Re: ndxCards & CRIMP "obligations"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3547

Posted by graham.smith
2005-07-26 06:00:09

I keep on looking at IDEA!, mainly because you often mention it!

It certainly looks interesting, how do you get data into Idea!. (later actually I have just installed the free version to have a look at it)

One of the reasosn I have found it difficult to give up Zoot is the ease of adding data. Alt+Z gives me instant access to adding data into Zoot from any program I am running. Either by writing a note or copying some data or web page. You can also send clips between programs using Alt+Z.

You can also search Zoot or indeed the web and your hard drive via alt+ctrl+Z.

This gives instant access to Zoot from anywhere, and everything else I have tried has seemed clumsy after Zoot.

And as I have mentioned before, without doing anything other than setting up a link to a directory on the hard drive, Zoot will then automatically catalogue and allow me to search any file saved to that directory, whether is a Word file, or an HTML file or pretty well nay file you can think of.

You can even save graphics from a web page into Zoot using a hot key combination (even though Zoot is text only. Zoot saves the graphic, saves the web link, and asks for a text description. Later when looking for an image, Zoot searches the text and then gives you an option of viewing the graphic (with irfanview in my case) or opening the original web page.

So although I find Zoot a bit clumsy in some aspects, I just haven’t found anything that can match it - and I have looked !!

However, I am keen for Tom to update it, give a better look, allow RTF and remove the limit on record size.

My system at the moment is therfore:

[Top Level] Creative Process (ideas) : Mind Genius/Mind Manager
Creative Process (structure): Brainstorm
(I still find Mind Mapping better for brainstorming, but then use Brainstorm to polish and expand on these ideas, turning them into a structure ready for word processing)

[Mid Level] Project Info: Zoot, but exploring ndxCards and OneNote

[Ground Level] Knowledge Base: Zoot and Library Master for bibliographic info.

I have also been using Net Snippets as a quck and dirty way of pulling together and publishing a web search for a specific project. For example when I bought my laptop I pulled together info and reviews into a single Net snippets report. I chose Net Snippets instead of the alternatives, because it saves web pages as HTML. This allows me to point Zoot at the Net Snippets directory and automatically add anything saved with NetSnippets into Zoot. However, Zoot won’t automatically search sub-directories - so this idea failed :-(

Graham

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