New Product Alert: Debrief

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 8, 2007 at 01:33 PM

Like you, one of the first things I do when I investiage a new piece of software is check out the screenshots on the web site. And I agree that the screen shots on the Debrief site are woefully inadequate. It looks to me like they are using the same screenshots they created for their help document for the web site.

I had no trouble installing the software on my computer, and I have not noticed a lot of mispellings or typgraphical errors in the popups or help documentation, though I have no doubt they are there. An abundance of these mistakes does undermine ones confidence in a program, especially when the software producer is writing in his or her own language. But, as I said, I haven’t notice a lot of these yet.

As for there being a lot of buttons on the screen, you can turn some of these features off to reduce the clutter a little bit. However, I don’t find the screen all that cluttered… to me the GUI of Debrief is a lot more “tidy” than UltraRecall… admittedly a subjective assessment.

For anyone still interested in Debrief, I can say this so far: This is not the program to replace an information capturing program such as UR or Zoot… it just doesn’t have the tools for gathering lots of different information from many sources. But if you build your own information through capturing of your own thoughts, todos, contacts, etc… Debrief is worth a look.

Steve Z.