Why no love for MyBase? My early review:

Posted by nathanb
Jul 10, 2018 at 10:16 PM

>That said, if you have suggestions to improve IQ’s UI, I’m all ears !

MyBase, MyInfo, and UltraRecall all have something in common that makes them more approachable than IQ. Well two things. Obviously IQ is much more flexible and open-ended in it’s workflow possibilities, and of course that makes it tougher to grasp. Assign from just complexity difference, IQ doesn’t use ICONS to differentiate data types (as far as I can tell).

The vast majority of people (myself included) are used to interacting with software where the items convey strong sense of place and content. Imagine Windows explorer without folder icons indicating “a bucket of files or more folders” or files that were just a list of text like they used to be in the DOS days. Even logical links have well-established visual indicators of those little arrows on the icon and I think MB, MI, and UR all use those to indicate item clones.

Of course IQ is fundamentally different in that items don’t have a place but show up when appropriate depending on the ‘grid’ being displayed and that attributes and grids are items too. So I can see why you wouldn’t want to pidgeon-hole a subset of items to show an icon that indicates they are a thing, not just metadata about a thing (yes I sort of understand that the genious of IQ is that attributes can be actual full-featured documents too). So why pretend to have a ‘sense-of-place’ when the whole point is to have everything be a pivot on everything else?

I…don’t know. All I know is that when I use the other three I instantly understand the overall scope and breadth of my notes and I commence to throw metadata and alternate clone hierarchies at them until the database starts to feel too complex to be manageable or clearly understood. I never mistake a tag for an item, or an item for an attribute, or a saved search (grid) for an item. I never ‘lose sight’ of my content which is almost always notes in the form of a document.

With IQ, I ‘lose sight’ of my notes almost instantly when I start to dink around with the attribute window which is a combination of simple attributes which may only ‘describe’ this particular item, categories common to hundreds of items, and saved-searches (grids) with little visual indicators to differentiate which is which until I click on one and experience a massive pivot away from the outline I was just getting the hang of. I really do understand how databases work and it doesn’t take me long to wrap my mind around that I’m just looking at a different view and that my precious actual typed notes aren’t any more buried than in the other info managers… It’s just a level of abstraction beyond me feeling comfortable where my stuff is.

Is it possible to auto-generate a ‘document’ icon in the title of an item if html pane content exists? Therefore I can instantly differentiate between content and metadata within all contexts and never worry about ‘losing sight’ of my actual notes?

Along those lines, is it possible to auto-generate a ‘grid’ icon in the title for all named grids? In the ‘properties’ pane, the named grids are blue underlined text which is exactly how hyperlinks in many other contexts look. I’ve learned what they really are within this context, but I still have to remind myself to not think of those as hyperlinks. The properties pane shows a LOT of similar looking text that means very different things. On one hand the shear power of being able to jump to items and pivot to other views from that pane is glorious but on the other hand it adds to the mental overhead to have to mentally categorize the different text strings. Of course they are already categorized for me by the headings they are in and I do understand those. But it still adds a mental step. Again I refer back to windows explorer and what it would feel like to navigate without the icon column. Of course I’d be able to differentiate excel files and photos by the file extension and I’d know where I was at in the hard drive by reading the \path… but seeing that ubiquitous green excel icon under that folder icon saves me the mental deciphering step.

I hope you don’t take this as actual criticism as I am able to walk through IQ and eventually understand what I’m looking at by stopping and thinking about it. When I do I’m always impressed at your achievement. I’ve obviously been conditioned to ‘software for dummies’ and my hangups are my fault, not yours. Just trying to convey how it feels to a normal ‘power user’ who is unable to make the mental leap to ‘database geek’ that IQ requires.