Zoot revisited ... again

Posted by Chris Murtland
Jan 24, 2021 at 07:41 PM

@LB:
That’s correct, there is no traditional calendar view. You can sync to Outlook, but I haven’t done that in about 15 years. I usually only have 2-3 appointments per month, so I just use Google Calendar.

JDS wrote:
>You have inspired me to take another look, having spent many years using
>Zoot, and having abandoned it quite a while back. It is interesting
>looking at it through the lens of 2021. The use of apps like Obsidian
>and Roam have changed the scene a lot. For me, Zoot has utility as a
>universal inbox and as a task management/workflow tool. But having used
>Obsidian for a while now, there is no way I could make Zoot my only PKM
>app with the alternatives out there.

Yeah, the approaches are pretty different, and Obsidian is certainly appealing to me - it’s clean and straightforward and the plugins are adding a lot of power. It’s flexible and a pleasure to use.

Zoot shines in a fairly particular use case, which is amassing a ton of information from various sources and being able to split it among multiple databases and slice and dice, filter, and show the information in multiple contexts with different views (and doing some automated processing). I find this great for reference material and lightweight project management, and it seems like it could be really useful for writing long non-fiction and fiction. You could set up, for example (this is the gist, not a literal Zoot rule), a view for “all scenes having less than 300 words involving character Jane in the setting lake house that were modified last month.”

I think I’m ultimately drawn to more of a database model than a pure document/note model, because I quickly get overwhelmed with just a huge stack of notes or files. I want fields and custom searches based on a combination of field conditions. I especially like it when I can set these up once for a particular need and then reuse forever. I’ve found I want to see only relatively narrow subsets of my data at all times. The other software I repeatedly come back to for that reason are Ecco, Ultra Recall, and InfoQube.

The backlinks and unlinked mentions that are currently all the rage seemed great to me at first, but I found that in actual day to day use I didn’t use them much. They were either too obvious or returned too much noise. I didn’t even navigate using direct links frequently; I’d jump to a specific item or just search. Relying on search in Obsidian, when all you have to work with is the document content and the tags, becomes too general for me when I reach some pretty small threshold of notes (a couple of hundred).

I’ve used a lot of personal wikis, and ConnectedText was my favorite of the category, mostly because of the properties and attributes (semantic wiki features), which allowed interacting with notes more like a database when needed. Obsidian is developing super rapidly, and I expect some kind of semantic wiki features to be added before long, either in the core app or as a plugin. I’m sure I’ll revisit at that point, although I’m really trying to make it to 2022 without revisiting anything :-D