinations). But on a practical, application level, with what we've got today, everybody must search for his individual solution how he will granulate, then re-combine his information bits in order to make them useful for him, and all I can say now, after 6 months' heavy information processing in and out of my new heteroclite, scratch, homemade system: It works like a charm, and it's the first of my many information systems that does so. But it stands and falls with both components: Hierarchical systems are a necessity then, provided you hold 'em flat and combine 'em ingeniously. And yes, kinook could have done this, within UR's borders, not for big corporations, but for all those freelancers and 1 to 5 head business gathering here. But instead, they don't do any super system that would drive UR into another sphere of utility. Cannot help those, but could help myself. Yes, We Can Do. Individually. Ingeniuosly. Don't be customers, you'd be waiting forever for the manna to come.
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#6
05-04-2012, 06:09 AM
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1)
Because it's so beautiful, here, for your contemplation: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/3984/ TreeProjects 2.5 adds database encryption Posted by Ian Goldsmid May 3, 2012 at 09:20 PM Since Treeprojects is quite similar to Kinook’s Ultra Recall - and their development has stopped - would you be able to develop an import process for .URD databases? Posted by Daly de Gagne May 4, 2012 at 01:30 AM Ian, when you say Ultra Recall development has stopped, do you mean the company simply hasn’t added any features for a while - or can an inference be drawn from what you say that Kinook is having problems? Posted by Ian Goldsmid May 4, 2012 at 03:51 AM I’m certain Kinook is a thriving company - other than that everyone on the planet has “problems” - so I’ve no idea what you are talking about really. [So, complete retraction just 6 and a half hours afterwards, and pretending the inquirer is doing the calomny. Black's white, white's black. Must be working very successfully in the political field, that smart guy.] 2) Some additional details for my white paper in order for avoiding misunderstandings: Comments are mainly for systematic content description (working with multiple tabs, I need file names be as short as possible), and for various ToDo codings ("filter by..."), but all project / context groupings are done by file names, making heavy use of "clones", in the form of "ab.ao", "ak.ao", "ake.ao", together with "a.kl.ao" (= a clone of "kl.ao") or even "ake.klc.ao" and "ake.plo.ao" (= clones, respectively, of "klc.ao" and "plo.ao") - this way, clones are grouped within their immediate multiple contexts, in alphabetically-sorted sub-groups of the whole thing, whilst I rely, for any choosing of such outlines, on reading the "comment" text. Separator lines are done similarly, they are appropriately named clones of an original divider line which is nothing more than an empty file with a sequence of dashes within the comment attribute. As explained in another context above, there is no good search functionality in my system, but within a corporate context, such a thing wouldn't be any difficult to implement, it's just a matter of money to pay for the programming. In my system - used by one man (whilst in a collaborative environment, searching would indeed be of much more predominant necessity) - I discovered that my fractionizing of information into self-contained, correctly-described (= within the comment attribute) chunks allows for doing without frequent global searching, and it's not more than once a day, here and there, that I'm really in need of this. Well, for these exceptional needs of mine, there's a cheap third party application that not only allows for global searching my .ao files, but which also delivers correct results for terms containing European characters (if I enter them in the transcribed form AO internally processes them). Such a search (= of the whole, 2 GB bunch) takes about 200 seconds, but even delivers a table with the multiple contexts of the hits within each "hit" outline, which allows for my selecting the "right" .ao file then, in which I then must do a new search for the same term in order to finally get to the "hit" item. So this is cumbersome, but since it's of rare necessity, it's a quirk acceptable to me. Within the above-mentioned cloned-outlines system relying on the file system, it's perfectly envisionable to integrate all sorts of other files than just outline files, especially .pdf files and .xml files (or whatever you need within your projects and various reference compartments), belonging to such projects, and I started to integrate such files into my system indeed, all the more so since it's possible to do multiple filtering at the same time, i.e. sometimes you want to have a clear view of just your "own" files, i.e. those you created by your own means (even if they also contain, perhaps a lot of, (fractions of) external content), and sometimes, you want to have "complete projects" to work an, an which indeed contain and related real third-party files, as downloaded .pdf's, etc. As for scripting and integration, an important aspect is to do the scripting in a way that you can access (self-written) commands / routines doing processing within the file system (i.e. working upon your file commander or otherwise), from WITHIN your "real" application, i.e. in my case mainly AO, but also from within other applics (e.g. Excel) where you'd have any need to access your file management routines from; any necessary "switching" to a file commander or any other intermediate device, beforehand, would interrupt your workflow indeed. And of course, these "simili-global commands" (= similar but not necessarily identical functionality, depending on your starting point applic) would be triggered by the same shortkeys, hence the interest of having a "new deal" for your numeric keypad, but this supposes that within other applics than Excel and your electronic tape calculator, you would NOT need to enter digits all day long. I also experimented with additional keyboards; there, the problem is you've got a full keyboard, with arrow keys and with a numeric keypad, so the additional keyboard (make it a tiny one, some 30 or 40 keys, not 100 or so) is far away from your a-z keys, or you must place it for your left hand, and in my experience, that was really awkward. It's far better to use your right (= your principal; for lefthanders it's all the other way round but perfectly similar then) hand for commanding your information system, willing to enter SOME digits (i.e. outside of heavy calculating and table processing) by the keys above your normal keyboard, all the more so since I discovered that within Excel, I need far less of such immediate access to my information system, allowing my normal using of the numeric keyboard for just entering digits there. If you do a lot of data processing within Excel - which I discovered as being a much smarter way than trying to squeeze the attributes fields of an outliner (UR, MI) into a simili-spreadsheet (as I had tried to no real avail before, as many here always do) -, you could even use another system variable within your scripting system, in order to have your numeric keypad ready for number crunching, in Excel, WHEN you do number crunching there, but to have it do all sorts of more elaborate things at your will whenever just doing data analysing within that ubiquitous (and rightly so loved by everbody) program. In the late Eighties (= transition period from proprietary systems to general computer use in secretarial work), you could buy a lot of elaborate keyboards, with a lot of additional F keys, and often distributed = really accessible in a smart way, whilst today, the problem, as mentioned, with additional keys being their distance from your normal a-z keys, hence the interest of a better re-use of your (integrated) numeric keypad whenever possible. (And to Mark, your "scherk" I translated by "a smart way to insinuate "jerk"", but that was not a mandatory reading of perhaps just a typo...)
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#7
05-04-2012, 12:05 PM
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I have read your postings and have tried to follow your train of thought and references. You obviously have thoughts to contribute, but could you please be concise? I am sure your references are lost on most readers due to obscurity, idiosyncratic application, or because the reader must be familiar with your previous posts (here and in other forums). To start, I would edit these out. Jabs at other posters or at Kinook are uncalled for, especially since we are "guests" on Kinook's forum. This does not mean that we should not be critical (I have pressed issues on several occasions), but snide comments are, in my opinion, not helpful.
Jon
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#8
06-13-2012, 06:57 AM
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What about Mail, then ?
Above, I've been describing a "complete" and scaleable system of IM, but "complete" only if you discard the email problem, and you cannot, of course: you MUST find a solution for that problem. In UR, Outlook processing seems to be outstanding (I'm arguing from help files / forum knowledge only here - but no Outlook 2010 64bit possible? perhaps now... - and does UR automatically import these mails into the corresponding UR subfolders, AND into an inbox in UR, so that they could be user-treated within UR and be within their right place there all the same? Perhaps, by "searching" for "newest entries"; smoothness of moving them would remain to be seen, and then, would synching back with Outlook create the corresponding new folders / subfolders within Outlook? I'm speaking of refining your Outllook folders more and more, automatically, whilst the actual work of refining would be done within UR), whereas processing of mails coming from other mail clients is lots of manual fiddling and cannot be considered helpful in any way, there would be a lot of false (since manual) attributions (since any manual synching of two "file" systems would be "hell" AND would be prone to lots of errors, as anybody can confirm who ever tried to synch manually lots of folders / files (back in DOS days where no such sync tools were / seemed to be available to the masses - Norton Commander presumably had a "compare view" incl. sub-folders, but from the beginning on? Anyway, I remember lots of hard work, with bad results altogether). I own Outlook (French 2003 version, from a package I bought), but what I hate more than anything elseabout it is its .pst file and