Ideamason abandoned

Posted by Lucas
May 11, 2009 at 03:56 PM

Ideamason will be missed.

Apparently the latest betas of Biblioscape offer some similar functionality, but the screenshots don’t really entice me.

I had purchased Ideamason about six weeks ago and begun a writing project in it. I sort of had a hunch it was on it’s last legs. So either my timing was poor, as I paid for dying software, or my timing was good, as I go hold of it just before it became unavailable (it seems that it can’t be downloaded anymore).

Scrivener is all the rage for writing (I’ve used it on my Mac), but I haven’t found anything besides Ideamason for drafting text in a format of rearrangeable and reusable chunks of ideas that can be structure in an outline. I particularly like the distinction between outline “elements,” which are simply things like headings, and outline content, which comes about, for instance, when one inserts “ideas” under “elements” (ideas can abe arranged hierarchically as well). And, of course, combing these outlining tools with citation management is enormously useful, even if Ideamason remained rather clunky. Anyway, I do hope something emerges to fill the void left by Ideamason.

Lucas