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General Knowledge Base vs Ask Sam vs Idea
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 20, 2008 at 03:13 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>I’m, surprised there’s no one out there who has experience with
>AskSam, except that I know AskSam was seemingly going the way of programs affiliated
>with the Sommer/Lewis brand of support and customer relations. Would you believe
>that AskSam has had a user concern with fixed right hand marging, ie. fixed doc width
>for several versions, and in spite of dozens of user complaints about, it is still
>being talked about in the forum for the beta
>version?
Daly,
I have some experience with AskSam. I’ve owned a license from version 3.0 through the current version. I love the concept of AskSam: Free form data—just dump it in and find it later. But, of course, to get the most from AskSam you have to set up entry forms—and that isn’t free form any longer. I’ve found these entry forms to be very touchy—that is, they don’t always behave the way I expect. Frankly, a regular database such as Alpha Five is easier to work with once you add this requirement to build entry forms.
Still, you do not really NEED entry forms in AskSam. You can dump a bunch of stuff in it and find it fast. But you can’t run reports on this stuff. (And that’s another problem I’ve had with AS—the report layout builder never seemed to behave quite right, either.)
Even so, I’d probably use AskSam if the editor was more like a word processor. It looks like a word processor, but it is the least user friendly editor I’ve seen. There is no extended selection at all. So, composing material in AskSam is not very fun.
All in all, I would say that I would not recommend using AskSam… which makes me sad, since I do think the concept is exactly what I’ve always looked for.
Steve Z.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Jan 20, 2008 at 05:28 PM
Daly,
I thought that by this morning I would remember the name of the program, but it still eludes me. In principle it sounds to me like what you are doing is a perfect task for that German multi-dimensional outliner that you used to like.
One thing to consider is whether you will build an organization _out of_ the documents, or you will impose an organization _on_ them. If you can pretty much figure out what the categories should be beforehand, it will probably be most efficient first to create the structure. You might want to use an outline processor or mind mapper to determine the structure. I think that Idea! is more convenient than UltraRecall, when you have an a priori structure. Again, that German multi-dimensional product _sounds_ ideal, although I haven’t used it.
Considering the pressure, probably Ultra Recall is the way to go. I think the New Year’s poll in this forum supports it as an excellent general purpose organizer. Note that I haven’t used it for some time.
Posted by Bob Mackreth
Jan 20, 2008 at 05:53 PM
I used AskSam 3.0 for something like this about 10 years ago.
I had just taken over a job, and a computer, from a very prolific, and also very disorganized, predecessor.
His hard drive had hundreds of files—primarily DOS Wordperfect, as I recall—stored without any real organizational scheme. The situation was that I would be needing the information in those files, but I had no intention of editing them. In other words, I needed them in a readily searchable archive.
All I did was create one, big, unstructured AskSam file, and imported all these documents into it. I then used AskSam’s search function whenever I needed to retrieve information from my predecessor’s files. The Boolean search capability made it fairly easy to narrow down the results.
Not a particularly elegant system, but adequate to my needs at the time.
By the way, I purchased a license for AskSam 4.0 within the first hour of commerical release (I’d been beta-testing it) and subsequently upgraded that to AS 5. However, I found that version 5 would not properly import HTML files for me, and my support requests to AskSam went unanswered.
So, I uninstalled my paid-for copy of AskSam 5, reinstalled 4.1, and have never bothered upgrading since. I still have AskSam installed for access to my legacy databases, but have not added to them in years. Instead, I have been manually migrating their contents into MyInfo as I’ve felt the whim.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 20, 2008 at 05:55 PM
Steve, actually it is the entry forms that intrigue me with Ask Sam—but they gotta work.
And so does the report generating aspect or else you have just shot yourself in the foot(note) so to speak.
I am thinking UR—but keep wanting to use Zoot—although some of my data is web-based. But Zoot can link to a web file, and I have Firefox portable on my stick.
For some reason I like GKB—which is totally irrational because I don’t enough about how to use it.
Is there any way that Idea would be helpful—again I don’t know enough about, but with the amount of data I have coming in I want to be sure. I also need to be able to know more or less what is in that data within about five weeks of getting it. Ouph!
Thank for the input.
Daly
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Daly de Gagne wrote:
>>I’m, surprised there’s no one out there who has experience with
>
>>AskSam, except that I know AskSam was seemingly going the way of programs
>affiliated
>>with the Sommer/Lewis brand of support and customer relations. Would
>you believe
>>that AskSam has had a user concern with fixed right hand marging, ie.
>fixed doc width
>>for several versions, and in spite of dozens of user complaints
>about, it is still
>>being talked about in the forum for the beta
>
>>version?
>
>Daly,
>
>I have some experience with AskSam. I’ve owned a license from
>version 3.0 through the current version. I love the concept of AskSam: Free form data
>—just dump it in and find it later. But, of course, to get the most from AskSam you have
>to set up entry forms—and that isn’t free form any longer. I’ve found these entry
>forms to be very touchy—that is, they don’t always behave the way I expect. Frankly, a
>regular database such as Alpha Five is easier to work with once you add this
>requirement to build entry forms.
>
>Still, you do not really NEED entry forms in
>AskSam. You can dump a bunch of stuff in it and find it fast. But you can’t run reports on
>this stuff. (And that’s another problem I’ve had with AS—the report layout builder
>never seemed to behave quite right, either.)
>
>Even so, I’d probably use AskSam if the
>editor was more like a word processor. It looks like a word processor, but it is the
>least user friendly editor I’ve seen. There is no extended selection at all. So,
>composing material in AskSam is not very fun.
>
>All in all, I would say that I would not
>recommend using AskSam… which makes me sad, since I do think the concept is exactly
>what I’ve always looked for.
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jan 20, 2008 at 06:01 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>I had ruled
>Zoot out in my first post. I wonder if that was a mistake?
>
>Daly
No, I don’t think so at this point. As you said, currently long articles get split up in Zoot, and this is a nuisance for reading purposes - although I am sure this is going to change now that Zoot32 is a release candidate. Nor does Zoot32 have a rich-text editor, but this is also on its way.
>Plus I am having difficulty getting all my databases to open as part of one project in Zoot, and until I can figure out how to clean up that mess I want to lay off Zoot for a while.
I think you can assign your zot databases to particular projects by working outside Zoot. Just close Zoot down and then use a file manager to move your databases to the right project. At least, this is what I have done in the past.
On a general note, I am not sure what direction Zoot is going to take in the future. At the moment it is a great plain-text-only user-generated notes organizer (leaving aside its other PIM aspects for the present discussion). Lots of people are pushing for Zoot to be able to import htm, pdf, Word, etc. files right into Zoot itself (at the moment the only way of working with these files is to extract the text from them into Zoot and make a link to the actual files).
I have very mixed feelings about making Zoot more like UR or askSam, which are primarily repositories. I’m not convinced that note-taking and file-storing are best put together in one piece of software. In my experience it gets to be rather a mess. OTOH, providing Zoot with better writing features would seem to me to be a great idea. So I’d like to see better tree features, cascading windows, a choice between plain-text and rtf, outlining within the notes editor, etc. The great thing about Zoot is its contribution to active thinking and drafting, and I’d hate this to be diluted.
Derek