Best of Both Worlds, Twice - I think this was the missing element to a perfect system: The "one db, one tree" nexus is dead.

Posted by 22111
Dec 25, 2013 at 02:36 PM

“but my time is limited”

Thank you very much, Pierre, for your kind offer. But you’re aware that as a general offer to everybody, whilst it remaining more than kind, it’s not that efficient when it comes to full those about 30 minutes with answering questions that should not even be necessary? Don’t try to do videos, which take time to produce and are not really step-by-step instructions for people who then would need to put the steps they see there, on paper first in order to follow those. But bear in mind what somebody not “knowing about” IQ would need to know about IQ within the first minutes he tries to use this program, for very basic work, and then try to do a “first steps” paper for this, which you would place priminently on your page. This would not be about “how to do something similar like the pivot function in Excel”, but about what I described above, create a new tree (? list, whatever), then create some items there, and have them as siblings or children, etc., i.e. exactly the task that is so easy in a (non-too-basic) MI, and so much more difficult in UR, and seemingly impossible in IQ. Just bear in mind that people NOT willing to read more than 1 page of text should be able to do the very first steps alone, too, THEN perhaps even counselling by phone would be an extraordinary step to broaden your market share, since I’ve never heard of such an offer by any of your competitors. But having to explain the most basic basics, again and again, on the phone, is certainly not the best approach here for a developer who’s time is limited, no doubt.

As said, when after the “new file(or whatever, since you say it’s within the same db)” command, I create a new item then, I don’t see that item, and at this point, most “triallers” will close down the beta, without calling. And then, this “grid” is kind of a “service” to those of your customers that “want more”, but it’s not the perfect display your sw for “beginners”, let alone those who come from other outliners, so the default screen should be much more “visually accessible” - to give another example, it’s a fact that Zoot’s default screen can be changed in quite a spectacular way, but then, nobody understands why its developer insists on presenting Zoot, to prospects, in its traditional visual aspect which certainly makes instantly flee many (if not the majority) of them - and what I see when I first open IQ, is worse than that.

And since I’m honestly trying to help here: Nobody would ever try to look up possible new software from his netbook, from a 800x600 screen, nobody - please believe me here. Providing accessibility for netbook users might be a good thing for sets that have to be continually accessed “from the read”, cloud services, mail services - but no one is sitting in a coffeeshop and gets the idea, well, I heard about IQ, let’s see what I could do with that. (Vice Versa didn’t get that fact either, and some more.)

And finally, why always spread your “material” over several domains, even years after the name change?

And yes, I acknowledge it’s a little bit ironic that I, the “hold it as flat as possible” advocate here, kindly invites you to present traditional outlines, to your prospects, not those ugly lists, all the less so spread over 70 p.c. of the screen.

A more traditional (and more pleasant) appearance, please, and then all those “third-dimensional goodies” “under the hood”, for advanced users?

Not a single minute spent on making sw “market-conforming” (visual appearance, immediate access to the core functionality even for people not having read the handbook) could ever be lost. ;-)