possible problems with it, hence my preference for Thunderbird. Yes, you could use UR or some outher IM tool to process and manage your mails, but when leaving that tool for some, these mails (=these copies of them) will be lost, and in your Thunderbird (or whatever) db, they will all be as a bunch of many thousand (or more), indistiguishable but by searching, since it's simply impossible to synch them there, with your UR versions of them, by hand, and for years (this meaning you'll have necessarily ever-growing inboxes within Thunderbird or your mail client of your choice, doing any classifying work in UR (or any other IM tool for that). Hence the utmost interest of UR's Outlook synching capabilities indeed - but which force Outlook upon you even if you hate MS in general and Outlook in particular. My "separate files" approach quite naturally led me to Everdesk; they have multiple versions, drowning some versions here, creating some others there; I know of Standard, Optima, Google, Mail, and perhaps there are others. Fact is, their site persistently refuses to load into my IE8 (and I threw out Chrome / Opera / Safari after 10 minutes respectively, Firefox after 2 hours). From what I know from third parties, Everdesk puts emails into separate files, maintains a commun file structure for your files and your mails... Seems to be very smart at first sight, but then, remember what I said above re 5,000 .doc files: What about 20k (or more) of separate Everdesk mails, after some years, then? Wouldn't be smart at all, all things considered! It's quite the contrary, as your notes, some 20, 50, 120, 500, belonging together, should be put into the same technical entity, i.e. an outline for your casual contexts on this subject, another one for those on another subject... and mails from and to a certain big customer, into that customer's outline. And, of course, your mails should NOT be separated from your notes and other bits, but should be integrated into these same outlines, subject-wise. (People who want their mails within a separate body could simply replicate their outlining structure within their mail client and leave all mails therein, and indeed, almost everybody who doesn't use an information manager / pim does exactly do this, having no other solutions at their disposal, except for exotic ones as Everdesk provides.) This being said, and seeing what UR does with respect to Outlook, I see another great strength of UR here that for many a user will certainly be a reason to never leave UR. Of course, I'd prefer such integration within AO, and with Thunderbird, not Outlook, but I'll never get that. Which means, I'm contemplating just another pane on my screen, showing me, by scripting, the according subfolder within my Thunderbird program, for every .ao file I'd bring to focus - in order, of course, to leave my mails there, (manually) synching only created, renamed, or moved folders (or manually moving mails when in my file system I deleted a folder and must create one or two new containers in order to not orphanize my corresponding mails). There's another aspect in all this, the legal aspect. Even a one-man show like mine must comply to legal dispositions, and in Germany, for example, tax authorities are tremendously strict about your "commercial correspondence", incl. your mails, and from all I know about it, it seems unacceptable (and thus reprimandable) for them to just have your mail in something like UR. On the other hand, systematic filing of your files within UR, whilst preserving all these same files in unordered state (or let's say, in chronological order) within your mail client, will and must be fine even for these high-level paranoids. If there are better mail solutions, please share them with us; the same goes for any further insight into UR and Outlook. BTW, I did NOT find any respective installation numbers for Outlook or for Thunderbird; Outlook storing your mails into a relational db, it would be a dream to have just ONE such db, for your notes and stuff, AND for your original Outlook (or Thunderbird or whatever) mails... a dream that'll never come true, of course. For me, it'll be .ao / .xls, etc., it'll be secondary files within a parallel structure (= as before, but synchronized now), and it'll be Thunderbird with that very same structure: Must write a script replicating my 600 .ao files as a Thunderbird folder structure! And I'll have to go for buying me a wider screen now. EDIT: All things considered, having a legally valid collection of chronologically ordered mails (= in and out) within your mail client, 1 subfolder per month, 12 such subfolders per higher subfolder for each year, and systematically copying any such mail from there, first into an inbox within your IM system (= whatever that IM system might be), and systematizing mails ONLY FROM THERE, i.e. classifying them into the respective folders, would, on one hand, mean you deliberately renounce on the "advantages" that so-called "rules" within your mail client would otherwise provide, but on the other hand, this way of doings things would greatly simplify your mail work, since these "rules" can't reasonably be synched with any other thing, and will certainly interfere with any other task here, i.e. any "rule" system will be opaque, not evident, unvariably forgetten by yourself in lesser or greater parts, in short: Will trigger