Zoot revisited ... again

Posted by JDS
Jan 24, 2021 at 08:55 PM

Chris Murtland wrote:
@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

You have much more accurately and eloquently described what I meant by saying that Zoot will be great as a universal inbox and a project management tool. I think conversely, that Obsidian, despite all the interesting plugins, cannot function as a database/task management tool, nor is it that easy to use it as a capture tool. On the other hand, if you are looking for a Zettelkasten or a tool for developing complex thinking and writing, Obsidian is great, and Zoot is not. I plan to try to use them as complementary tools, and despite my decades of being an inveterate disappointed CRIMPer, Iam quite optimistic this time.