WhizFolders and Graphical Front Ends

Posted by Ian Goldsmid
Jul 14, 2006 at 09:03 PM

Derek

Yup, I have licenses for ContentSaver/Web Researcher, NetSnippets, and UltraRecall.. Ultimately I found that UltraRecall was and is able to replicate every web page I throw at it perfectly, looking identical to the original - I really like that. Also UR provides a much greater range of metadata, or tagging with dirrerent attributes such as dates of various kinds, keywords, pick-lists, notes and on and on.. Its extremely well engineered, the developers are constantly improving it at an impressive rate, they are incredibly responsive to users….. AND Saved Web pages can be easily mirrored on your hard disk by exporting them. To keep copies synchronous what I do is create a saved (advanced) search: “Create Date is equal to or greater than [the date at which I last saved my web clips to disk] ” AND “Doc Type = [1 OR 2….]- which then means its real easy to keep a synchronised copy of all of that on my hard disk. ALSO, UltraRecall are now developing an iFilter for Google Desktop Search so all the insides of UR will be exposed to GDS search. I expect that will be available in the not very distant future. http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=993

NetSnippets, hasn’t been updated for two years, and the developer looks to be putting all his eggs in eSnips…Nevertheless is a very neat product - but merely because it saves data to hard disk isn’t enough for me. Also with Contensaver, its real easy to export/mirror your stuff to disk if you need to link it into other applications. With hard disk being so low priced, who cares?

So, yes, I also agree with Stephen, WF has a really excellent editor, (and full text search by the way) - but clearly isn’t a contender as a collector and manager of all your data/document types - and of course its external links could equally well be pasted into UltraRecall - and ZOOT! In fact it (would need to be the latest alpha) could now be used to instantly overcome the rtf shortcomings of ZOOT, just write up all your notes in WF and create links to them in Zoot.

Cheers, Ian

Derek Cornish wrote:
>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.
>_____________________________________
> >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