WhizFolders and Graphical Front Ends

Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 14, 2006 at 03:32 PM

Ian -

> 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.
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I was very interested in your comments about Contentsaver (now re-named Web Research [WR]), since I am seriously thinking about switching back from it to Net Snippets Standard. Given that Ultra Recall has many of WR’s limitations, why do you think it is so much better?

Incidentally, my reasons for returning to NS are:

- doesn’t contain data within a proprietory database

- easy to index and search - especially pdf files - without having to export them first, using external program (e.g., dtSearch - my favourite)

- offers a rudimentary bibliographic feature

- many ways of saving web-pages, extracts, files, links, etc.

- works well with Firefox

- can make separate notes (stored as htm files) with html editor

- provides for comments and other metadata

- offers keywords (but not virtual folders - so can’t “permanently” organize files on basis of keywords; only gather temporarily when doing a keyword search)

- can easily send file as attachment by email (neat)

- can keep on adding clips to existing snippet

- can “hoist” working folder by zooming in, and de-hoist by zooming out.

Many of the above are also offered by programs like Surfulater and WR, of course. And I like the visual elegance of WR’s three-pane display, and its categories; but getting at its data from third-party programs is just too complicated.

As NS uses the Windows filing system to store files, not only is indexed searching easy, but there is no need to tag files with special URL-type addresses in order to hyperlink them to the outside world. It’s easy, for example, for Zoot to make file-links to them.

Down the line there is promise that these problems of proprietory databases will be solved by Windows desktop search, xml, or whatever. At the moment, though, I am leaning back) towards NS again as the only viable current solution to integrating scattered data. Firefox’s Scrapbook is another potential candidate, too, as it doesn’t use a proprietory database either.

Derek