A link to the Milenix Blog

Posted by Graham Rhind
Jun 21, 2007 at 11:49 AM

quant wrote:
>If I could get the same power
>elsewhere, I too would prefer just to use another soft, rather that think how to get
>around in UR to achieve that. Please, share with us which soft you have in mind? (it’s
>not meant to be sarcastic) :)
>The features I need are: meta-data (attributes),
>internal/externam links, saved search items. (I can live without forms, powerful
>editor, or website grabber)

Touché! I’m probably not the best person to answer this, as my needs tend to be different from an average user’s. UR is an interface built onto a database. As a database manager, I could do much of what the UR interface does using a raw database program such as Visual Foxpro. In that way also, of course, I can also pick up the errors myself and not have to rely on Kinook’s dodgy handling, but I’m not about to start writing PIMs so I use what is available! I must also say, it do find it interesting to analyse other people’s takes on data management.

Don’t get me wrong - building a PIM onto a database is a good idea and should lead to a powerful program. I just think Kinook have a basic misunderstanding of their end-users. If they could switch off their techie mode for a little while and do something about the customer support side of the program (help, error mesages etc.), I’m sure they could considerably reduce their time in answering the same questions over and over again on their forum. Also, they seriously need to address themselves to some really basic program bugs.
You may also know, from my other posts, that to me the concept of “metadata” is too vaguely and amorphously used by most people, and therefore requires some definition. If you mean tagging a note with keywords or attributes, for example, then I’ve never really understood why this can’t be done just by adding the keywords to the text. In OneNote and Whizfolders (my two main outliner programs at the moment), for example, there are structured tagging possibility, but one can also simply add text to a note for it to be found in any searches. Hyperlinking of notes and externally is also possible in many programs, such as OneNote and Whizfolders, and any using an html/wiki paradigm. Saved searches: not sure what you mean by that - you want to run the same search regularly? Hmmm, not something I’ve tried myself so I don’t know what would do it. I don’t think that this can be done in OneNote or Whizfolders - I stand to be corrected.

Graham