News for Zoot fans

Posted by Derek Cornish
Mar 7, 2008 at 07:20 PM

Well, that’s all true…but -

Zoot is a complex program and it’s developer has constantly tweaked the original design - so much so that the main version numbers provide a very poor indication of his level of activity.

Like SteveZ I am rather optimistic that, faced with more interesting challenges than the grind of moving from 16-bit to full 32-bit, Tom will pick up speed when it comes to providing rtf.

Word (I use 2003 for drafting) has a terribly clunky outliner IMHO, not much use for anything except document navigation and formatting. For my last book I used Grandview and Zoot for planning and organising, and can’t imagine how I could have coped without the latter - though of course I agree that if one wants to draft in Zoot, or highlight text in it, the lack of rtf is a drawback. I’d put a “within-editing-pane” outliner higher up the priority list for Zoot32 improvements than rtf, though. But I know that’s not going to happen any time soon; in fact the adoption of rtf will probably rule it out for the foreseeable future.

Although I’m a great fan, and current user, of GV - which works fine for me on XP - I don’t see it as comparable with Zoot in terms of capacity to organize information. Complementary - yes.

It’s hardly surprising that people seem to be switching over to the Mac in droves. The lack of decent writing tools in Windows after all these years is pretty disappointing. I had as good a set when I used DOS: Lotus Agenda, Lotus Magellan, Lotus Manuscript, PC-Write, Grandview, Harvard Graphics, dtSearch and DesQview/X.

Meanwhile, Mac users have - well, we know what they have :-(. I won’t be upgrading to Vista when my Thinkpad bites the dirt. In fact, it will be a good time to switch platforms.

Derek

Cassius wrote:
> >Derek Cornish wrote:
>> ...The RTF editor and the loosening of constraints on number
>of folders, length of items, and so
>>on, will come in the next few months, I imagine.
>...
>————————————-
> >”...months”? It took AT LEAST 7.5 YEARS between
>the introduction of version 4 and ver. 5. The wait from ver. 3 to ver. 4 also took
>forever. During this time I went from middle age (or younger) to a retired “senior.” I
>could have REALLY used a Zoot with RTF and fewer other limitations while I was working
>on multiple technical projects. Now, I’m writing a book using Word 2000 (NoteMap
>proved to be crap) and no longer need Zoot’s capabilities. Perhaps Zoot 5.x with RTF
>will appear before my future headstone crumbles.
> >For comparison GrandView
>appeared in about 1988 and had most (all?) of Zoot’s features, an extremely capable
>outliner, excellent formatting capabilities, etc. It’s limitations were
>essentially those imposed by DOS.
> >-c