Welcome to MI, mfelix.
Current MI users should know that mfelix is one of the real AS experts.
If I've been able to get HIM to come here, well, "lesser" AS users will soon join us.
mfelix, I KNOW that AS has had so many invaluable advantages, our work here is to find ways to integrate some of them into MI, to make MI a real splendid thing. Any competition here to bring in even more "intelligent" solutions = in the way, simple but effective, and simple to encode, will do enormous good to MI and to this community.
I'm glad you've come to join us.
Fred
Welcome to MI
Welcome back dear Fred !
I'm indeed one and the same person from the askSam forums. I did choose the same username out of this very reason.
I had the feeling that askSam was on a steady decline for a long time already. But the software was still working and was enough for what I was doing. I was looking into alternatives from time to time, but none came close to the possibilities of MyInfo.
Since I'm just about to begin a big new project where I will collect a lot of information I thought it was a good opportunity to change. I'm still evaluating, but it is pretty sure I'm going to buy a license soon.
And yes: it was your posts on the askSam forums that made me come over here !
And yes: I would like many others to follow us. As soon as I've logged more work into MyInfo I will get back to old place and write about it
Felix
I'm indeed one and the same person from the askSam forums. I did choose the same username out of this very reason.
I had the feeling that askSam was on a steady decline for a long time already. But the software was still working and was enough for what I was doing. I was looking into alternatives from time to time, but none came close to the possibilities of MyInfo.
Since I'm just about to begin a big new project where I will collect a lot of information I thought it was a good opportunity to change. I'm still evaluating, but it is pretty sure I'm going to buy a license soon.
And yes: it was your posts on the askSam forums that made me come over here !
And yes: I would like many others to follow us. As soon as I've logged more work into MyInfo I will get back to old place and write about it
Felix
Hi Michael,
My mother language is German, French being my second, English being my third language; this it comes a little bit weird that two German mother tongues might correspond in a common, "third-party" language! But then, it's not for our pleasure only we do that, it's for the "higher cause" we do it, and indeed, when I say "higher cause", I ask myself, gosh, didn't I put there a real "germanism", out of which everybody around here will discover I'm not French, I'm German? Well, in fact, I'm neither, I've got ONE nationality, the "Belgian" one; those who have a good command of French will see the problem; I'm from Wallonia, and Belgium, as you can read on the sites of those French-speaking newspapers as www.lesoir.be and www.lalibre.be, we've got some (identitiy) problems those last times...
Let's speak frankly, Michael. UR is out there. But if you come to MI, exporting all your things to UR, any day, will never cause you any problem whatsoever; I tried before "investing" (= my time and efforts, and a few euros) into MI; so, whenever you'll come to the reasoning that MI is doomed, you always be able to export your stuff to UR; thus, in coming aboard, you won't take a risk but those few euros, nothing more - I'll even share my script to transform hundreds of MI files into one big UR files, if necessary -
by the way, my script (sharing) of doing a "macro" third level macro, in AutoIt, for doing projects in MI before Petko encodes something better in MI... in (paid) 6.0 that is, is underway, but I'm just an amateur programmer, and AI is just a completely new language for me, and I have to work for my living, too
so NOBODY here will lose anything but the few dollars / euros he'll be paid for the professional version of MI, if ever he'll decide to move to anything else.
Currently, btw, I'm downloading (= not by a spider, but manually, into MI, one by one, and reading them beforehand) "all" of AS posts, in view of them closing, perhaps, their site, in the near feature: For very special tasks, AS is invaluable, as both of us know, and thus, I want to be prepared to them closing them down their site.
Let's face it: I tried to help them, for serious, and that's provable; you did almost 300 posts there, most of which were tremendous help, especially to new and intermediate users... but then, it's those users that make the sales / turnover of a software company! -, and Flo did a tremendous amount of work there, an amount I am trying to mimic here.
Flo - there's a Dr. (= 2005, = 5 years ago) Florian Gehrke, LLM (South Africa), in Hamburg, Germany, specialized in maritime law, but he's rather young, and then, AS's Flo should have began using AS at the age of 13... not impossible, but AS's Flo seems to have connotations with Spanish / South American languages, so I doubt it's him... and would a specialized lawyer (= who can charge 300, or even 500 euro the hour, be as fervent to spend A WHOLE YEAR, or more, of his life, on a software product he doesn't have any financial interest in? I doubt this, but I cannot see any other Florian Gehrke by Google who might be AS's Flo, and I deeply admire him for having done what he's done for AS: we both know it's simply invaluable... even in financial terms!
Thus, I don't want to fall into the trap he fell into, all this commitment for nothing! And that's why I chose MI, among other reasons: I'll never be stuck in a program (= with my 100,000 items, that is, and many containing rich text, and many containing jpg's) where "exit" will be (almost) impossible.
Thus, it's like I said: Whenever I'll want to leave MI, I'll be able to do so, and that's a splendid reason, in the meanwhile, to stay.
