Zoot Grows on You

Posted by Thomas
Aug 21, 2007 at 09:43 PM

I have found UR way more user friendly than Zoot, but then even Zoot doesn’t have as steep learning curve as claimed - I couldn’t figure it originally (years ago) with the sample databases supplied, but it clicked once I have seen the database supplied by James Fallows (in files section of Zoot forum).

Agreed on rich text, plain text is fine, but at least bolding and underlining would be enough for my purposes.

I have noticed on UR forum as well that some people have stability issues with UR. I’m running it (=have it open) 18 hours a day (admittedly, little data entry, mostly data retrieval), on a fairly unstable setup (old OS, plenty of trialing new applications and occasional system crashes and other application crashes), but UR never crashes, well maybe once or twice long time ago…..

> UR definitely has a lot of advantages, and has a more contemporary feel.
Well it could use some more visual appeal - custom fonts and colours for tree items, and so on. It’s too “digital” in approach.

UR is useless for me for task list purposes, because of the lack of visual aspect and a bit awkward feeling in comparison to specialized task list software. Zoot would win here.

> The splitting of info into an arbitrary number of databases, all quickly accessible but not loaded all the time, also seems
> a good approach. I tend to feel less overwhelm than in most tree-type managers where I load up a single tree with thousands
> of items.

That’s achievable in UR as well, at least if we are only talking about toolbar from which you can access your databases.