UltraRecal vs. MyInfo

Posted by Tom S.
Mar 14, 2007 at 11:58 AM

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>These tree-based information managers seem to be getting the best comments. Does
>anyone care to summarize their relative strengths and weaknesses?

I don’t know if I can sumarize them all but I can tell you what bothers me the most about them. Tree-based PIMS tend to categorize information by making them subitems of another item which would be, say, the name of a real category. Other possibilities might be contact names, places, dates, pretty much anything you would use to separate and group data.

This brings you to the first issue: in far too many cases, you can only put the item in one spot. So which one will use choose as the “root” category where you information is filed and where you will look for it? This is only a minor issue because many of the better designed PIMS actually allow the data to reside in multiple places in the tree.

That brings you to the second and IMO the more niggling problem. If you’ve got the data in all of these places in the tree, the tree gets really big. In the end, at least in my case, the whole thing gets very bulky and very unwieldy as you find yourself filing away items in many different places, most often manually, in this huge structure which becomes more and more difficult to manipulate. It’s a vicious cycle: Adding more data in more places leads to making everything more difficult and clumsy. Inother words, you’re basically making the system harder and harder to deal with as you add more and more data, filing it in more and more ways.

I don’t know what the answer to how to organize data is. I’ve been reading a book called, “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg. I think pretty much everyone who subscribes to this forum would probably enjoy it. It basically outlines the history of the “Chandler” project which was an effort by a group of veteran software developers to make PIM software that would do it all better. As many of you probably know, this is a project which has foundered for all kinds of reasons. But even if it hadn’t, I really wonder how far it would have gone toward solving the problems that have probably brought most of us to this forum in the first place.

Tom S.