And that's a splendid reason for everybody: What I tried with the aforementioned "100,000" (= in fact, near 90,000 ) items, without any problem whatsoever, anybody will be able to do it with his 10,000 items or so...
And I'm delving DEEP into competitors like PB... and I stay, and I could, now, analyze PB thoroughly... and I'll give my 2 cents upon request... staying here.
In the PB forum, there's been a certain Glen Coulthard, in 2007, saying, "Darkstar represents my viewpoint exactly. PB is great for organizing and relating topics, ideas, concepts, references, etc., but it is terrible for recording notes or details about such thoughts. I use Office documents, ConnectedText, and MyInfo to record notes and use links within PB to "link out" to these containers when necessary." - the same, in 2008, said in the CT forum, "Here is my software library for organizing data: CT (...) PB (...) MI (...) ZuluPad Pro (...) WebResearch (...) IdeaMason (...) MyNotesKeeper (...) Surfulator (...) So yes, I agree that one should not be married to a particular application, but I am also living proof that being a software junkie can spread your data across too many applications."
In the AS forum, there had been you, Florian Gehrke on top of us all, sovi"007" who played the nagging child, has this been done, has that been done? - but then, that's a very important role in any class, and we all depend on Petko like pupils depend on their teacher!... and then, there has been those posts by the Scottish Australian, Scott McEwan nagged by sovi007, and which I invite EVERYBODY here to (re-) read, not only for Scott's kindness, but also for his insight:
http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4967
You know I don't have the right to simply copy this very valuable thread; so please (re-) read it while it can be found there!
Thus, Michael, in the dark depths of my mind, I know that somebody out there will read my posts here, and is willing to enhance his software accordingly, if it's not Petko.
But for TWO YEARS TO COME, I'll not be leaving if Petko "responds": MI has the potential, I've got the design knowledge foundations... down to pseudo code if necessary...
And you, Michael, if you do just some for MI of what you did for AS, Petko'd be a fool to not being thankful by not doing a lot of programming... as AS "developers" were... fools? Well, AS had been invented in the eighties, by a man who's very old now, and who'd not been investing any more in the further development of his tremendous product. Paul hadn't been up to the task, I think, Jim Brown neither, I think - but then, what had been his manoeuvral space? -, Jim Hartman was good-willing at a time at least... it's that marketing there I've really come to hate...
But then, family business are very often HELL for any manager not belonging to the family... and then, even belonging to the family...
whereas Petko's Milenix is, as far as I know, not a family biz, but a one-man-show. That's limiting programming resources for the time time... and that's multiplying our chances to be listened to.
Again, we can exit any time we want to, without any data loss. So let's take the chance, together, to be listened to. Anybody who might doubt, you, Michael, have a lot of valuable things to say, just might have a look into your 300 AS posts as long as that site exists; I do good work here without going to leave any time soon.
Welcome aboard, Michael, if I may dare say so... even better: Petko, say welcome aboard, Michael: Let's have real, valuable encouragement, and we won't disappoint you in forging software that will endure and outlive those difficult times.
My mother language is German, French being my second, English being my third language; this it comes a little bit weird that two German mother tongues might correspond in a common, "third-party" language! But then, it's not for our pleasure only we do that, it's for the "higher cause" we do it, and indeed, when I say "higher cause", I ask myself, gosh, didn't I put there a real "germanism", out of which everybody around here will discover I'm not French, I'm German? Well, in fact, I'm neither, I've got ONE nationality, the "Belgian" one; those who have a good command of French will see the problem; I'm from Wallonia, and Belgium, as you can read on the sites of those French-speaking newspapers as www.lesoir.be and www.lalibre.be, we've got some (identitiy) problems those last times...
Let's speak frankly, Michael. UR is out there. But if you come to MI, exporting all your things to UR, any day, will never cause you any problem whatsoever; I tried before "investing" (= my time and efforts, and a few euros) into MI; so, whenever you'll come to the reasoning that MI is doomed, you always be able to export your stuff to UR; thus, in coming aboard, you won't take a risk but those few euros, nothing more - I'll even share my script to transform hundreds of MI files into one big UR files, if necessary -
by the way, my script (sharing) of doing a "macro" third level macro, in AutoIt, for doing projects in MI before Petko encodes something better in MI... in (paid) 6.0 that is, is underway, but I'm just an amateur programmer, and AI is just a completely new language for me, and I have to work for my living, too
so NOBODY here will lose anything but the few dollars / euros he'll be paid for the professional version of MI, if ever he'll decide to move to anything else.
Currently, btw, I'm downloading (= not by a spider, but manually, into MI, one by one, and reading them beforehand) "all" of AS posts, in view of them closing, perhaps, their site, in the near feature: For very special tasks, AS is invaluable, as both of us know, and thus, I want to be prepared to them closing them down their site.
