Two Pane Outliner Shootout

Posted by Paul J. Miller
May 23, 2018 at 10:10 PM

For a long time now I have been looking for the perfect note taking program, I have been spending lots of money getting licenses for programs which I thought were promising and passing of the results to the readers of my blog in the form of reviews which other people may or may not find informative.

Faced with so many different note taking programs it is easy to feel anxiety caused by the plethora of choices available. I kept asking myself ‘Will I make the right choice?’, the underlying assumption was that there is an optimum choice which does not involve any compromise if only I could find it.

But I have realised that there are often situations where the optimum choice does not exist and where every choice is a compromise. Such is the nature of CRIMP.

I mainly use MyInfo and ConnectedText. But Petko is hinting that the next version of MyInfo will be ‘SaaS’ which is ‘Software as a Sentence’ or rental software. This is unacceptable and if MyInfo 7 is a rental version I will not be upgrading.

Eduardo says that ConnectedText has not been abandoned it is just been put in ‘maintenance mode’ so he will fix bugs when they arise but version 6 will be the last version. I am not so sure because he has been absent from the CT forum for a long time now. He re-appears briefly and infrequently, his last post was in January 2018.

I have been looking for a suitable replacement for MyInfo and ConnectedText.

InfoQube seems fairly interesting. It is quite difficult and intimidating for a new user but I have found a way to simplify it. The user interface is customisable and so I stripped out everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary and I was left with a two pane organiser similar in operation to MyInfo with the meta-data columns in the left hand pane similar to Myinfo but it has the dockable panes which can be detached and placed on the other monitor just like Ultra Recall and it has a form of hierarchical tagging similar to ConnectedText. It has the ability to assign different meta-data to different items like Ultra Recall and the capability to have saved searches like the $ASK command in ConnectedText (except the results appear in a table (grid) not on a page).

It still doesn’t have backlinks and it isn’t as easy as it should be to set up a link from one page to another but it’s a start.