ConnectedText 3

Posted by Manfred
Mar 12, 2008 at 10:30 PM

As one of the Beta Testers, I had the opportunity of trying first hand the new version of ConnectedText 3 that is about to be released. In addition to many incremental improvements (in the editor, spell checker, etc.), it will have some highly significant changes:

1. Perhaps most important for the members of this forum an improved OUTLINER that can do check boxes now (and outlines can now be embedded in topics so that they open them with a double-click).

2. Lightning fast (not to say: instantaneous) SEARCHES. This makes possible “Smart topics” or the equivalent of “Smart folders” in Zoot (based on queries with very complex expressions).

3. New SEMANTIC EXTENSIONS enabling markups of Predicates and Attributes (like in Wikipedia) that significantly extend CT’s meta information capabilities.

4. A new (additional) backup option that saves every entry of CT as a separate UTF8 text file in a separate directory. I does not just allow one to reconstruct the database, if things should go wrong, it also creates a concurrent TEXTUAL RECORD that could be indexed by another indexing program. All the information in CT is thus available in text, and it can just as easily be be used outside of CT as in CT. Anyone who trusts only plain text should find this appealing.

A long time ago (in the old forum), I compared Zoot and ConnectedText, concluding that Zoot had the edge over ConnectedText with regard to SMART FOLDERS. I now think ConnectedText is better in this regard as well.

There is no other desktop wiki (nor any two-pane outliner) that comes even close to this feature set.

I admit that I am prejudiced, but, I would like to add, it isn’t uninformed prejudiced. Since you are all (almost all?) crimpers, what do you have to lose by taking another look. (In any case, it’s the only thing that keeps me from using my Mac Notebook more than I do.)

Manfred