Let's face it: I tried to help them, for serious, and that's provable; you did almost 300 posts there, most of which were tremendous help, especially to new and intermediate users... but then, it's those users that make the sales / turnover of a software company! -, and Flo did a tremendous amount of work there, an amount I am trying to mimic here.
Flo - there's a Dr. (= 2005, = 5 years ago) Florian Gehrke, LLM (South Africa), in Hamburg, Germany, specialized in maritime law, but he's rather young, and then, AS's Flo should have began using AS at the age of 13... not impossible, but AS's Flo seems to have connotations with Spanish / South American languages, so I doubt it's him... and would a specialized lawyer (= who can charge 300, or even 500 euro the hour, be as fervent to spend A WHOLE YEAR, or more, of his life, on a software product he doesn't have any financial interest in? I doubt this, but I cannot see any other Florian Gehrke by Google who might be AS's Flo, and I deeply admire him for having done what he's done for AS: we both know it's simply invaluable... even in financial terms!
Thus, I don't want to fall into the trap he fell into, all this commitment for nothing! And that's why I chose MI, among other reasons: I'll never be stuck in a program (= with my 100,000 items, that is, and many containing rich text, and many containing jpg's) where "exit" will be (almost) impossible.
Thus, it's like I said: Whenever I'll want to leave MI, I'll be able to do so, and that's a splendid reason, in the meanwhile, to stay.
And that's a splendid reason for everybody: What I tried with the aforementioned "100,000" (= in fact, near 90,000 ) items, without any problem whatsoever, anybody will be able to do it with his 10,000 items or so...
And I'm delving DEEP into competitors like PB... and I stay, and I could, now, analyze PB thoroughly... and I'll give my 2 cents upon request... staying here.
In the PB forum, there's been a certain Glen Coulthard, in 2007, saying, "Darkstar represents my viewpoint exactly. PB is great for organizing and relating topics, ideas, concepts, references, etc., but it is terrible for recording notes or details about such thoughts. I use Office documents, ConnectedText, and MyInfo to record notes and use links within PB to "link out" to these containers when necessary." - the same, in 2008, said in the CT forum, "Here is my software library for organizing data: CT (...) PB (...) MI (...) ZuluPad Pro (...) WebResearch (...) IdeaMason (...) MyNotesKeeper (...) Surfulator (...) So yes, I agree that one should not be married to a particular application, but I am also living proof that being a software junkie can spread your data across too many applications."
In the AS forum, there had been you, Florian Gehrke on top of us all, sovi"007" who played the nagging child, has this been done, has that been done? - but then, that's a very important role in any class, and we all depend on Petko like pupils depend on their teacher!... and then, there has been those posts by the Scottish Australian, Scott McEwan nagged by sovi007, and which I invite EVERYBODY here to (re-) read, not only for Scott's kindness, but also for his insight:
http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4967
You know I don't have the right to simply copy this very valuable thread; so please (re-) read it while it can be found there!
Thus, Michael, in the dark depths of my mind, I know that somebody out there will read my posts here, and is willing to enhance his software accordingly, if it's not Petko.
But for TWO YEARS TO COME, I'll not be leaving if Petko "responds": MI has the potential, I've got the design knowledge foundations... down to pseudo code if necessary...
And you, Michael, if you do just some for MI of what you did for AS, Petko'd be a fool to not being thankful by not doing a lot of programming... as AS "developers" were... fools? Well, AS had been invented in the eighties, by a man who's very old now, and who'd not been investing any more in the further development of his tremendous product. Paul hadn't been up to the task, I think, Jim Brown neither, I think - but then, what had been his manoeuvral space? -, Jim Hartman was good-willing at a time at least... it's that marketing there I've really come to hate...
But then, family business are very often HELL for any manager not belonging to the family... and then, even belonging to the family...
whereas Petko's Milenix is, as far as I know, not a family biz, but a one-man-show. That's limiting programming resources for the time time... and that's multiplying our chances to be listened to.
Again, we can exit any time we want to, without any data loss. So let's take the chance, together, to be listened to. Anybody who might doubt, you, Michael, have a lot of valuable things to say, just might have a look into your 300 AS posts as long as that site exists; I do good work here without going to leave any time soon.
Welcome aboard, Michael, if I may dare say so... even better: Petko, say welcome aboard, Michael: Let's have real, valuable encouragement, and we won't disappoint you in forging software that will endure and outlive those difficult times.
Hello, Felix and welcome aboard. I am glad to see new faces on the forum and hope you will find MyInfo the tool that you need.
-
Crystal401
- Posts: 126
- Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 11:59 pm
Fred:
Suggestion:
What you think of writing a short post with your top 10 feature requests?
But maybe 3-5 lines of description per feature? (no more)
Just provide a link to the other posts with your reasoning.
Order them by importance and/or ease of implementation?
If you don't like uservoice.com,
I thought this would be easier for Petko to read and evaluate your requests.
