Zoot XT and Evernote

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Sep 29, 2013 at 03:11 PM

There’s an excellent discussion at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?zx=1dam86dyqvy3h#inbox/1415fedbb730ffdb called Zoot and Evernote.

The discussion deals with a theme of growing importance on the Zoot group, that of taking time to develop a helpful help file to guide people through the process of setting Zoot up, and being able to take full advantage of it. Right now there is a steep learning curve, and many people (myself included) are unable to make full use of the program. This is a shame because it’s a program of great power, capability, and elegance.

Zoot is a one person operation (as near as I can determine). That one person, Tom Davis, does an amazing job of creating software, responding to users within hours, and often posting resulting fixes within 24 to 48 hours.

With a good help file and set of tutorials, my guess is many 100s, if not 1000s, more people would use Zoot. On this particular thread, months of requesting, begging, for a help file has reached the point where someone asked Tom to stop developing the product for a while so he could write a help file. In spite of offers of volunteer assistance he’s yet to take up any of the offers (as far as I know).

Ironically, Zoot has had good writers around it for a long time - James Fallows is perhaps the best known, as is our own Steve Zeoli here, and Jan Rifkinson, who has written here on occasion. Over recent months I’ve followed Jan’s posts, and he’s blown me away with his patience and his ability to think in terms of what Zoot is capable of. Unlike me, Jan has all the right questions, which is the best way to getting to good answers. :)

The other interesting aspect of this thread is that it is one of the more serious looks I have seen at the limitation of Evernote. Evernote, recognized as a top, multiplatform means to capture information, and to retrieve it anywhere, has major weaknesses when it comes to processing information. A brief perusal of its forums shows the attempts to make that point over its years. In part, the Evernote Trunk is a response to some of EN’s weaknesses as an info manager.

So also are the scores of videos on YouTube telling users how to make Evernote a GTD manager, a life manager, the place to store all one’s business information, etc. EN can do that, to be sure, but I often feel with EN I am using work arounds to compensate for the fact that EN developers do not have a full understanding of the mission, that metadata capture hardly exists, that it’s not possible to keep notes separate from the content (Ariadne in its previous form had an elegant way to do this, but unfortunately the new developer seems to have lost sight of all the potential in that simple yet effective program; I hope Ariadne’s fabled thread is enough to lead him back to her.).

It’s good to see EN’s info processing limitations named and discussed on the Zoot site.

Ironic in a way that Zoot and Evernote in their respective fashions stand apart from the crowd of software programs, and yet both have an Achilles heel which brings (needlessly) limiting factors into play.

I’m not suggesting Zoot and EN should get together, so much as hoping Zoot would a) get the essential help file, (b) arrange for a third party author to write Zoot for Dummies, (c) develop already powerful info tools further, and (d) create a multi-device capability. Perhaps the most powerful asset Zoot has at the moment is the cohort of erudite, helpful forum members, some of whom are willing to crowd source the work among themselves.

Daly