unexpected results, would be another such classification system that'd be never in synch with your more evident processings, be they scripted or partly manually-driven or whatever. SUCH a system - chronologic divisions within the mail client, systematic filing within your IM system - will certainly be far more straightforward than any other offering, incl. two-way synch between UR and Outlook (and there would NOT be needed any reference from the mail client into the IM system - from the IM system, you would see any time where the "original" mail will be within your mail client's chronological structure, and if EVER (= not probable at all, no plausible scenario for that except for the tax authorities, cf. below) you need to verify such an "original's" "final place" within your systematic structure... well, as for the tax guys: let'em search! Such a system, then, will free you from any synch needs between mail client and IM structure (= 1 big UR file, 1k of tiny .ao files, whatever), and the only scripting / programming "difficulty" (and that's not a big one, hence my quotes) will be your enabling to write new mails within your IM structure, and trigger then their sending from within the mail client (= remember, no systematic filing in that structure needed, just "put it into the current months in and out folder"). Even with a dumb macro, you could realize such a thing, and even within a dumb program like ActionOutline: have multiple clipboards (cf. my previous postings), write within your IM system, put the different field contents, automatically, into the different fields of your mail client, trigger "send". In short, maintaining THREE synchronuous structures would be ridiculous when TWO such structures largely suffice, and having your mails in chronological order wouldn't harm either, and be it only for obligeing to legal dispositions. Voilà : It seems this would be a valid system - and it helps if you swear by UltraRecall, preferring any other mail client over Outlook though. Last edited by schferk; 06-13-2012 at 07:50 AM.
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#9
05-04-2012, 01:52 PM
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Quote:
I can assure you that calling you 'scherk' instead of 'schferk' was an accident and not intended as an insult. If I had actually intended to be insulting it would have been something more like 'schjerk', but since nothing intentionally insulting like that was done hopefully you can see it was a typo. I'm sorry if you have read the kinook forum so much that people's suggestions in the forum category set aside for suggestions are becoming repetitive. I would guess in a perfect forum world there would be an organizational system so efficient that all postings which might possibly be related to the RICHED32.DLL would all go under a single thread titled something like "Please post your reason here why Microsoft's riched32.dll should be left for Microsoft apps to use and not reused as a free rich text editor in this application". I suppose that thread might contain a lot of different reasons, but it could also be that people would be afraid to post in that thread because they might have mistakenly organized their posting incorrectly, and then the whole organizational system would just break down. Anyway, I did not see a thread describing the same problem and asking about a future resolution to the problem. If there does happen to be one, I missed it. But one thing is absolutely certain - this thread has been so derailed that it really might as well not have existed in the first place. So much for organization. Thanks, Mark.
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#10
05-07-2012, 09:46 AM
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Mark, that wasn't any criticism on my part, I was just explaining there isn't but hijacking threads, there's also multiplying them, and yes indeed, there IS another thread asking for outlining within UR items, since i've read such a request here well before 2012, but then, it's not about "who's right and who's wrong", my interest here is conceptual development. Perhaps I should just have said, well, look at the title you gave to your thread (= not "outlining within items?" but "proper outlining?"): Wasn't it inviting for third-party hijacks entering the vessel and shouting, "well, there is indeed, and here's how to do it in a perfect way", i.e. asking for "proper outlining" could not but force me into answering that fundamental question, since - excuse me - I'm just one of that handful of specialists worldwide who are able to answer such a question in A (= not necessarily "the") proper way. So, you really and thoroughly "asked for it", but then, be assured, it's my purpose to present worthwile findings, and not in any way to aggress fellow contributors of this forum, hence my DOUBLE excuse for the "boy" when not one such was expected or asked for. As for obscurity problems, references to material elsewhere can be considered secondary to my purpose here; in fact, my presention is already almost complete, and wading thru it is, while intellectually demanding possibly (let alone that my language is French, not English), worthwile for anybody doing work in the IM industry, and perhaps useful, for some bits of ideas here and there (cf. below), for every UR user wishing to use his UR db to its fullest potential.
