askSam vs. Zoot? and vs. others

Posted by Armin
Oct 6, 2013 at 06:16 PM

22111 wrote:
>But I’ve become wary of data monsters, so my question is: How many
>items? How many problems?

This has been recently discussed in the Zoot-Group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zoot-xt/NWsOl_HqTCg/discussion

There Tom Davis said:
> The main factors which affect Zoot performance are:
> * Amount of RAM
> * Speed of Hard Drive(s)

I had once problems with a huge feed database in Zoot, which contained 40.000 and more items (RSS,Twitter) and which was slowing down the system while fetching new items, but that’s long ago (2 years or so). I guess Tom Davis (developer of Zoot) did something in the meantime to avoid this. I cannot say anything about including huge photosets into Zoot and how that works, because I only use small amounts of images in my Zoot databases.

> My looking around being caused by UR’s non-availability of formatting for tree entries - this might appear ridiculous, but I too much crave for this formatting
> in order to become ever happy with UR.

Although I do not know what exactly you mean by tree entries, according to formatting:
In Zoot you have three panes.

1. A folder tree with folder names (simple folders, smart folders and GTD-folders), you manually can modify the color of the folder (name) but you cannot set them to italic or bold (they are automatically bold, if they contain unread items). Folders with feed accounts get if provided the favicon as their folder icon.

2. The item grid shows the subject and the selected fields of each item located in a folder. You can select the fields you want to see in the item grid and you can build different user-defined views for this item grid. The text of the item’s subject only can be formatted via color in the item grid. The subject is bold, if its item is unread. Within smart folders using RULES and ACTIONs you automatically can modify the color of the item’s subject.

3. The content of the item, in former versions of Zoot when items were plain text only this was called “body” of the item, now it’s the editor pane. The item body can be plain text, RTF or HTML. You can select and change this. So you are able to format the text of the item as you want. There is also a useful comment field (which could be inline or excluded) for each item, if you want to take some notes or remarks to a full text document (I use color for analysing articles and put e.g. footnotes or references into the comment field).

sorry for any mistakes in English, it’s not my native language and I’m in a hurry. ;-)

Regards
Armin