little red hen needs help

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 3, 2014 at 11:21 AM

Tragically, the program you really, truly need is Blackwell’s legendary Idealist. Alas, now long defunct! It was described as a bibliographic database, but was actually much more than that - a system capable of placing any number of fields in a single record, then searching/sorting on any criterion/combination of criteria in any field(s). So perfectly matching your need for unique records with their own combination of fields.

It was actually a flat-file full-text database (not dissimilar in conception to askSam, but much more reliable - until, alas, the latest versions). But because of its built-in scripting language, you could use it as a kind of relational database. In fact, I built our very first admin database in Idealist, and it served us well for many years (holding records of clients, suppliers, projects, invoices, all inter-related and instantly searchable). The search engine was very, very fast and efficient - literally eye-blink fast.

Somewhere I may have the very last version of Idealist (before the disastrous release 5, which attempted to incorporate rich text and was totally unstable). But it’s not being developed any more, and the last developer to take it on - I forget the name - appears to have vanished without trace. If anybody’s interested, I’ll see if I can dig it out.

Having said all that, there are alternatives. One of them is ListPro by Ilium Software (http://www.iliumsoft.com/listpro/), also available for iPhone and Android. The desktop version could be used as a fairly competent writing tool (the ‘Notes’ field supports rich text and can cope with significant amounts of text), I suppose, but the mobile phone versions are a bit too fiddly for that. And I’m sure there are others, but they don’t immediately spring to mind. You could have a look under http://alternativeto.net, perhaps.