Some more details to elaborate on my white paper I very much hope that UR users will understand that even for using their current UR setting, there's a lot of valuable advice here, so I hope my posts will be useful for UR users that will remain happy UR users, and without mentioning the fact that there's a lot of flat-file discussion to be found (= the above-mentioned 100 k items in 100 k flat files folly) in the Scrivener forum - i.e. they allow for presentation / discussion of alternative ways of IM, not censoring these in spite of the fact that it could lure just some Scrivener users away from the database / integrated sw philosophy away and into a totally different workflow. I perfectly acknowledge that UR users having taken the decision to do their stuff within the concept of "one db for all" will not leave just because a defactor tells them he's quite happy for having left. In particular, the "joining" of "other" subtrees (= i.e. "standard reference material" for such a project, etc.) to a project's subtree is realizable with my system, and also within UR or another "complete" db. I want to explain that a fundamental part of my system is to do LESS hierarchies, and MORE simultaneous displaying of currently needed elements (items / subtree within a db setting, files within a files setting) within the same (necessarily "hoisted", be it by means of file filtering in my system, or by means of hoisting within a db) "list" (= of items/subtrees, of files), using separator lines to do reasonable grouping, i.e. have one big group for your current project in the true sens of the word (if necessary, further divided into subgroups, with more divider lines), and have another main group for reference material (left unchanged by your processing that current project in question), or more than one such additional "reference material" or "to be considered also" or whatever group of material. This way, you'ld work on a legal case, e.g., and your case = "project" would contain - as a lot more such "projects" would also contain - standard legal material to be considered for the processing of this particular project: In your "one big file" system, you'd then have a succession of perhaps 15 subtrees (if necessary, divided into 3 or 4 sub-groups perhaps), each containing some more material (but within a subtree that should be as flat as possible, i.e. I try do hold these subtrees (= in my system, separate .ao outline files) just 1 level deep, with, here and there, perhaps, or or two siblings under such an item within that outline, but with perhaps 20 or 30 items = siblings, divided by 4 or 5 divider lines)). And you'd have another group of reference material, where again you would NOT have deep subtrees, but, far more preferential, 10, 20 or 30 rather FLAT subtrees, within a list of 10, 20 or 30 "items", accessible immediately instead of "digging deep and deeper" into multiple deep hierarchies. I know very well that such deep hierarchies, from a technical point of view, don't represent any problem, but from a "man-machine interaction" point of view, flat hierarchies present the very big advantage to necessitate just ONE mouseclick (or arrow keys then Enter, peu importe) in order to browse multiple aspects there, and just ONE mouseclick (or pressing of a single (!) "back" key) in order to get back to your "main level" (= of that particular project), whilst deep hierarchies present a tremendous nuisance with their (totally unnecessary) additional navigation needs. Even rather tiny screens can display a list of 40 items (=subtrees, separate outline files, whatever) or more, so make sure you take full advantage of this simultaneous display capability! (We perfectly agree, on the other hand, that scrolling needs should be avoided indeed!) We are presented with a slight problem here, in "all in one" db's as well as in file systems: If we want to "hold it flat", we'll have a much more manegeable work environment for our project then, but before, we must cluster 5 or 8 or a dozen of separate sub-trees (= in your db system) / separate outliner (or other) files (in my files system) together, instead of just copying / cloning one single entry = a single "higher-level" subtree, containing multiple subtrees in its hierarchy - but must we necessarily do this by hand? As said above, as soon as we've got such a FLAT representation of our material on our screen, for project work, both our overall view of our project and our navigational ease are greatly enhanced by our "listing elements" instead of "subordinating elements", so even a one-time effort to manually copy / clone these elements one by one will be worth the effort, considering that afterwards, we'll get multiplied rewards for it, but then, is it really necessary to do so by hand, in the very first place? So, within a IM db system, it should be possible to select several items (be they singular items or subtree headings), then clone them all together, as siblings, into another position of the "big tree" (= into a specific project / additional context), and within a file system, it should be possible to select several items (= files, be they outline, Excel or whatever files), then create clones of them and put those into a specific context / project, which would be technically done by renaming these newly created clones (= links of various sorts, as the Windows file system allows for; by the way and in correction of a sloppy formulation in a previous post, my "xyz.ao" clones would indeed not be named "abc.xyz.ao" but would bear another suffix, according to your choice of the respective kind of your Windows file clones / references) in a certain standardized way. I acknowledge that for the time being, a program like UR has a big advantage over any file system-bound way of doing these procedures. Re an element mentioned before: Don't underestimate keyboard accessibility of important commands; my expositions re keyboards / additional keyboards could appear of minor importance; in fact, to have, e.g. navigational, commands right on your fingertips is of far more importance than your possible having to wait, once or twice a day, for a global search result for almost 3 minutes, instead of having it available immediately. It goes without saying that any other additional sw you need to access with your main system, i.e. not only your web browser, but also (in case of, that is,) Excel, a calculator, a (bilingual or unilingual) dictionary, or whatever you need again and again, in your work, should be accessible by just one single key pressing, hence the importance of elaborate key assignment to the numerical keypad (whilst within all these additional programs, the key F12, e.g., could just get you back to your main prog (be it AO, be it UR, be it any other IM system), so there's no need, of course, to make available, by single key, all additional secondary programs from within all these secondary applications). As for the integration of imported third party files into your system (.htm, .mht, .pdf., etc.), when I said you could integrate them into the same window that displays your main (= in my case, .ao, .pdf and .xls) files, I missed to explain how this could be done. In fact, there are two different system. The first would be integration into your main list, and here, the obvious solution to any possible renaming issue would be to not really rename your third party files, in order to preserve their original names, but to simple add a prefix to their names, with such a prefix being similar to your normal file naming / sorting conventions you might have elaborated for your workflow. E.g., you import an internet file having some 50 characters in its name, e.g. blabla(and much more).mht; you would like to import it into your "axz" context: very simply, you would rename that file "axz.blablabla(and much more).mht - and you're done, your imported file will appear at that position within your file list.
