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New Windows laptop, new information management software?
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Posted by jamesofford
Apr 20, 2008 at 07:30 PM
fellowthe t Crimpers:
I have been using a MacBook in real life for the last several months. I am happy(mostly)with the software that I have for keeping track of info on the mac. I use Devonthink for most things, and Papers for the scientific papers that I use. I have also bought Eaglefiler and like it, but don’t use it as much as Devonthink.
I am using a Windows XP machine at work, and I have Onenote 2007 on that for most of the clippings and little bits of info that I need.
However, I need something a little bit more heavy duty for keeping track of PDF files, Word files, and other stuff that is project related. Since I haven’t been focusing on the XP side for a while, what’s out there these days?
Zoot was a useful program, but ithas limitations in the kind of files that you can store. Omea Pro was nice, but a bit too overbuilt for anything other than experimenting. I need something that will function with as little fiddling as possible. While I am happy to fiddle, I don’t really have the time to fiddle at work.
Anybody got any suggestions?
Jim.
Posted by quant
Apr 20, 2008 at 09:14 PM
UltraRecall combined with pdf-xchange viewer (free) for pdf annotation
Posted by Cassius
Apr 20, 2008 at 11:39 PM
I haven’t used it, but EverNote is supposed to import almost everything.
UltraRecall may be ideal, but I’ve hardly used it, simply because I have too much info committed to MyBase/WebCollect.
MyBase initially looks like a two-pane PIM with a tree on the left (Info Items) and a right pane with two tabs. The Text Note tab includes a full-featured rtf editor. The Webpage tab displays Web pages and some other types of files. (More than one window can be displayed here simultaneously.) Other panes that can be visible or hidden are an Item Link pane and an Attachment pane.
Using WebCollect one can almost instantaneously save almost any Web page. One can insert other types of files, such as PDF, into the Attachment pane. Several types of links are available.
[There are a few Web pages that MyBase cannot save directly, but which can be saved by Surfulator or Web Research (http://www.macropool.com/en/products/webresearch/professional/index.html ). I know little of the other capabilities of these programs.
In myBase, files other than text/rtf, Web pages, or copied/pasted images are saved in the Attachments area and must be opened from there. The following, material I adapted from the Users’ Manual, will give you an idea of Attachment operations:
——-
Attachment:
An attachment represents a file stored in the attachment area and associated with an info item. One can store any kind of documents/images and even binary files within your database. The attachment feature is very similar to Email Attachments, plus you have the convenience of viewing, editing and commenting the attachments stored within your database.
—-
To insert an external file as an attachment of an item:
1) Select the ‘Attachment -> Add Attachments…’ menu item or right-click the item and select “Add Attachments,” then choose a file from the Open dialog box and press the ‘Open’ button. myBase will copy the file to the database and store it as an attachment of the item. If the attachment pane is hidden at the moment, myBase will open it automatically.
OR
2) Drag a file from Windows and drop onto a target info item or onto the attachment pane of the item.
Holding down Shift or Alt key changes the default behaviour, it creates shortcuts to the source files, instead of insert as attachments.
NOTE: Because there are a lot of attachments to a saved Web page, rather than attach an external file to an item that already has an associated Web page, create a subitem and attach the file to the subitem.
—-
To open an attachment, just double-click on the file icon. The action of double-clicking on an attachment depends on the file type:
If the file type is a web page or a graphic, myBase invokes the embedded web browser to view it.
If the file is a textual file such as .txt/.rtf, myBase opens it within the integrated RTF editor.
If the file is a known document such as .doc/.xls/.pdf etc., myBase attempts to launch the associated program to open it.
In addition, myBase allows you to send an attachment to the integrated rtf editor or Web browser, for example, you may want to open an .html with the rtf editor, or send a .pdf document to the web browser pane. To do so, just right-click the file icon and choose the ‘Open with RTF editor’ or ‘Open with Web browser’ sub menu item.
If you want to choose another program to open the file, select the ‘Attachment -> Open with Specified program…’ menu item.
—-
To Rename an attachment, just right-click on the attachment and select the ‘Rename’ menu item, then type in a new file name and press Enter.
To delete an attachment from the item, right-click on the attachment and select the ‘Delete…’ menu item. By default all deleted files will be kept in the myBase recycle bin, whereby you can undelete them when needed. The recycled files will stay there until you empty the recycle bin.
To export an attachment, right-click on the attachment icon, choose the ‘Export Attachments…’ menu item, and choose a folder to store the file.
To comment on an attachment, right-click on it and choose ‘Comment…’ menu item, then you can supply a short text and save as a comment with the attachment.
Searching within attachments: The comment field of attachment can be used as keywords relevant to the attached file, which may help enhance the integrated search utility.
Drag-drop Attachments:
Drag or Shift+Drag Attachments: moves the attachments to the target info item.
Ctrl+Drag Attachments: copies the attachments to the target info item.
When drag-drop occurs across two different databases, it copies the attachments.
—-
-cassius
Posted by jamesofford
Apr 21, 2008 at 02:17 AM
Cassius: thanks for your reply. I had not considered Mybase, though I have heard of it. I took a quick look at it and it looks good. I have a couple of questions.
First, can you import directories of files? For instance, I have all of my PDF files sorted into different folders, under one directory that includes all of my PDFs. Can I import the whole PDF folder at once?
Second, perhaps it is in the reply that you posted, but it is a little late, and I am in the lab and not thinking clearly-but can you search your PDF files within MyBase?
Posted by Cassius
Apr 21, 2008 at 06:39 AM
Jim,
1) I don’t have any folders of PDFs, but I do have folders of photos. I tried importing a folder as an attachment—no go. However, after opening the folder, I could highlight several files within it and import,as attachments and in one operation, all of these files.
However, I don’t think you can mass import files with each as an attachment to a separate item (= left tree node). This may give you problems in 2), below. You may wish to ask the Chinese myBase developers about this: support@wjjsoft.com
An apparent glitch prevented me from opening the attachment pane after importing the files (or I did something wrong), but if I opened the attachment pane before the importing, all went well.
2) You also asked, “Second, perhaps it is in the reply that you posted, but it is a little late, and I am in the lab and not thinking clearly-but can you search your PDF files within MyBase?”
Here, you may have a problem. I tried an example importing 2 pdf files into the same item (item=single node in left branch) and then created a search index on the item. The PDFs appeared to be indexed and I was able to search for a unique word in one of them. However the search result listed the item (node) name, NOT the individual attachment. When I double-clicked onthe item name, both pdf attachments were highlighted.
So if a single item (node) has more than one attachment, one cannot tell which of the attachments includes the search word. One can, of course open, one-by-one, each pdf file in Adobe or in the myBase web browser and separately search each file for the search term.
myBase says it does have one possible help here, but it is 2:30am here, so I’m not trying it. According to the users’ guide:
To comment on an attachment, right-click on it and choose ‘Comment…’ menu item, then you can supply a short text and save as a comment with the attachment.
Searching within attachments: The comment field of attachment can be used as keywords relevant to the attached file, which may help enhance the integrated search utility.
YOU SHOULD also try Evernote which claims unbelievable import and search abilities.
P.S. In the lab? What field? (Personally, I have Ph.D. in math and have also done stat and ops research work, from highly theoretical to highly practical; am now retired—went from a work-a-holic to a bum.)
-c
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