Suggestion:
What you think of writing a short post with your top 10 feature requests?
But maybe 3-5 lines of description per feature? (no more)
Just provide a link to the other posts with your reasoning.
Order them by importance and/or ease of implementation?
If you don't like uservoice.com,
I thought this would be easier for Petko to read and evaluate your requests.
Hello Petko, thanks a lot for your personal welcome !
As things stand, buying your software is just a matter of days away.
I think Fred has it right when he says that for 90% of the daily work MyInfo is already more than good enough. So take your time when enhancing the software to make sure it stands on solid ground. I think I know what I'm talking about, being in the software development business for more than 20 years: First as a developer, then as an architect and now as a project lead or product owner. The systems we build last some 20 to 30 years and I'm relentless on defending the right of the development team to keep their technical debt from accumulating.
That said I could imagine developing an import plugin for askSam if I would really need it. I had a first look at the SDK, but for the time being I'm fine with the CSV import and what I call "lazy" migration: whenever I touch a document in askSam I copy it over to MyInfo and close it in askSam.
As soon as I become more proficient with MyInfo I will try to help out with questions on the forums, so you can hopefully concentrate a little bit more on developing.
To Fred: things start to get funny. Just to set the record straight: I've got two nationalities: German by birth and French by mariage. The one and only exception of a person carrying two identities Germany tolerates because of the special relationship between the two countries.
I'm working in Switzerland and I think I'm still more used to conversing in English than in French. And: don't take the Belgian identity problems too seriously: the French sometimes don't even know which part of Belgium is francophone
Belgium to me is the motherland of bd (or comics for our english readers) and therefore occupies a big big place in my heart and on my bookshelf
Good night, boys !
As things stand, buying your software is just a matter of days away.
I think Fred has it right when he says that for 90% of the daily work MyInfo is already more than good enough. So take your time when enhancing the software to make sure it stands on solid ground. I think I know what I'm talking about, being in the software development business for more than 20 years: First as a developer, then as an architect and now as a project lead or product owner. The systems we build last some 20 to 30 years and I'm relentless on defending the right of the development team to keep their technical debt from accumulating.
That said I could imagine developing an import plugin for askSam if I would really need it. I had a first look at the SDK, but for the time being I'm fine with the CSV import and what I call "lazy" migration: whenever I touch a document in askSam I copy it over to MyInfo and close it in askSam.
As soon as I become more proficient with MyInfo I will try to help out with questions on the forums, so you can hopefully concentrate a little bit more on developing.
To Fred: things start to get funny. Just to set the record straight: I've got two nationalities: German by birth and French by mariage. The one and only exception of a person carrying two identities Germany tolerates because of the special relationship between the two countries.
I'm working in Switzerland and I think I'm still more used to conversing in English than in French. And: don't take the Belgian identity problems too seriously: the French sometimes don't even know which part of Belgium is francophone
Belgium to me is the motherland of bd (or comics for our english readers) and therefore occupies a big big place in my heart and on my bookshelf
Good night, boys !
Hi All,
I
Oh yes, Alex (= Chrystal), I know what you mean, people cannot follow me anymore, but then, I am SURE Petko follows me, and indeed, I had exactly this intention, i.e. to do a little list of my "demands" / observations in brief, but I had the intention to do so AFTER the next intermediate release, in the form: These issues have been addressed, these issues are waiting to be addressed.
In fact, I've been a little bit angry about wasp, remaining totally anonymous and telling me I've strong opinions of things I don't know anything about, when in fact, all I dare say is, finally, I do NOT understand why people should, in order to just exchange their own data from 1 comp to another, go by the net. Perhaps I'm too old, but I just don't understand it. When it goes to collaborations features, I understand, but for going from 1 comp of my own to another comp of my own, I cannot imagine the sense of doing that by web services, I'm simply too dumb for it, I don't sense, I don't get it.
There have been cables, there's wifi, there are usb sticks / usb hard disks, etc. - why sending your data into a web site of people that have a voice like a salesman, when in fact they offer their services for free and don't even seem to have some advertizing on their site? To intercept data? Understand me very well, I'm NOT suggesting that site there is fraudulous, I'm just saying I don't understand their business model yet, and I'd be happy for encountering somebody to enlighten me; wasp, being a "scholar", should have (had) the brain to solve the mistery; instead he says I'm speaking on everything, knowing almost nothing, in a way...
When in fact, I've touted MI so much, June 22 on bitsdujour.com, that MI extended the offer for a second day - notwithstanding my real disssecting MI since.
