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Blackwell Idealist
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Posted by James Salla
May 24, 2025 at 04:11 AM
Blackwell Idealist seems to still have a heathy fanbase, like Ecco Pro or Lotus Agenda. Has anyone tried to create a piece of software that mimics the features that makes Idealist so well liked?
Posted by Lucine
May 24, 2025 at 09:50 PM
Lucas wrote:
...
>
>There are also recent discussions there that appear to include working
>download links for installations files, such as the following:
>
>https://groups.google.com/g/idealistdb/c/W3589hSxdlo/m/gPCCn_0jBQAJ
The installation file mentioned here worked on Win11, thank you!
As for copyright, I’d rather take the long term view that good ideas tend to make the world a better place, and more people should be exposed to them instead of the short term thinking of the potential financial loss incurred by the originator. If people don’t know what’s out there, they are less likely to demand their software be better. This doesn’t apply to everything, but I’d argue that copyright infringement is not categorically a bad thing. People kind of have to claim it to prevent others from abusing your creation for their profit but it hinders knowledge dissemination and even for academics to own their own work(though they go into it with full knowledge and consent beforehand that they won’t have rights to their own intellectual labor). In this case, i don’t think anyone is using Idealist for commercial purposes so I don’t see the harm.
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 28, 2025 at 09:54 AM
Interesting question. I’ve found – and this is really going to irritate some of you! – that one can create something very similar using Obsidian’s properties and templates features plus various plugins, with the added advantage of much greater flexibility, rich text support and vastly greater data capacity (that was one of the shortcomings the last version of Idealist attempted to resolve). Thing is, there are a lot of full-text-capable knowledge managers out there; the extent to which they’re “comparable” with Idealist varies enormously. Having designed an entire business admin system using Idealist (that worked really rather well in combination with MS-Word templates, albeit back in the 1990s), I’m intrigued by the capabilities of e.g. Notion and similar systems (cf. e.g. AnyType), which combine full-text support with relational features, in this respect.
The advantage of Obsidian is that you can configure a given vault to behave in very specific ways, so that it’s feasible to create a very complex knowledge management system if you really want to – personally, I always try for the minimum necessary to fulfil the required functions. But the sample project included with e.g. the Projects plugin gives you a taste of the kind of thing you can create if you want to (alas, Projects has been discontinued, but I use CardBoard to achieve similar outcomes).
Then, of course, there’s Pierre’s astonishing InfoQube, which I was looking at just the other day (alas, Windows only, but hey). IQ easily matches and exceeds anything Idealist could do! And benefits from regular support, a very reasonable price, and a constantly growing list of super-integrated features. I’m well impressed by how far it’s come! What’s more, you can keep it as simple as Idealist if you want to – you don’t have to use e.g. the “Pivot Table” feature, although you may eventually be glad of it, depending on how extensive your Idealist-a-like system eventually becomes!
Finally, to answer your question more precisely: there was an Idealist clone around a few years back, but it appears to have sunk without trace (as does askSam, the near-equivalent that also had a very large fanbase back in the day). I’d love to know what the Idealist programming team are doing nowadays…
Cheers,
Bill
James Salla wrote:
Blackwell Idealist seems to still have a heathy fanbase, like Ecco Pro
>or Lotus Agenda. Has anyone tried to create a piece of software that
>mimics the features that makes Idealist so well liked?
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 28, 2025 at 09:57 AM
The Idealist clone: Quercus, of course (still available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qercus/)
Posted by Geoffrey Miller
May 29, 2025 at 02:05 PM
I’m still using version 3 of Idealist (the less said about Version 5 the better) on a daily basis and have done so through every iteration of Windows and cannot understand why there is not a simple, modern, equivalent.
askSam was another favourite which I still use on rare occasions - how that was allowed to wither and die is a mystery when it was such a useful program. Too many of the ones I used to use have gone (Idea Mason, Infohesive) but then I’m probably showing my age.
Kind regards,
Geoffrey