Can we talk about Info Select?

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Aug 26, 2012 at 11:51 PM

@razorboy:
1. So, you tried IS 9 (2007) and 10, and found them inferior to IS 8? IS 10 has really bad user reviews, I see.
Yes, I couldn’t see that IS9 was necessarily any better than IS8 - at least, not from my perspective. I don’t have any notes written up about it, but I recall that I thought IS9 seemed a bit of a regressive step. I very briefly played about with an earlier prototype version (I think it was) of IS10, when the IS/Yahoo forum was active (but again, no notes, sorry, though I did put my thoughts into the forum thread and you presumably can still read that material).
I couldn’t see the need for half the changes that were made/proposed for IS10, a good many of which seemed to be removal of previously otherwise stable functionality. Then there was the introduction of the feature of the “ribbon” interface.

The developer (and the forum users/members) seemed to be fixated on features (e.g., “ribbon” interface) rather than whether the functionality met their needs. Neglecting NEEDS is usually a classic error in software design/development, so if IS10 got any bad reviews (and it definitely did), then it’s arguably because of that rather than that IS10 is a “bad product” per se.
The needs never were defined (to my knowledge) and the classic step of prioritising them into A, B, C (A=mandatory, B=highly desirable, C= nice-to-have) seemed to have been omitted throughout. The whole exercise thus seemed appallingly confused and almost purposeless, and it was apparently being driven this way by the developer (go figure). Sadly, in restrospect, it seemed to have been an exercise in missed opportunity to improve the design in line with users’ needs.

I don’t think the IS10 developer produces “bad product” per se - at least, not from my experience. Even an egregiously bad design can be made operational, but that won’t necessarily make the design any better - e.g., the Maginot Line.
______________________________

2. ...led me to reinstall my old copy of IS5 as an experiment, to prove that it too works just fine on a Win 7-64 laptop (Home Premium).~~~~ How did you do that? Did the installer do its job, or did you have to resort to hackery?

It was no problem at all - piece of cake. As with all my trial or old software, I deliberately install the software into a special directory of my own choosing and thus avoid installing the software into the Windows “Program Files” or “Program Files (x86)” directories - thus bypassing the need for extra system privileges that the OS puts on proggies using those directories. The only difficulty I recall was in ensuring I had the appropriate InfoSelect v5 (and later) English spelling and thesaurus files. I also have the IS database in a specially defined data area (for targetting of backups).
______________________________

3. Do IS 9 and 10 not save audio (note) files? Does Evernote?
I don’t know of any other PIM that handles words spoken/sung in audio files as text data AND that handles text embedded in images as text data. Furthermore, the smooth and uncluttered way in which OneNote does this is amazing. I only discovered a few days ago that if you put an mp3 song in OneNote, and paste the text of the lyrics below it, then when you play the mp3 in OneNote, it automatically tries to step down through and highlight the lines of the lyrics as they are being sung. That’s pretty smart. Of course, being able to search through the words in an audio file when you have no transcript is also pretty damn smart, and arguably just what you’d need in a note-taking PIM tool.
I think that in this regard OneNote leaves Evernote in the dust. Evernote would not be so far behind OneNote if they hadn’t crippled their client application so that you couldn’t have an OCR store of your text images - you are locked-in to being dependent on the cloud-based store for this. I detest such archaic business models that use lock-in in any shape or form.
______________________________

4. I confess that I don’t know what It is meant by “hierarchical” in the context of describing these softwares. Please explain. (..blush..)
A flexible hierarchical categorisation tree is an immensely powerful tool for organising information into categories and for marshalling and communicating your thoughts on a complex subject - e.g., in writing a book or a report in sections and subsections, on a particular subject.

For IS8, imagine a diagram of a structured set of categories and sub-categories - e.g., an organisational hierarchy diagram - then turn it on its side, and what you have is a linear view of that in the LH pane of IS8 (the categories can be anything you want, and there is a way of mapping unstructured cross-categories too, which can be rather handy). The RH pane contains the relevant content material for each point in the hierarchy.

EXAMPLE:
1.0 Parent (e.g. CEO)
1.1 Child of the above parent. (e.g., Vice President #1)
1.2 Child that is a parent (e.g., Vice President #2)
1.2.1 Child of 1.2 (e.g., 1st Deputy Vice President to #2)
1.2.2 Child of 1.2 (e.g., 2nd Deputy Vice President to #2)
1.2.2.1 Child of 1.2.2
2.0 Another parent - etc.
______________________________