II
But I understand wasp is a little bit jealous... without any need to be: I'm NOT asking him for shoving his Apple toys into... instead, I "bended over backwards to make it easy for" him (my gosh, what an expression I get there from my dictionary, in fact, "je lui ai tendu la perche", "ich habe ihm eine goldene Brücke gebaut" = I erected a golden bridge for him, as they say in German, by saying, yes, I understand, the iPad isn't but a toy, I understand its real interest lays in being connected to the net 24 hours a day? He didn't even said, yes, that's it, but he jumped on the occasion that I had dared to give my 2 cents to the above-mentioned problem of synching your own comps by third-party net services - of course, for the iPad, that seems to be the only easy way to do it - BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT THE NORMAL WAY TO DO IT in my humble opinion...
In fact, I had read a real user's experience with the iPad when giving my 2 cents, and I think that reading this experience will be extremely useful for EVERY computer user today, it's the (unsuccessful) try of of a British, bestselling thriller novelist, David Hewson - but he tried deeply, not in a light way! read his experience, it's real info! -, to give the iPad a real use; well, I felt tempted to say, well, wasp is a "scholar", whereas David Hewson abandoned school at the age of 17 (which is a fact), so the scholar is more apt to use the iPad in an intelligent way...
but then, wasp says, MI is almost perfect for him, whereas I said that, e.g., the (perhaps third-party-) search function gives false finds... which for professional use is not acceptable... and the iPad is intended as a thing for dummies to get them to a sort of a simili-comp where they are heavily patronized... but where they get done a certain minimum of things, whereas "normally", they wouldn't accept to own a comp (= your father / mother / step-... but then, even your little sister would be frustrated with it)... in fact, it's a Porsche for people who cannot afford a Porsche: See, folks, I can spend 1,000 dollars on a toy that I'll dump for 300 next year on Ebay when the successor will be released.
But I see the real problem, wasp is railing against a sort of a "super user" coming out of nothing, giving straightforwad advice on everything, when up to now, wasp had the impression to be "on top here", which is gone.
But then, wasp, I'm not paid by any university where I would have liked to be, so this hat goes to you, and my expertize on outlining is a very special one, as I said, I'm not even a real programmer, I just devoted a part of my life to the development, from scratch, when any other possibly existing outliner out there wasn't know to me, I reinvented the wheel... and I did many things very well, 12 years ago... I even had end notes - not footnotes, that's right, since I leaned on the sh** printing function of ToolBo..ok, instead of integrating some third-party printing program... in a way, I had been state-of-the-art and really dumb at the same time.
Thus, saying, oh yeah, a "scholar", but who thinks MI were almost perfect, such a statement wouldn't be my style, since elsewhere, wasp said he owns InDesign, and I know very well that this is the royal solution; in fact, where around 95 p.c. or more people export to MS Word, he exports to InDesign, then, and thus, he's able to do some cryptic codes in the text, like {|fn=xyz}, and so on, in order to have his works typeset ways over those MS Word manuscripts.
But then, stating falsely that MI were almost perfect, IS NOT HELPING MI, whereas my dissecting IS helping it. Because, let's put it frankly, in almost any way, MI is INFERIOR to UR, except for easy access (which is not nothing, I know), and except for tagging, but real tagging is FIRST on the UR agenda.
And, as everybody can see, UR's "community" is tenfold MI's... and this is WITH wasp aboard...
Whereas my intention here is to defend David against Goliath; call me crazy, but then, (re-) read my, it's some 70 posts of mine, and you'll see that MI has very strong potential IF those IMPORTANT advice issues of mine will be followed.
Thus, it'd be CRAZY to show jealousy when some "professionals" "overtake" this forum... as long as those "professionals" - I consider myself as a professional in software design, and see what Michael's credentials are!!! - are really and wholeheartedly interested in MI's future! (And Petko undeniably has the intelligence to not going let astray on this.)
Thus, wasp, please, leave your perfect anonymity, and we'll respect you for your scholarly credentials; have a look at professor Manfred Kühn, the leading (? = one of the leading without any doubt) Kant specialists worldwide (another born German, but Canadian by his heart at least, by naturalization perhaps), who some weeks ago, in the forum outlinersoftware.com, said, I don't need this, when in fact nobody really attacked him, it just had been the LEVEL of discussion there with which he finally got totally fed up... just like me, many months before him.
(Kühn isn't the guy who just whines and dines, he tries to go a little bit further here and there; see his blog, it's worthwhile your visit:
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ )
Even when I don't read the NYT on an iPad - and then, I don't like the man, politically, who's bought the NYT -, there's always this famous clipping from The New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 30, 2005, by Steven Johnson, and I wanna help with finding solutions...
So, I'm very happy to have given a push to the discussion here, in, let's put it bluntly, having given a real RISE to its level before some intelligent people (= perhaps more than I am, but as wasps knows, I'm ALWAYS ready to give in when somebody is right and I'm not, so this doesn't set the slightest problem for me) join us here (Michael) and / or RE-join us here (= Alex)... and I'd be happy to have more people of this high standard aboard... unfortunately, somebody like Florian Gehrke, from the AS forum, seems to be fed up with everything, at least for the time being... after having done a TREMENDOUS work (for free) for AS... not only on the English language forum, but also on AS's defunct German language forum, and after having "lost" one "man year" of his life there; one thing is sure, or do I overlook something really important?:
The greatest loss in software history is Framework (and that not because their programming language was called "Fred" - see the "Framework" item in the English Wikipedia!) - and the second-important loss is askSam, I think, oh yes.
