General Knowledge Base vs Ask Sam vs Idea

Posted by Derek Cornish
Jan 20, 2008 at 06:01 PM

Daly de Gagne wrote:

>I had ruled
>Zoot out in my first post. I wonder if that was a mistake?
> >Daly

No, I don’t think so at this point. As you said, currently long articles get split up in Zoot, and this is a nuisance for reading purposes - although I am sure this is going to change now that Zoot32 is a release candidate. Nor does Zoot32 have a rich-text editor, but this is also on its way.

>Plus I am having difficulty getting all my databases to open as part of one project in Zoot, and until I can figure out how to clean up that mess I want to lay off Zoot for a while.

I think you can assign your zot databases to particular projects by working outside Zoot. Just close Zoot down and then use a file manager to move your databases to the right project. At least, this is what I have done in the past.

On a general note, I am not sure what direction Zoot is going to take in the future. At the moment it is a great plain-text-only user-generated notes organizer (leaving aside its other PIM aspects for the present discussion). Lots of people are pushing for Zoot to be able to import htm, pdf, Word, etc. files right into Zoot itself (at the moment the only way of working with these files is to extract the text from them into Zoot and make a link to the actual files).

I have very mixed feelings about making Zoot more like UR or askSam, which are primarily repositories. I’m not convinced that note-taking and file-storing are best put together in one piece of software. In my experience it gets to be rather a mess. OTOH, providing Zoot with better writing features would seem to me to be a great idea. So I’d like to see better tree features, cascading windows, a choice between plain-text and rtf, outlining within the notes editor, etc. The great thing about Zoot is its contribution to active thinking and drafting, and I’d hate this to be diluted.

Derek