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#11
05-07-2012, 09:47 AM
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Then, of course, you'll have the problem of list width. In my case, the with of the name attribute of files is just 1 or 2 cm, since I adopted that mnemonic file naming system consisting of 1 to 5 characters only (each character having a mnemonic systematic "virtual subfolders" meaning and with the latest character only to be the first character of the item's / file's " virtual individual title" (= which as such doesn't even exist), plus possible prefixes, but then, if I've got a cloned file "abc.xyz.ao" file, and only the characters "abc.xyz" are visible, very well for me, and even if only the characters "abc.xy" are visible, that's okay with me, since in every instance, within the "comment" attribute, I RESOLVE that cryptic, mnemonic title, and as said, I choose my files from there, except for some standard files I open again and again and whose cryptic names I've since long memorized. Example: File name is cfb.ao, entry within the - rather broad - "comment" field will be the resulution of that code, i.e. "C IM Backup, Recovery, etc." ("C" stands for "Computer" and "IM" stands for "Information Management", since I've got these denominations dozens of times within my system, but other terms are generally resolved in full characters).
Which is to say, an imported, long file name, with a short prefix, will still be a rather long file name, that's not easily squeezed into such 1-2 cm column width! And so, there's two solutions to this problem, mentioned above: Either your system (= natively, or by your own scripting capabilities) will put the "resolution" for the prefix, and then the original file name, into the comment attribute of the file, and by this, at least a good part of the complete file name of your imported file will be readable within the attribute column of your system - or you do TWO such file lists, side by side, the first one being your above-described main file system, and the one farther to the right of your (wide) screen being a "parallel" such file (and folder) system for imported, third-party files. You could even hold these two bunches of differently treated / displayed files within the same folder / the folder / subfolders system, by filtering, within list one, by your own suffixes (.ao, .xls, etc.), and within list two, by EXLUDING exactly these suffixes of your own files, both lists being sorted alphabetically, but with list 1 having a narrow name column but a large comment column, list 2 having a broad name column and perhaps an invisible comment column (but which you'll need anyway in order to store (but not necessarily to display!) ToDo codes like #, £, the yen sign, or combinations such as £1, £2, #a, #z, or whatever). Re interaction main program / outlining program and file commander / file management, it should of course be possible to do renaming of an original file that propagates to any clones of it, and renaming of clones that propagate to the original and any other clone, and the same goes for propagation of text changes within the comment field of any such an element, be it the clone, one of several clones or the original; in part, these problems and theirs solutions depend on the kind of your individual cloning technology (which depends both on the outlining program you use, and on the Windows version you rely upon. These problems could be resolved by scripting, instead of manual maintenance, but the main problem (addressable by scripting also if necessary in the end) is to avoid to perpetuate the current need for "having to think about it" any time you do any changes whatsoever to any of your files (and be it just additional cloning, let alone renaming a clone, i.e. the prefix part of it, which should indeed be perfectly devoid of problems but isn't for now). Off-topic and re physical storage of sentences: Underlying global and double problem is both to assure scalability into spheres of amounts of data comparing to Google's db's, and to finally get rid with that conceptional data storage chaos