But then, and this FROM THE BEGINNING ON, the AS folks NEVER understood that items have a NATURAL place in ONE category = a tree, AND multiple other places = affiliations in secondary tree structures; AS always relied on their (tremendous) search engine, but WITHOUT implementing "artificial intelligence" = automatic searching of synonyms, or automatic dismissing of non-contextual homonyms; any linguistic consideration simply wasn't in the field of vision of AS staff... whereas a Florian Gehrke told them TEN YEARS AGO about it: Thus, AS simply relied on their core ideas from 20 years ago, and weren't in any way apt to listen to any reason whatsoever, even if it came from their most prominent and incredibly investing advocate...
Of course, I've got Florian's fate there when investing here, since my position is a little bit similar: I'm working for a third party, for free: for Petko.
So, I've got in my mind some fears like, "Sharing is loosing.", and other paranoia-driven ideas, "perles before swines", etc., here and there... and on the other hand, I understand perfectly that indeed, when considering Petko's situation as a one-man-show, we MUST give him time to first eliminate all those little things that indeed do that MI is FAR from perfect as wasp pretends, AND give him time to thoroughly consider our propositions...
III
All the more so since our propositions are NOT refined yet, i.e. my "macro third dimension thing", developed in this forum, almost each day, I discover details where my proposition must be refined first, and THEN ONLY - and after discussion between intelligent people INCLUDING WASP - shall we have the "moral right" to ask Petko to implement it:
All those little things, Petko WILL amend them... but we simply CANNOT tell him, do this and this and this, which will take him a year... and afterward, we'll say, excuse us, we were mistaken, you should better do it this other way!!!
Thus, give me some more time, I'm currently becoming acquainted with AutoIt, and I'll SHARE my script with you, in order for some of yours loading it, working with it, and then we'll discuss in which way a perhaps MORE intelligent solution of the problem, than the one delivered by me, could be implemented into MI.
This is to say, I would like to "implement" many of my suggestions by AI scripts beforehand, for commun use, in order to TRY THEM, before we'll ask Petko to do the encoding... and then, it would be tremendous if Petko would give HIS opinion, as we are giving ours. Thus, I would like to trigger a REAL DISCUSSION of future MI features...
and if Petko does not follow THEN, we'll go to Goliath - but why should we do this, long before knowing?
Let's put it bluntly, a year or so before touting MI on June 22, 2010, I went to UR, wanting to discuss some idiosyncrasies of that software. The chief developer pretended to not understand me, and he said, English doesn't seem to be your native language? Of course he was right, but then, did I ever NOT succeed in making me understood, anywhere?
IV
And no, I did NOT forget to mention David Hewson's link:
http://davidhewson.com/2010/10/22/the-i ... nite-fail/
Understand me well: I'm not agains tablets, I never was. Just have a look at anoto.com, the make their living out of the absence of useful tablets - but iPad isn't that yet.
V
I agree with you, Michael, it's caricatural, but I'm VERY glad in several respects: France has been the dream of my life - but my Wallonian compatriots are not intelligent enough to see that our joining France would make the day of our all's life -, and Belgium is so tiny that our problems don't even really get into the minds of other Europeans, let alone any "transatlantic" considerations - the US, Canada
and then, going, with your FRENCH wife, to Switzerland to make your living, well, it's PARADISE for you (and your family), it's simply not possible to get a happier life than yours... but your credentials show that you worked hard for getting where you are now... but I said so, you are a very serious guy... and then, you are even more serious than I had thought... and let's put it bluntly, expatriate Germans are an elite group, whereas most of Germans who have their say in Germany today, AIN'T worth that much... and whereas you can find, at an intermediate level, many, many Germans of very high value, even IN today's Germany... seems that the formation of Germany's elite is highly contestable; btw., there are quite a few sociological studies backing my point - so, please, wasp, not again!
VI
For your "lazy migration", Michael, this abhorrs me: You simply couldn't do this for thousands of AS items?! Of course, it would be inadequate to propose you my scripting help, since what could be difficult for me, should be less difficult (if not easy) for you, but we MUST find a solution....
I had erroneously assumed that it could be done without too much problems: As I had said elsewhere, MI exports PERFECTLY to UR, by exporting to TreePad Plus, and then by importing the TreePad files into UR [the post in the UR forum that either you lose indentation = levelling or formatting, is NOT valid anymore, and even pictures in the formatted texts are transferred in a perfect way).
But indeed, the opposite direction is obstructed! (I had hoped one could use UR as an intermediate step between AS and MI.) In fact, UR does import TreePad files, but does not export them; MI does export and import TreePad files and exports rtf files, but does not import those rtf files - if it did, any detour by UR would be unnecessary anyway.
