Software for dissertation research & writing

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 6, 2006 at 12:52 AM

Softwareguru, I agree with your positive hopes for IdeaMason.

I would disagree with your assessment of Notabene as the Rolls Royce. I have NB, and have played with it a little bit, as well as monitoring the NB list for a couple of years. My sense is that other software, including pretty good hard drive indexing and search programs, have passed NB by. Meanwhile, NB seems to have never fully made the transition from DOS, or at least early Windows, to today’s Windows. As well, its note-taking capability, presented as something special by the developers, is not really that special.

I have Biblioscape, which has been taking a very long time to come out with its new version. There are things I like about Biblioscape, but my sense is that it may also be struggling to regain a cutting edge position.

IdeaMason’s developers seem to have taken a hard look at the various frustrations and problems many of us have had with most of what is currently available, and single mindedly tried to overcome them all. I hope fervently that IdeaMason is successful in this quest.

Daly

Softwareguru wrote:
>Hi,
>The only application on the market with a reasonable price for academic (and even
>non-academic) writing is IdeaMason.
>The interface of version 2.2 looks old
>fashioned and a bit childish but it is a very capable application.
>Version 3 will be
>released by the end of December or beginning of January and will a have an interface
>similar to Ultra Recall and will include keyboard shortcuts and a lot of very
>interesting and useful features. I myself rate IdeaMason as the best company so far in
>regard of customer responsiveness. All the features I have requested (rtf export,
>smaller Icons, keyboard shortcuts etc.) will be in the coming version 3.
> >ndxCards
>is very nice but I personally don’t like the interface and the strict card metaphor.
> >
>Notabene is the rolls royce but too expensive and complex for me.
> >I can’t imagine
>how it would work to use ADM, Ultra Recall or any other Outliner/PIM application for
>serious academic research and/or writing because these tools are not designed for
>that purpose.
> >Who I am:
>I am a software developer (OO, Java, .NET, C#) living in
>Austria.
> >Regards,
>Softwareguru
> >
> >
> >
> >