Zoot revisited ... again

Posted by Chris Murtland
Jan 19, 2021 at 11:27 PM

First, let me offer a belated “happy new year” to all! I meant to do that sooner, but was struck with a severe case of CRIMP at the start of the year, because I didn’t want to go through another year switching programs all the time. My variant is actually CRIMS at this point (switching rather than purchasing), as I seem to already own quite a lot of software.

So, in a fit of helpless thrashing, I fired up Zoot. At first, I had the same feeling I’ve had many times when trying Zoot again over the past several years: “this is too strange, I’m never going to stick with this.”

But then, I changed some of the fonts and reduced the font size in a custom theme. This made everything more compact and I liked that. Then I spent some time reading the help file (the help file is pretty good now) and just doing things without being too committed. Soon, some of my old Zoot 5 muscle memory came back to me, and before long, I was being reminded of what I liked about Zoot so long ago.

The main thing is the multi-database approach. This makes a lot of sense to me, as the problem I run into time and again is feeling like things are going fine when I spin up a fresh copy of some old favorite software and everything is limited and clean, only to hit a wall of overwhelm and clutter past a certain point. Even though Zoot itself is initially overwhelming, once you get past that feeling, the actual information you are dealing with seems a lot more controllable, even at volume.

Second, the ability to interact with Zoot without the main program showing is great. You can quickly add clips, web links, and new items no matter what else you are doing. And you can query any database and pop up a single item or even multiple found items in a new detached window. You can even insert Zoot item text into other programs, which may have existed for a long time, but I’d forgotten about it if so.

Anyway, it eventually all started making sense again. We’ll see if it sticks.