myBase Desktop 6.x + Addons Packfor PC on Bits Du Jour today

Posted by 22111
Oct 18, 2013 at 01:55 PM

I forgot a detail: Even the 1-line context display isn’t that useful whenever your search term appears right at the beginning of the line (but without it being the beginning of a sentence), or when it appears to the end of the line, especially when a new sentence has begun rather immediately before the term.

Technically, it is possible to have the search term “centered”, by having the program fetching the same number of words/characters before and behind, but such al algorithm doesn’t consider sentence parts enough.

So this brings me to another consideration, since any outliner developer would have to reinvent the wheel, on his own: Perhaps there is a basic problem with outliners, which is the absence of “libraries” for parts of the outliner, except for the tree. You can buy (and even have for free) lots of tree “components”, but it would be a good thing for developers to be able to choose some routine elements from the usual “libraries”, but since there are so few outliners, with so few customers, most of such elements would not exist, or they are not easy enough to find, and then to adapt.

Also, on a bigger scale, software houses buy other software houses / individual developers’ findings, but in the outliner world, without there being the necessary money for such things, every developer minds his business, without ever there being any interaction by which some standards could evolve. And as said, lots of developers’ coding efforts go into html/web rendering/“translation”, and that’s also a reason why they don’t like to spend time with ingenious solutions, and that’s why we are often stuck with a rather primitive state of affairs in outliner details, where ingenious solutions would have perfectly been possible.

Not speaking of missing basics, for example even with “Boolean” search, NEAR is rarely available, let alone things like BEFORE 3 or AFTER 4, in askSam meaning within the 3/4 words before/after the next search term. (As said, AS has got a “command line” for entering search codes, and that’s all quite impressive, even though it’s 25 years old and just the residuals of its quite complete macro language then that, except for the search codes, got lost with its transposition to Windows).

This being said, it would be “advisable” to have a “winner” in this field, a “winner who takes it all”, but under the sole condition that he will then reinvest his gains into real development of his outliner/PIM/WhateverYouCallIt - and we would not see this.

But please permit a frank word here: Judging by the pace of their respective development, it must be assumed that ALL those developers have got a profession for living, and then do some coding in the evening, one day per month, or similar. Even if they applied just all their week-ends to this coding, their new versions should come with tenfold of what they bring now. So this “lack of application” seems to indicate that even for such spare-time developments, those developers want to maximize return on a minimum of hours spent on coding. My remark may seem a little bit harsh, but anybody who knows a bit about programming, cannot help but be astonished by this slow development pace we see almost everywhere in the outliner world.