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.