Anyone heard of Quirkos?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 16, 2014 at 10:08 AM

Hm. Temptation has been fairly easily repelled, since the commercial price of GBP 400, while not ridiculous (especially not by the standards of qualitative analysis software) is nevertheless not exactly an inducement to an impulse buy. But I’ve been watching the videos and have now downloaded the trial. If this works as well as the videos suggest, it’s a seriously impressive tool with a very broad range of potential applications.

In particular, I think the way the categorisation and search engine can be used seamlessly together is very elegant. The way you can create source metadata fields on the fly which are then shared across the entire source repository is an outstanding idea (shades of Idealist). And the reporting looks interesting, too. As you say, Dr Andus, the whole thing has been designed for overlapping categories, subcategories etc., but manages to suggest that it’s still very easy to use. The fact that it’s programmed for cross-platform use (including mobile) from the get-go suggests the development team are well-grounded in today’s realities! Just waiting for the iOS version now, of course…

So. The trial will show whether, after having used all these wonderful features to analyse a bunch of source texts, one can then produce some kind of meaningful, structured, conclusion-enabling output. I have a vast store of documents dealing with my main obsessions, so should be able to generate some meaningful output fairly quickly (when I can find time to do some analysis).

Also nice to find that the developers are based just down the road in Edinburgh! Might have to go and talk to them about my Ultimate Authoring Tool concept…