Ideamason 3.0 released

Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Jan 19, 2007 at 07:55 AM

Daly,

Here are some reasons why I have stopped using ADM:

Stability:
I got annoyed of the repeating ‘List out of bound ...’ errors in ADM.

Search capabilities:
Ultra Recall allows to save a search query and not just the result like the Views in ADM.
Further, UR allowsyou to create quite complex search queries. The same applies to IdeaMason 3.

Metadata:
I prefer the metadata system of UR. It is easier for me.

Further development secured:
I have invested quite a lot of money in software which is not available or not further developed anymore (net-snippets for example).
Even ADM has constantly been developing I have a bad feeling in the stomach regarding the future of the english version.
And I can understand Eric’s foucs on the chinese market (imagine a potential of around 1 billion users).
He is living there, he has chinese developers and there are so many you people at universities etc.

Printing:
Much better (stable) in UR and IdeaMason.
UR does scale saved websites to the correct A4 format (used in Europe).

Export to Word:
A strong feature of ADM.
But IdeaMason provides a much better solution by letting you define the template and adding the citations.
Perhaps a bit unfair against ADM because ADM is not developed for writing scientific papers.

Bugs:
UR and IdeaMason 3.0 (and 2.2) are very stable. No crashes, not strange error messages etc.
And reported bugs are fixed. ADM still has bugs which have been known for years (this is a reminder for Bill Gates -> Word!).

Development cycles and communication:
The time between ADM 3 and ADM 4 is too long. Further, the communication to the users is poor.
IdeaMason does the best job here. Letting you know what’s coming in the next release, constantly updating where they are and *not* communicating a final release date. Because *all* software projects are delayed.
UR does less communication but you know that they constantly release a new version every year. It is just good to know that.

Yes, I have invested a lot of time and energy in providing ideas and tips for ADM. I think it was worth the effort because I had a very good time with ADM and Eric. And I have to be fair: ADM has many features I am missing in UR/IM.

But I have a day job to be done. And here I need reliable software and the knowledge that the developers are still alive (ADM?, Zoot?, Ariadne?, Net Snippets?, InfoSelect?).

I agree with you that MyInfo is a strong application and an option to UR. And it has a very fair price.

All the best,
Dominik