Thus, as a first step, it would be helpful to see if the rtf export from AS can be correctly transferred into (a) TreePad file(s); if yes, I suppose that MI will then import those TreePad files correctly, since, as stated, MI does the EXPORT to this format 100 p.c. faultless.
Importing from another outliner as the original source would set the problem of indenting / levelling = getting lost by exporting the items to the intermediate rtf format; in AS, there is no real tree, hence a tree cannot be lost either. You've got many fields? MI at this time doesn't even has a "Replace in the whole topic" function, but then, I published a macro how to do this months ago yet (any macro program would do)... and Petko has promised to deliver this function soon, thus the macro necessity will not subsist for long!
A macro could even put field contents into tags or other attributes, for example: technically it's easy... And then, perhaps it would be smart to do a lot of swapping in AS yet (= in a COPY of your file(s) of course...), BEFORE any exporting? Or the other way round: First, a report in AS, with csv export, and importing this into MI, and then only, this, and MERGING by macro, perhaps with manually checking each hundredth item in order to be sure that fields and rtf texts are synched...
So what to do? Exporting into rtf, then...
On the site
http://www.treepad.com/conversion_utilities/
I found this for downloading:
Word2TreePad
Freeware program to convert an MS Word document to a TreePad file or an XML file. The Treepad 2.x file is created right from active Word document, following it's structure.
Download: word2tp11.zip (18 Kb).
Platforms: MS Word 97 or higher.
Created by: Andris Shleiters.
And from then on, importing the file(s) into MI (perhaps after checking them, if necessary, in a trial version of TreePad...) - and then, the manual building up of trees would need to be done ;-( But then, it could be done, by a macro, depending on some field contents...!!!
VII
Which would be, using TreePad as the intermediary format - where I very well hope that the above-mentioned routine gets your rtf formatting, and not just text -, AND it shows ANOTHER MI structural / marketing deficiency to Petko and to all of us: At this moment, MI does NOT yet allow import of rtf / MS Word files - WHEREAS ULTRA RECALL DOES!!!!! -, and thus, any MS word user wanting to transfer his data into an outliner program, will discover this MI inability as soon as he tries the transfer... and voilà, UR tenfold the user count of MI's!
As I often said, Petko makes real marketing errors - and again, I'm here to turn the knife in the wound... in the most constructive way -; thus, allowing for easy MS Word files import is, without any doubt, the UTMOST NEXT NECESSARY STEP in MI's development - since this transfer of MS Word users is, undeniably and by far, the greatest potential user group, and that is, up to now, virtually put off by MI:
People who want to leave MS Word... go elsewhere, simply CANNOT come aboard, by lack of, in most cases, even a tenth of the technological background Michael has...
And then, downlad the above-mentioned program (and TreePad trial version) soon... since TreePad and its human context will certainly not be happy to serve as just an intermediate step for transferring data from third-party application x to third-party application z...
VIII
See, Michael, there really seems to be that intermediate step for importing your data, without too much scripting, I hope. Let us know, we don't want to lose you for such a minor reason!
Oh yes, another matter, it could be that before exporting to rtf, it would be advisable to reformat in AS, or doing straightward encoding of real paragraphs vs. just ends of lines, AS has, among other faults, a very annoying tendancy to replace normal line endings by paragraph endings, so be prepared to run and reformat its rtf export file in MS Word, e.g. - but who am I to give you news about AS, knowing you know it far better even than I could ever have known it?
As for the keyboard "Swiss romande", you might indeed be that other MI user who works with it - most people never heard of this feature; it's a tremendous invention, you simply pass from English to French to German, without any crazy jumping keys from one side to the other, I've been using these keyboards (= this keyboard layout, independently on any physical keyboard designs) for more than 20 years now, from Windows 3 (or 3.11) on - there are SOME things that are WELL designed in our Windows world...
Oh yeah, and speking of design, Scrivener is a fine thing... and even more beautiful is... Storyist - and as our fellow Daly will confirm, the more beautiful your writing instrument, the better the results, all other factors maintained.
Oh, and then, the master of Belgian BD is dead, unfortunately... but this forum seems to have risen from the dead!
And yes, IOU the Johnson citation:
Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called 'As We May Think'; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called 'Tools for Thought.' Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers.
;-(
I
Oh yes, Alex (= Chrystal), I know what you mean, people cannot follow me anymore, but then, I am SURE Petko follows me, and indeed, I had exactly this intention, i.e. to do a little list of my "demands" / observations in brief, but I had the intention to do so AFTER the next intermediate release, in the form: These issues have been addressed, these issues are waiting to be addressed.
