askSam vs. Zoot? and vs. others

Posted by 22111
Oct 5, 2013 at 06:38 PM

Of course, in a relational database, all this would be much more comfortable, but as I said in another thread, AS is a useful quick-n-dirty solution for tasks like crm, as is used by many people to this effect. So if Zoot replicates those special features, and does it even better, this could become more widely used.

Those smart trees in AS are rather slow to build up if you have thousands of records in the database, and even worse, in order to switch from one such tree to another, depending on other fields and their contents (or in a different order), you must do a lot of manual work - this can be done by a macro, but such a macro involves plenty of clicks in multiple dialogs, and worse, if there are toggles, the previous and the final state are a little unpredictable, so this is far from “professional”.

Those multiple, identically-named fields are without too many problems, since you would tend to enter “additional” info into the “additional” ones, but several different entries in one such “list” field is a real-life problem, since those fields would/should be perfect for tagging/categorizing, and with tags/categories, the second or third within such a field is often even more “important”/needed than the very first one, but as said, they will be “overlooked” when AS builds up the tree, so it would be real good info to know if Zoot handles this aspect better, and this would imply to put such records, if checked for this field, as “clones”, several times, into that same smart tree, one time for every such entry in that same field. Btw, uses for this would me multiple, not only for tags, etc., but also, if some corporation has got several outlets, you would put the respective town names as a list into this field, and then every outlet of that corporation/customer would appear under the respective town in your tree - of course, this could be realized differently, by having separate items all referencing to the main corporation.

And of course, there is always the search function, where such “second” or “third” entries in list fields don’t get lost.

But anyway, traditional outliners don’t have such functionality, so it’s good news, all the more so for people who might be interested in AS (meaning they don’t have all their stuff into AS yet), but would prefer to buy something more stable and in better shape; AS development / AS’ future both having become pathetic subjects.

Also, with Zoot, there is e-mail integration, which is absent from AS, and especially for crm tasks, this could be something extremely important. Of course, a current help file would be welcome, especially since their “forum” doesn’t accept new “members” who ain’t willing to give Google their telephone number…

Be that as is might be, if Zoot now has introduced such functionality, I agree that no new customer needing these features should go to AS anymore (and accept all its quirks).

As for relational databases, there has been some thread somewhere in which somebody said he replaced his former Connected Text workflow by programming something in Access for himself, and he’s much happier now. Well, he doesn’t give away the code for free, nor does he try to sell it, which would not so bad an idea if it’s really a smooth piece of software (and for Access, there is available a free runtime, so that’s not the problem).

That’s why for such tasks, I’ve been going with AS, but Zoot is tempting.

All the more so since it could perhaps consolidate my Ultra Recall setup together with my AS setup.

Btw, the parent nodes in such an AS tree aren’t those of an outliner: Since they are created by the program, they are necessarily empty, and so many times, I “try” to put some info into them, since I am accustomed to this by all those outliners. This being a disadvantage Zoot should share with AS, for smart folders, I’m afraid.

And last, the citation above states fields in the text, and smart folders, in Zoot; I’m not entirely sure those smart trees can be built up from fields in the text, since there are also “attributes” fields - if that’s possible, though, the next question would be if for smart trees, such “standardized” fields, and text fields even can be mixed.

I suppose that today, CT, Zoot and InfoQube are the top three, and then, all the others lack far behind (with the exception of TB, but which is very special; some people mention WhizFolders, too, but Ultra Recall has stopped real development long ago and becomes and more unacceptable); some man (here, I think) says the developer of Zoot doesn’t answer his mails anymore, since he mentioned too many bugs to the developer… (Just to explay why I don’t jump from AS to Zoot in a hurry.)