Zoot Grows on You

Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 21, 2007 at 11:27 AM

I have to agree with quant on this one. Zoot would be a fine information manager if information was only to be found in text form. My information isn’t, so I can’t use it as an information manager. Equally, UltraRecall, with its “quirks”, doesn’t square up for me to OneNote, which is where I have now stored my complete non-structured information archive (scanned documents, web page snippets, photographs, graphics, articles etc.). UltraRecall is useful for me for structured data, such as customer data and purchase history. I could put this into Zoot, but the item pane in Zoot is tabular and this (as far as I know) cannot be changed - UltraRecall allows item data-entry to occur in a form, which suits me better.

That said, I am trying Zoot32 beta as a replacement to my current task manager (ITSD, which proved very unstable on my machine and not supported, though its design was ideal for my purposes). UltraRecall won’t do in its current form because of its lack of proper support for recurring tasks (I know that this, like so much, is on Kinook’s todo list, which, in my opinion, needs re-ordering!).

Zoot is useful task manager for me because of its ability to absorb data (new tasks) easily through its “zooter” task bar add on, and it is a very flexible piece of software, with a help system which is far more useful and accessible than UltraRecall’s (though not exhaustive - a lot of experimentation is required for us newbies). The beta versions for me have proved very stable - it has never crashed, though there are some errors and some error messages. On the same machine I use UltraRecall for about 30 minutes per day for data entry and have at least one crash per day when the program terminates entirely and two of three error messages when the program does not exit (though I have never lost data in UR, to its credit - it doesn’t attempt a roll back when it crashes).

I hope that Zoot does develop beyond a simple port from 16-bit to 32-bit with RTF as an extra - html support would be very desirable, for example.

Graham