askSam vs. Zoot? and vs. others

Posted by 22111
Oct 10, 2013 at 02:45 PM

Armin, thank you very much for your broad info! So they have made the layout flexible, and I’m very intrigued now, will trial and probably buy before the help file is really ready (I know you can do away with the white-on-black-background, so that should not be a problem for anybody).

In fact, 3-pane outliners are a kind of their own, and they are rare. So in UR, I “learned” to do without the third pane, but it will be more than interesting to “learn” how to best use the third pane; from the outside, by not having tried yet, I would say that it could be very useful to put clones of “other” sub-trees into the current sub-tree in pane 1, then have the items of the current item (in pane 1) in pane 2, and then you switch freely between your pane-1 headings, within the current sub-tree there, and independently of them being “at home” there or just being cloned to that position in the tree.

This way, quite fluent navigation between many such “item groups” (pane 2) all put together in pane 1 should be possible, and one click there (in pane 1) will bring you immediate access to all the respective “children”. I think that workflow-wise, this 3-pane is the greatest concept of them all, and perhaps it’s really time to switch the outliner. (Previous version had no formatting, and even a 32k limit for the content field: Since all this has gone, no further reason to avoid this program!) And I think the developer is right to never put it into “bits”, since thus, no deprecation, and no unnecessary waiting for the right moment to buy (and 100 p.c. to the developer, not 25 p.c. only).

One general question about type encoding: If I understand the problem right (which I never really dived into): If you write in some West European language, no problem. Eastern European ditto? But problems for Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and so on?! Then, some problems if you import websites, even with special West European language characters sometimes? What about the trick to install the right font? On most computers, the “new” Arial font is installed, the one with many hundreds of characters. I suppose with that, you will not encounter any/too many font problems? And then, even Surfulater, the “specialist” for storing web sites, does not follow those new guidelines (Unicode I mean)... but perhaps it will be of interest indeed how well it processes European web sites…

A word about shortkeys, and badly assigned, not re-assignable shortkeys: I never encountered any program which I could not spice a little bit up with a macro program, so everybody should install the macro program of his choice, anyway. From there on, it’s easy to reassign original, unalterable shortkeys of any program to begin with, as your very first “macros” there. Just trial the macro program(s) before, since some of them are unable to re-assign such original shortkeys of a program, they do not intercept your key pressings early enough. But most will do without any problem. I know from bits comments and other sources that many a people do make rely their decision for or against a given software on that software’s shortkeys being re-assignable or not, when in fact, that minor criterion should not interfere here. In ancient age, good software had its own macro “language”/set; except for MS, this has largely be abandoned. So choose your macro tool, and then spice up your multiple applications, AND reassign better shortkeys with it, too!