that at this time every developer solutions in his own, perfectly chaotic way, i.e. up to now, there's no standardized concept for (mainly) text data storage but in most applications, there's the text storage in its "natural way" from your writing, and then there's nothing but superposed on that a second overlayed system for referencing, but only for recencing various parts of these "naturally stored" text chunks, i.e. text is mainly stored in "text files" (of various technical realizations, e.g. record fields within records of a UR db) where various text bits are stored consecutively but which could as "naturally" belong into various / multiple / myriads of other contexts, whilst only some of these are, but then by various forms of referential realizations, also put within some of those possible other contexts (e.g. cloned items, cloned paragraphs, cloned paragraphs / items you later on wish they were just copies not clones (!) or even aggregates of a "cloned part" and an "info part" showing which way the cloning mechanism (by way of changing the original) affects these clones (but which would be used in their original form, besides that information need, etc., etc., and, the other way round, "further developed clones" where the original part would be recognizable but which would allow for variations, and variations not propagated backwards to the original (which is a big risk with UR's clones, by the way). As a third, again different mechanism, such a heteroclite system is often overlayed by a "real reference" mechanism, for outbound links, or for internal links but to items, whilst the second system described above is only for paragraphs - and so on and on and on, making a chaos for text storage, most texts stored in a physical sequential order as you wrote them, having bits of text in link bodies and whatever, spread out over the whole data heaps. The same often applies to db's storing pictures, pdf's and even other (html or whatever) data into the db itself, instead of just linking to the original files stored within any folder external to the db file, or to special auxiliary folders / db's / parts of the main db in which such a systems stores non-textual data. Hence the interest of separation, and and for all, of text storage and text presentation, and with today's pc's, there's no need whatsoever anymore to not deciding to store a text chunk presented within an item's text field, and consisting of perhaps 100 sentences, within 100 different records of a monster db, from which your application routine, by reading no text file / text record but a list of (in this example) 100 reference addresses, will restore the connected text: each item record would then contain a bunch of links only, be they to sentences, pictures, jpg's, web addresses, mails (!), or whatever. Specialists and people a little bit interested in technology will know what delta copying is, and whilst for web synching services (like Dropbox and many more) this dividing of monster files (of perhaps 4 GB) into (perhaps 1,000) chunks (of perhaps 4 MB each) and then copying (and integrating into the target file) of just those parts of the monster files that have been altered in any way, all but one (?) of the "consumer" sync programs (and including the overpriced SyncBack Prof and ViceVersa Prof) do NOT do this delta copying; MS Outlook does create such monster files, these ".pst" files, and many of them get corrupted, here and then, and it's not by coincidence that tools that promise to repair such corrupted .pst files, are sold for (often much) more money than the Outlook program is sold itself (even if you buy it separately from MS "Office"). But then, most experts agree that the MS programming style (cf. Word's outlining function, being so bad it nourished a whole outlining industry) is certainly not to be imitated, so it cannot reasonably be put forward that creating monster files containing data, instead of just reference addresses, is of any value - whereas the sheer multiplication of (possibly as standardized as possible) files is industry standard today and will be there forever.
