All of TGS Labs Software is now Freeware

Posted by 22111
Dec 20, 2014 at 10:08 PM

Nice find, Donovan; could you develop a little bit, Madaboutdana?

I quickly discarded WinOganizer back in 2011 (4.4), because of its skeu-o-crap (ringbinder graphics), and because its not-so-cheap price not being in accordance with its lack of item cloning possibilities.

Now, I have been interested in GS Notes, and I have made the following observations; please correct me if I’m wrong:

(SPEAKING OF GS NOTES HERE, WinOrganizer will probably have an additional agenda functionality but otherwise function in a similar way?:)

- Quite good search, incl. regex and “include comments”, which means you either search in the titles only (which often comes quite handy), or “incl. comments”, meaning full text. There is a hit table just with titles, not with respective contexts, but if you display the hit table on any other location than within the GS Notes screen, browsing the non-modal hit table will not make disappear it each time, so you will browse the respective contexts quite fast. This is similar to Jot Plus, except for the fact that in Jot Plus, you even can put the hit table within the program’s main frame for browsing.

- No formatting within the tree, which for me is a deal breaker (I replaced UR with AO because of that); also, it does not seem possible to hide the (ugly) tree symbols.

- The item title in the tree is NOT replicated in the title line above the content (= “comment”); you will have to fill up the title line manually if you want to have some additional title there; it would have been preferable that the respective tree title had been replicated there, and that it had been up to you to then perhaps change / develop that title, in case; so in practice, the title line of most items will probably remain blank, which is not beautiful; as for searching in titles, both terms in the tree and in the title line will be found (= even without “comments” being included), so you could use the title line as a tag / keyword field, and search there and in the titles (as they are in the tree), with “incl. comments” de-activated).

- Tab in tree goes to title field, and there it goes to content (“comment”) field; there, it does a text tab: Thus, it’s evident that for doing a tree-content toggle, you need to write some lines in the macro program of your choice. Similar for “new sibling” by alt-insert only: should be re-assigned to something more intuitive, e.g. to the enter key when focus is in the tree; btw, the alt-insert does NOT function from within the content field, which would have been a simple thing to do.

- Program has tables and pics in its content field (not tried).

- No export, and especially no import facilities worth mentioning.

- Spell-checking (also in other languages than English?) - not tried; ditto for possible thesauri other than English.

- There is an “edit window” (by leftclick on the symbol in the title line), which seems devoid of sense to me.

- Sorting of siblings is apparently non-destructive (possibly subject to problems when after sorting, you do additions or save your work, i.e. I doubt the non-destructiveness of sorting at least between different work sessions - not tried).

- WinOrganizer (!) MIGHT be functional as a 3-pane outliner, judging from some screenshots, but then, even in GS Notes, the title field’s workings are not that evident.

As I see it, GS Notes is a typical me-too application, without any real charm; compare with Jot Plus. I don’t accept outliners without tree formatting anymore, as I don’t accept file managers without individual formatting of list entries anymore.

I have spoken about the problem of a second editing pane, in a traditional 2-pane outliner, cf. MI’s reading-only pane, UR not offering any such pane, etc. - either you work in MS Word, in Atlantis Word Processor, or in any other rtf-capable text processing tool, in parallel to your outliner work, or you do as I recently did, and buy (20 bucks) WordPad Plus, which is one of the very basic rtf editors, of which most are free though, but which offers a list of “checkpoints”, i.e. it’s visually similar to a 2-pane outliner, except for the fact that its “tree” is just a flat list. Most of its command are not available by shortkeys, but only from the menu, so you will have to write some macro tool lines in order to get “select all” from control-a, and such, but under these circumstances, WordPad Plus is an ideal add-on to any 2-pane outliner not offering a second edit pane, whilst shuffling content forth and back between your main outliner, and then GS Notes, would be quite inelegant imo, if you try to use it out of the box, i.e. without writing some shuffle macros beforehand, and I doubt anybody would adopt it as their main outliner either, be it free or not. This being said, of course you could write the necessary macros in order to use GS Notes as “second pane”, with a flat tree (moving of items with control-up/dn): It’s free now, after all.