myBase on Bits next week

Posted by TonyJ
Jun 12, 2009 at 06:50 PM

I’ve only been playing with MyBase for about a week but it made a good impression; I’m buying it. It’s funny that unicode is not some killer feature, but without it, it didn’t get much of a trial; I’m glad he was able to get that resolved. While I capture a good bit of information from the web, most of the text I’m trying to stay on top of comes in pdf files. So, the indexing and search of pdfs is a pretty big deal, and while MyBase is hardly alone in doing this, its performance is strong.

While there’s a few features I would like to see improved, I don’t have a problem with the interface. Where do you find it lacking?

I did have a problem yesterday with an Office file that was not updated after a save. There was a power outage and when the computer came back on the MyBase database was fine, and I resumed working on an Excel file stored in MyBase. Excel was able to restore the file despite the crash exit, but when I saved, the file was not saved within MyBase. Perhaps MyBase is not at fault here, maybe Excel used a different location when it restored the file. Still, it’s a quirk I’m glad I discovered early, and one I can easily adjust to.

I’ve got a few more improvements I would like to see, but nothing real major. The rtf editor could be stronger. Jarte (http://www.jarte.com) is a good point of comparison. I’d like to be able to change the spacing between paragraphs. It’s also difficult to remove some formatting that I’ve copied and pasted from a different document, but I’m not sure why. Maybe the authors used features that aren’t supported in the editor and so there’s no easy way to take them out? I haven’t found a better html editor than Scrapbook, and MyBase is no exception. Putting files in and taking them out is dead simple, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to export just one webpage, or to show the content pulled by WebCollect in a different browser. At some point I would like to use one of the visual management programs as a front end to MyBase. Perhaps the capability is already there and I haven’t yet found it, but if not, being able to link to an Info Item, or even better, to link within an Info Item i.e. a specific attachment or a specific point in the rtf page or web page, from another program, would be a welcome improvement. The file tree would also be improved by there being some mark identifying which files had item links and which did not.

As mentioned on Bits Du Jour, there is a user’s group, which is small, but not dead: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MybaseForum/