WhizFolders and Graphical Front Ends

Posted by Ian Goldsmid
Jul 14, 2006 at 05:52 AM

Daly

I have been using UltraRecall mostly… as i have been saving hundreds of web pages - and UR, I have found through extensive trial and error, is absolutely the best for this (even better than ContentSaver - much better actually). I don’t like the fact though that UR only indexes keywords - so this is quite a big limitation (no practical phrase searching for example) - and it also doesn’t highlight search terms - so you search once to find the Item, then again in each item to find the text.

In the last few days, as a result of my suggestions (that I got insight into from playing with OneNote 2007), Sanjay, the developer of WhizFolders has implemented external links from WF as URL’s - so that you can now effectively use WhizFolders as the Notes management application from other programs - as I said in my last note. This is a revelation actually, I find this to be truly productive and creative.

I have always wanted to use a graphical, visual application to manage my information - but all of them, even Mind Manager 6 Pro, are completely NOT built to work with extensive collections of notes (and don’t deal with web pages at all), especially where there will be many and complex cross references - and you want to perform fast, complex text searches too. So a combination of Axon Idea Processor (extremely versatile visual/graphical concept mapping program), and Whizfolders I am finding to be ideal (for now). And then I think UltraRecall will soon make it possible to copy external links into their info Items that can then be pasted into Axon (or any other tool like it) - at the moment UR has a function called “Copy Command Line to Item” - but it doesn’t work right yet when pasted into other apps (as file or web hyperlinks) - but I am certain it will soon - I am in conversation with Kevin about this right now, and I believe he is working on it.

Whizfolders is actually really superb, handles rich text exceedingly well, tables and so forth, has a very poweful full text search, and implements hyperlinking better than any other application out there. The overall feel, responsiveness and pleasureableness of using it is also very high/good.

The key for me is to have a structurally unlimited visual/graphical view of my data, i.e. not just hierarchical (like a mind map is limited to) - it has to be able to represent many-to-many - and much more than that. So with Axon, I can create a superb structurally unlimited graphical front end to all my notes and web pages - and still retain the power of WhizFolders for cross referencing and searching - and UR to retain pristine copies of any web page I throw at it.

I agree with you about InfoHandler, it is truly a superb product, there is nohing like it for rapidly categorizing your info items with potentially complex combinations of categories/sub categories, and for finding/filtering info, potentially where you will want to use complex category intersection - and do that easily and quickly - fabulous! It also makes it possible to link all you other stuff (disk files, web links, Outlook emails/contacts etc) into it, and categorize those links too - marvellous! I nearly went for it ‘lock stock and barrel’ - but the search mechansim in it is rather weak (unless you wanna use Regular Expressions and I don’t, they drive me crazy) - and so is internal linking… and I figured there was something about that that would start to annoy me when I got a lot of data in it…. But it was close…

Another great thing about UR is its ability to easily and quickly export info item content, especially web pages and rich text items… I thereby overcome the UR search limitation by keeping a copy of all my saved web pages, pdf’s, word, ppts etc on disk - and then I have a saved search in X1 that limits the initial search to a set of folders with UR exported data. X1 makes it real easy to perform complex/boolean whatever searches, highlighting all the results, and letting you preview pretty much anything you throw at it…..

In conclusion, even though I am putting most everything in UR, WZ, Axon, I am still waiting with baited breath for two new PIM type applications to emerge into beta - Personal Brain (V4 completely re-written and updated), and Tinderbox. Personal Brain should be available in its new incarnation within a few months, and Eastgate’s Tinderbox for Windows sooner than that.

Well, knowledge management is where much of the issue and opportunity is now and into the future. So I think we are all justified in putting a lot of effort and time into finding the best tools to manage all our stuff. And frankly new ones are always emerging, existing ones compete with each other, coming up with important new features, like external linking, that I find just too compelling to gloss over. So I also look for tools that make it easy to export all the content, and then at least the pain of changing is reduced - albeit you can’t generally automate the export/import of the metadata like the categories in IH… oh well…

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Ian