On bitsdujour, askSam has been described as orphanware by a user (me). And there has been an interesting answer from a developer:
"
Wade Goodman: Hi all - we have not abandoned the program. We are having some major trouble with out forums and unfortunately have not been able to respond/track properly. We are in the process of moving our forums to another system.
askSam is still being actively developed and supported. We handle support via email and phone. We are working on a new full version and have released many free maintenance releases since our last major release.
"
What do users of askSam think about active/further development and bug fixes?

Thanks,Peter.

I have a license to version 7 -- I think I bought it while in a CRIMP dillerium. AskSam has always felt like the ultimate tease to me, promising exactly what I was looking for, but delivering a buggy, quirky, quivering mess. The "editor" window is very tempermental. I've never gotten reports to print properly.

As for it being abandonware, I'd tend to believe that the developer is still "developing" it, if you can count adding useless features and not fixing existing problems developing. I'd like to be wrong. If AskSam truly lived up to its promise, it would be a great piece of software for CRIMPers.

Steve

Stephen, I agree with you.

Going by my readings of the AskSam forums over the years, some significant issues - printing being one, were never dealt with definitively.

And more recently, it appeared as though the company abandoned the forums.

Daly


Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I have a license to version 7 -- I think I bought it while in a CRIMP dillerium. AskSam has
always felt like the ultimate tease to me, promising exactly what I was looking for,
but delivering a buggy, quirky, quivering mess. The "editor" window is very
tempermental. I've never gotten reports to print properly.

As for it being
abandonware, I'd tend to believe that the developer is still "developing" it, if you
can count adding useless features and not fixing existing problems developing. I'd
like to be wrong. If AskSam truly lived up to its promise, it would be a great piece of
software for CRIMPers.

Steve

Well, all I can say is I've been in email contact with tech support at AskSam because I'm checking out version 7. They do reply quickly so that's good.

As for "bug" fixes, updates, whatever I have no idea. I have version 6 and used it for quite a while. I moved away from it because I was looking for nirvana in software to handle clients research of packages (I'm a travel agent) and storage of news clippings. The forums and other concerns had me head in other directions.

After trying many other programs (U.R. being one), I'm looking to go back to AS. For what I am needing it has the capabilities. I'm not looking at what will do, I'm looking at what it does now.

Steve

Steve, I'm curious to know what the capabilities are that AS can handle that are moving you back to it?

Thanks.

Daly


Steve wrote:

Well, all I can say is I've been in email contact with tech support at AskSam because I'm
checking out version 7. They do reply quickly so that's good.

As for "bug" fixes,
updates, whatever I have no idea. I have version 6 and used it for quite a while. I moved
away from it because I was looking for nirvana in software to handle clients research
of packages (I'm a travel agent) and storage of news clippings. The forums and other
concerns had me head in other directions.

After trying many other programs (U.R.
being one), I'm looking to go back to AS. For what I am needing it has the capabilities.
I'm not looking at what will do, I'm looking at what it does now.

Steve

Daly, I like the Title, Keywords and Notes fields available for entries when I am capturing data from an IE web page. It's a lot easier for me to quickly grab various options for clients (multiple clients too) at the point of capture. After I've grabbed various bits of data whether they are web pages, notes (text), imported pdf files, etc it is nice to already have the data entered into sortable fields to analyze and/or present.

Another thing I like is the search bar right there on the main screen so I can search the file without going to another screen. Other items cross over to personal preference only so I'm not listing those.

Vast majority of my needs is text based and AskSam seems to do the job.
Steve