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#12
05-08-2012, 08:27 AM
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More details of such an interoperability system Outliner (or whatever) -To-Elaborate File Commander
For the time being, in my system, if I switch between files in and from within my main system (.ao files), the selected entry within the external list (= file commander) is not updated. Of course, there is a macro that will determine the current file name (= in AO), then look it up within the big list there (= file commander), then select that entry, for further processing (in order to then apply, e.g., the corresponding routines for altering the "comment" attribute of this current file, e.g. the general comment edit routine (for manual editing) or for (automatically) inserting a specific ToDo code or for (again automatically!) deleting such a ToDo code, but then, it would of course be much more elegant for the (always visible) file list to have selected the current file (on condition that the current file IS somewhere in that list; if not, at least it would be elegant to de-select any list item that would have been selected before, being the current item then, but not being the current item anymore - remember you can change files within AO (or any other main program you use) itself, by this causing - if there isn't an automated routine intercepting and processing such changes accordingly - de-synchronization (or is it called asynchronization) of the current item in your main program and the selected item in your file commander window. It goes without saying that all such interoperability functionality should be triggered by an extension of such a file commander, even allowing for choosing your own main program at your will. For the time being, in UR, you cannot (easily) distinguish the "natural" (= original, main) parentage / fathering of a "clone" (= in fact the "original item") from any more (= real) clones of that item, let alone any changing of that status (= sometimes, it could become handy to make the original entry a clone, but mark the clone / one of the clones as the "original"), whilst both in my one-big-file system 15 years ago and in my file-system system today, the original items (then) / files (today) are clearly distinguished from their clones. Since in almost any cases, there is a "natural position" for any item, and then there could be (often multiple) "adoptive positions" for them (e.g., a law disposition, then being cloned into a lot of legal cases, and believe me, it's the same thing for almost every imaginable item / file: As with a child (boy/girl), there's only one real family "from which it comes from", and then, he / she will perhaps marry a few times, have children with several fathers / mothers, i.e. create several new families of its own, and even, in RARE cases, will (in-between, that is) be adopted by another family, it's "original original" family becoming secondary, as will once be these marriage families (hence the need to be able to change a clone into an original, the original becoming (just) a(nother) clone) - whilst UR's NOT doing the difference here will "sometimes" (i.e. rather ofter, in my experience) cause a rebirth of that old "lost in hyperspace" phenomenon; in fact, during the months a used (= did a paying trial of) UR, this not-distinguishing between originals and clones had been the most important factor in my leaving clones out of my working space, after some initial (and rather unfruitful) tries. If you do as many brackets as I do - oops, that wouldn't be easy to find -, you could try to format those bits in italics, instead of enclosing them in brackets - of course, that wouldn't be possible in posts as this one (but in your own blog, in web site texts, in printed texts, in .pdf's...). Whilst for every outliner applic appearing on bitsdujour, there's invariably the question, can it search imported pdf files?, on that all-encompassing outlinerthing.com, people currently relate their problems with pdf annotations / comments / pdf text passage yellow highlightings (if you want to check out, the search term would be "docear"), and that's simply another bit of proof (if any such was considered necessary) that all these concepts to import external files into an outliner software (and make 'em searchable or not, afterwards), is the bad approach, and I insist on my (ultimate but not necessarily to be realized today or tomorrow) concept of clearing your main applic from ALL possible content (including even text contents, that is): Specialized applics for processing different file formats, but the very best possible applics then, and with perfect integration, please! With import of web pages, it's exactly the same thing: It's not the (sometimes slow, sometimes buggy) import of web pages into UR that would be a problem, but trying to import web pages altogether, in the very first place, that should be subject to discussion! (And it's not I trying to develuate UR here: In many a forum in the www people relate their dissatisfaction with UR's web pages capabilities and sometimes even say that this is their reason for not doing their stuff within UR (anymore): It's evident that they've left or avoid UR for very bad reasons.) As stated before and elsewhere, I only import text passages (in plain text) from web pages (but often I format the most important parts of these excerpts in bold, afterwards, in my target prog), and some pictures only (i.e. containing graphs / numbers), and tables (= as rectangle (= not full screen but minimal) screen captures, as I import Adobe Flash texts or other bits I cannot import as text / graphics). As for pdf's, I download them as they are, then import important passages into my main prog (and, in case of need, do some de-securizing of these, and if they are really scrambled, I revert to screen captures of important passages, again) - it's all about standardization of content, as it is for everybody else, and importing whole web pages, with or without ad / Flash blockers applied, is certainly not the best way to do things if you want to avoid clutter (both in your electronic staff as well's in your head) to a max in further processing (of any sort) of any imported material. (And for forensic use, importing web pages into UR or any other outliner isn't the best way to hedge your interests either.) (Fellow forum contributors suspecting me of cluttering this thread with off-topic material should be aware that there's Google out there, referencing anything, and producing a helluva of hits to this forum, and I insist upon stating that if I consider UR not good enough for me, I truly consider it the best current self-contained (!) outliner out for the moment, even if I'm quite unhappy with the factual unresponsiveness of its developers. Yes, I truly believe that if even minor outliners can buy / rent a third-party component as their editor, UR / kinook should NOT rely on the gratis MS piece of sh**, and without its users having to do a collection to pay for such a decent editor, but then, within UR you can do a lot of things you wouldn't be able to do with lesser contenders, and they are legion. (This last paragraph was written in order to hopefully prevent censorship again.)
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Hybrid Mode
