Ideamason abandoned

Posted by Ike Washington
May 11, 2009 at 11:38 PM

Sad to see ideamason go. A good idea. And a great pitch.

I remember the excitement as the company rolled out the videos prior to launch, the features galore. I bought a license when it launched on the strength of the marketing, really.

Thirty days isn’t long enough to evaluate a writing/research manager.

After spending most of the evaluation period putting together ideamason in a way which suited me, and learning a lot about how I should work in the process, I realised soon afterwards that ideamason was slow, too slow for my average laptop. Irritating to have to wait five, ten seconds to place a comment in a field. And yet the ideas behind it were sound enough.

Much of this larking around, crimping with software is down to method. In my case, a lack of method. I want the 3x5 card file system. I’m forced to use a computer.

Certainly ideaMason, its flexibility, its videos too, inspired me to think more carefully about how I should organise my notes. And so Evernote followed and then Zoot…

Now, since late last summer, ConnectedText has proved to be excellent. Thanks Eduardo!

I use it to store work in progress.

The actual writing is done in WhizFolders.

The two applications complement each other extremely well, I think.

Just a matter of getting rid of WhizFolder’s garish toolbars. And learning its keyboard shortcuts.

Links work from one to the other so the two applications form a seamless writing/researching environment, what ideamason promised.

Ike