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EccoPro: Why has nobody developed a clone so far?
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Posted by Tom S.
Aug 26, 2007 at 11:56 PM
David Dunham wrote:
>I’ll have to ask one of the team members I know. My guess is that once they were part of a
>larger corporation, the product didn’t get as much attention.
>
>So what features are
>you especially craving? There are a number of reasons I’m not cloning it, but I’m
>always trying to figure out the best bang for the buck when adding to Opal.
Ecoo notepads are, as far as I can tell, unique. The combination of the free form outlining capabilities and the columns is something no one has replicated. The programs that have the columns in their notepad-like sections lack the outlining and the programs that have the outlining on their notepad-type sections don’t have the columns and almost none of the ones that have either feature implemented correctly have the needed calendar/task views and the related functionality.
Of course, Ecco had its faults. I don’t use the 1997 version because the email integration stinks and the data storage as embedded items in the notepads isn’t efficient.
Tom S.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 27, 2007 at 10:14 PM
Most “outliners” are one of two kinds: 1) Composition tools or 2) free form databases. To become wildly successful, however, an outliner probably needs to appeal to both groups, writers and pack rats, and allow users who desire the luxury to perform both functions in a single program. Everyone who has pursued this goal, perhaps the Holy Grail of Outlining, have not only failed to capture pre-eminence but have failed utterly from the commercial standpoint. At least according to some users, the first failure was the most successful, when evaluated from an objective rather than commercial standard. This was Grand View. Ecco is in this line, starting with GrandView and progressing through Ecco and ending in ADM on the Windows side. It still goes strong on the Mac, where the persistence of the columnar-metadata based variant creates the impression that outlining is healthier on that platform.
I looked seriously at Ecco for the first time a couple of days ago. The reason it had to fail is immediately apparent. For a writers’ tool, it provides a very capable single-pane outliner, with no means of export to anything but some obscure device. For a pack rat, there is no means of _import_. Ecco tried to stand alone, so to succeed, it needed to dominate the pim market. Thus its vulnerability to the Outlook release. Speculative, this, because I know nothing of the actual historical details. Yet, these inferences seem readable on the face of the application.
Why did all the Holy Grail attempts on Windows fail? One observation that I find striking is that they all seem to have been created in a programming frenzy. Their development proceeded very quickly and then failed to be sustainable. Ultra-rapid development is a way of gaining significant market prominence. We CRIMP artists tend also to be sensation seekers, reveling in the new feature or design. It works with me, for sure. Ultra-rapid development is a kind of marketing ploy, one well-suited to a Holy Grail pim.
There is to my knowledge only a single Holy Grail pim available today, but I would be surprised if a single reader could guess my referent. It has attracted less much less attention, probably because of the glacial pace of development. Maybe I’ll let someone guess.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 27, 2007 at 10:57 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>There is to my knowledge only a single Holy Grail pim available today, but I
>would be surprised if a single reader could guess my referent. It has attracted less
>much less attention, probably because of the glacial pace of development. Maybe I’ll
>let someone guess.
>
Nice challenge, Stephen. I don’t recall you being very enthusiastic about this, but I might guess InfoSelect, which has almost every feature anyone could ask for, it’s just that most of them are clumsily implemented. Am I close?
Steve Z.
Posted by Ken
Aug 27, 2007 at 11:45 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>>There is to my knowledge only a single Holy Grail pim available today, but I
>would be surprised if a single reader could guess my referent. It has attracted less
>much less attention, probably because of the glacial pace of development. Maybe I’ll
>let someone guess.
Ok, I’ll bite if only for a laugh. Is it Chandler? :0
Actually, the more I think about these programs, the more I think that we have too many programs under one roof to easily identify a Holy Grail. I started with Ecco at the very beginning in 1993. I liked the program because it was like having an office assistant. It had a calendar; reminded me of appointments; kept a phone log; and, this did not even count all of the great and powerful project management features found in the notepad and columns. Now, along comes Lotus, Microsoft and Novell, and look where we are today with respect to PIMs. Even Palm, which hosted the fantastic DateBk now rates a backset to Outlook, or worse yet, cell phones. I know this is a very truncated (and obviously opinionated) timeline, but the calendar portion of program seems to almost have fallen off of many of the new generation “PIMs”.
While the new breed of programs can handle much more complex forms of data (PDF files, web pages, etc…), many have trouble with a simple recurring appointment! This is fine if you do not need a calendar, but I do. So, what works for one set of needs, often completely misses another set. This is why I do not believe that we will easily see the Holy Grail in one program. I am guessing that the program that meets ALL of these needs will either be buggy, bloated, or worse yet, both. And, what works today will probably not meet our demands in another few years as our bandwidth, and needs, expand.
Now that I have concluded my sermon, I will come off of the box and let Stephen have the floor.
Posted by Bob Mackreth
Aug 28, 2007 at 12:59 PM
> For a pack rat, there is no means of _import_.
Huh?
There’s the Shooter, which directly imports text from other applications. I use it all the time.
Agree that ECCO is not the Holy Grail I wish it might be, but that’s not surprising since development was abandoned nearly a decade ago.
I still find it a wonderful tool for historical research. My main database contains information on several hundred people and several thousand discrete events, cross-referenced with respect to location, time period, topic, theme, etc. Raw data includes transcribed newspaper articles, 19th century lighthouse keeper’s logs, government documents from the National Archives, web clips… you name it. The combination of outline structure, filters, and virtual folder capability gives me tremendous power to collect, extract, and analyze information.
Later today, I will be writing a magazine article on a fairly obscure topic relating to a specific location. My first step will be to call up all the relevant incidents from my database. I know from experience that within a matter of seconds I’ll have a couple dozen anecdotes I can use to flesh out the story,
Maybe if I’d started with ZOOT years ago, I’d find that program as valuable as I do ECCO, but by this point, I could never imagine giving up on my most important tool. All future equipment and OS upgrades will have to meet my, “Will ECCO run?” litmus test.
Bob