IdeaMason

Posted by Franz Grieser
Jul 15, 2006 at 05:27 PM

Hi Kenneth.

Thanks for the pointer to IdeaMason.

I have tested the software for a week and bought a 3-machine licence yesterday.

The has been extremely responsive: 2 days after I asked about a 3-machine licence they expanded the 2-machine licence they had before to cover 3 PCs (they said that I was not the only one who required a more extensive licence). Before buying the licence I sent them a list of suggestions - again, they responded almost immediately (particularly surprising for me given the lag between the USA and Germany).

What I like about IdeaMason:

* It is an integrated tool that has almost everything I need: notetaking, outlining, source-material management (though I don´t need that for the current project).
* And: I don´t have to put up with the editor - I can export outlines and drafts to Word or OpenOffice.org and work in my familiar word processor.
* Add to that a fast search, the ability to use categories, to create link between notes, and the ability to create shortcuts to files and to combine several projects in one portfolio (i.e. a IdeaMason file).
* Though there is no real export feature at the moment, I can send all the data inside IdeaMason or selected notes to Microsoft Word - which is what I do to regularly backup my project in a format I can read with a tool outside IdeaMason.
* The responsiveness of the developer is great.

There are, however, a few things I am missing. What I urgently need:

* Keyboard shortcuts for often needed commands: New Idea, New Sourced Material, Bold, Italics, Font. When entering new information, I have my hands on the keyboard; IdeaMason forces me to interrupt the flow and take the mouse to create a new note or to format the text.
* The ability to select several items in outline view and move, promote/demote, copy, or cut the items together.
* An import feature that reads a RTF (or Word) file and creates a new note or a series of new notes - I have a lot of material for my various book projects stored in Word files and in Infoselect databases. At the moment, I have to copy and paste the data over to IdeaMason - being able to automate that using an import feature would be a great help.

Things that would be nice:

* An export command (at the moment I have to create a draft to export all or selected notes to Word and save it as Word, RTF, HTML or whatever file), what I’d like is an export to RTF (I do not need HTML output but I think there is a number of users that might need it).
* Though I own Microsoft Office 2003, I prefer to use OpenOffice.org - I’d like to be able to select the output format (either Word or OpenOffice.org Writer). Right now, I have to have both Word and OpenOffice.org on each machine on which I use IdeaMason.

After I sent my suggestions to the developer, I was told that they plan to publish updates in September and December. The September update will bring among others the keyboard shortcuts, the December update will bring an RTF import and an RTF and HTML export. They also offered me to review their proposed feature list for the next versions and make additional suggestions.

Franz