A useful property of 2-pane PIMs

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 19, 2008 at 04:53 PM

Chris Thompson wrote:
>The only desktop outliner that does this well that I know of is DevonThink.
>It’s a pretty standard two-pane outliner (with a variety of views, but at heart a
>two-pane outliner) except for a decent set of data-based classifier
>algorithms.

I remember salivating a little when we discussed this aspect of DevonThink a few months ago.

>
>These things are useful though. It would be a lot harder to browse
>Amazon.com for example if it didn’t use collaborative filtering techniques to
>suggest other items you might be interested in looking at.
>

This is true to some extent, but I also find that their suggestions can be rather odd… Like the way some strange Google ads pop up on this site (there’s one right now for Powerful Church Software). And I always wonder what they’ve got that isn’t being revealed by automated filtering.

So I definitely agree that this functionality would be very welcome… But I also think that “thumbing through” the data can also be quite useful. The best software would allow for both, I think.

Steve Z.