Ideamason 3.0 released

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 19, 2007 at 03:52 PM

Dominik, thanks for your thoughtful reply.

I concur with your concerns re ADM, and its communication history. Eric is either very communicative, or you hear nothing at all. The last straw for me was when he announced the development list would be moderated so as to prevent spam and inappropriate posts, this being an idea he got one night following a tv show called, ironically, Dialogue, that convinced him moderating the list was a good idea. Keep in mind that the developers list had had only about three or four posts in the last month or so. It was dying.

I responded to the list wiith a critique, that never appeared on the list, but which Eric replied to privately. I replied, as a friend, but telling him honestly how this move to moderating appeared given the the list had had none of the problems he was trying to protect it from. He took offence and kicked me off the list—for something that had never appeared on the list. I sent Eric a reply, to which he has not replied. I moerate a list with 5,000 members, hundreds of posts a month, spirited discussion—and I see absoluely no reason for moderating posts. The only posts I moderate are a member’s first post so I can screen out spammers. If the first post is not spam I change the person to unmoderated status.

Eric’s decision re moderation reminds me of the moderator czars on the so-called Opera “Community” boards—one reason that many people have stopped using Opera.

Bottom line, after having spent hours and hours working with ADM, trying to provide worthwhile feedback (feedback that often was used and resulted in improvements), I no longer have any confidence in ADM in Eric. As for Arne—I don’t even know if he’s involved anymore. And whether it was Eric’s or Arne’s fault ADM never seemed able to respond consistently to emails sent to the ADM support address.

Like you Dominik I have a concern about the future of the English version of ADM. I think the Chinese market has displaced the English market. I even wonder whether a lot of the Skype hype of a few years ago may have been motivated by a desire to provide Chinese computer users with an alternative to that country’s long distance phone system. Maybe yes, maybe no. It could have been simply a time consuming tangent that is one reason ADM 4 is still under development.

One thing I think we can infer is that ADM had some significant weaknesses because in recent months Eric has talked about recoding and using a more powerful data base engine.

I very much hope that Eric can do a 180 and get back on track, at least in terms of communicating. Given the lack of traffic on the development list in the last year it appears as though much of the English-speaking market has dried up. I want to see ADM succeed. ADM had a significant lead in features and capability, but that gap is closing quickly.

Dominik, you mentioned you preferred UR’s approach to metadata—can you please.explain why, and how you use UR’s metadata. I prefer ADM’s because of the column display—maybe I am misunderstanding something with re to UR, or just have different metadata needs. Thanks.

Take care,

Daly

Dominik Holenstein wrote:
>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
> >
>