Zoot 6 - the solution ?

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Aug 5, 2011 at 10:01 AM

This is an interesting thread. I enjoyed reading all the posts.
I am new to this forum (this is my 2nd post today), but I have been reading it in my feed aggregator (Google reader) for quite a while. I rarely visit the forum.

I have trialled/evaluated lots of PIM tools and started to suffer from the abovementioned IAF (Information-App Fatigue) a couple of years back.
I have recently again been reviewing various client-based PIM and Wiki tools, but still am unable to find any single one that meets my peculiar requirements.
I have been a user of the excellent IS (Info Select) for years, but stopped upgrading it at version 8 as the developer seemed to have the software not on a systematic developmental path (e.g., providing improved functionality to meet users’ defined requirements) but rather on an ad hoc change-thrashing path that was focussed on *features* rather than requirements.
At the time I started using IS, it was my first choice (after evaluation) instead of Zoot - which I also evaluated and which was my second choice. I have occasionally re-evaluated Zoot over the ensuing years but never had a sufficiently compelling reason to overcome my IS-inertia and migrate away from IS to Zoot.
Zoot was(is) a superb piece of software, IMHO, but the comments in this discussion thread seem to indicate that its development might have an unclear path/purpose - same as IS, I guess. This is a pity, as I had always through that Zoot would probably be the best tool for me to move to.

I am currently indexing/searching/finding, storing and managing my information (knowledge base) using various disparate tools:
- IS8
- Google Desktop (and Indexing/Search).
- Windows 7 Indexing/Search.
- ScrapBook add-on (and indexing/search) in Firefox
- CHS (Clipboard Help and Spell) from Donation Coder.
- Lotus Agenda (for DOS-based storage of legacy data only).
- Qiqqi (a reference management and OCR/index/search tool for text in PDF document/image files). I am trialling this.
- xplorer?
- Google docs and Google docs Sync.
- Gmail (integration of email and Google docs).
- MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) + MS Project.
- MS OneNote. I am trialling this.

Though I have assiduously avoided using the proprietary MS Outlook unless obliged to do so by clients (I work as an independent consultant), I have recently started trialling Jello Dashboard, which is not a standalone application but is built rather like an add-in to Outlook. Looking through the Jello-Outlook functionality, I figured that not only might Jello-Outlook provide a partial replacement for Info Select, but it also seemed to have some of the capability to automatically dynamically filter/categorise information items in the same way as Lotus Agenda, and in a similar way that can be done in the CHS database.

*@Mark*: re your post above about Zoot and Facebook/twitter.
I had always rather hoped that Zoot might be the ultimate PIM for me and could be taken by its developer in a direction that would eliminate the unavoidable and inefficient overlap and duplication that is inherent in the above set of tools that I am using. However, if it now seems that his greatest worry (?) is to keep it in step and integrated with the dynamically changing APIs for “social networks”, then I fail to comprehend the rationale for this.