In fact, I've been a little bit angry about wasp, remaining totally anonymous and telling me I've strong opinions of things I don't know anything about, when in fact, all I dare say is, finally, I do NOT understand why people should, in order to just exchange their own data from 1 comp to another, go by the net. Perhaps I'm too old, but I just don't understand it. When it goes to collaborations features, I understand, but for going from 1 comp of my own to another comp of my own, I cannot imagine the sense of doing that by web services, I'm simply too dumb for it, I don't sense, I don't get it.
There have been cables, there's wifi, there are usb sticks / usb hard disks, etc. - why sending your data into a web site of people that have a voice like a salesman, when in fact they offer their services for free and don't even seem to have some advertizing on their site? To intercept data? Understand me very well, I'm NOT suggesting that site there is fraudulous, I'm just saying I don't understand their business model yet, and I'd be happy for encountering somebody to enlighten me; wasp, being a "scholar", should have (had) the brain to solve the mistery; instead he says I'm speaking on everything, knowing almost nothing, in a way...
When in fact, I've touted MI so much, June 22 on bitsdujour.com, that MI extended the offer for a second day - notwithstanding my real disssecting MI since.
II
But I understand wasp is a little bit jealous... without any need to be: I'm NOT asking him for shoving his Apple toys into... instead, I "bended over backwards to make it easy for" him (my gosh, what an expression I get there from my dictionary, in fact, "je lui ai tendu la perche", "ich habe ihm eine goldene Brücke gebaut" = I erected a golden bridge for him, as they say in German, by saying, yes, I understand, the iPad isn't but a toy, I understand its real interest lays in being connected to the net 24 hours a day? He didn't even said, yes, that's it, but he jumped on the occasion that I had dared to give my 2 cents to the above-mentioned problem of synching your own comps by third-party net services - of course, for the iPad, that seems to be the only easy way to do it - BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT THE NORMAL WAY TO DO IT in my humble opinion...
In fact, I had read a real user's experience with the iPad when giving my 2 cents, and I think that reading this experience will be extremely useful for EVERY computer user today, it's the (unsuccessful) try of of a British, bestselling thriller novelist, David Hewson - but he tried deeply, not in a light way! read his experience, it's real info! -, to give the iPad a real use; well, I felt tempted to say, well, wasp is a "scholar", whereas David Hewson abandoned school at the age of 17 (which is a fact), so the scholar is more apt to use the iPad in an intelligent way...
but then, wasp says, MI is almost perfect for him, whereas I said that, e.g., the (perhaps third-party-) search function gives false finds... which for professional use is not acceptable... and the iPad is intended as a thing for dummies to get them to a sort of a simili-comp where they are heavily patronized... but where they get done a certain minimum of things, whereas "normally", they wouldn't accept to own a comp (= your father / mother / step-... but then, even your little sister would be frustrated with it)... in fact, it's a Porsche for people who cannot afford a Porsche: See, folks, I can spend 1,000 dollars on a toy that I'll dump for 300 next year on Ebay when the successor will be released.
But I see the real problem, wasp is railing against a sort of a "super user" coming out of nothing, giving straightforwad advice on everything, when up to now, wasp had the impression to be "on top here", which is gone.
But then, wasp, I'm not paid by any university where I would have liked to be, so this hat goes to you, and my expertize on outlining is a very special one, as I said, I'm not even a real programmer, I just devoted a part of my life to the development, from scratch, when any other possibly existing outliner out there wasn't know to me, I reinvented the wheel... and I did many things very well, 12 years ago... I even had end notes - not footnotes, that's right, since I leaned on the sh** printing function of ToolBo..ok, instead of integrating some third-party printing program... in a way, I had been state-of-the-art and really dumb at the same time.
Thus, saying, oh yeah, a "scholar", but who thinks MI were almost perfect, such a statement wouldn't be my style, since elsewhere, wasp said he owns InDesign, and I know very well that this is the royal solution; in fact, where around 95 p.c. or more people export to MS Word, he exports to InDesign, then, and thus, he's able to do some cryptic codes in the text, like {|fn=xyz}, and so on, in order to have his works typeset ways over those MS Word manuscripts.
But then, stating falsely that MI were almost perfect, IS NOT HELPING MI, whereas my dissecting IS helping it. Because, let's put it frankly, in almost any way, MI is INFERIOR to UR, except for easy access (which is not nothing, I know), and except for tagging, but real tagging is FIRST on the UR agenda.
And, as everybody can see, UR's "community" is tenfold MI's... and this is WITH wasp aboard...
Whereas my intention here is to defend David against Goliath; call me crazy, but then, (re-) read my, it's some 70 posts of mine, and you'll see that MI has very strong potential IF those IMPORTANT advice issues of mine will be followed.
Thus, it'd be CRAZY to show jealousy when some "professionals" "overtake" this forum... as long as those "professionals" - I consider myself as a professional in software design, and see what Michael's credentials are!!! - are really and wholeheartedly interested in MI's future! (And Petko undeniably has the intelligence to not going let astray on this.)
Thus, wasp, please, leave your perfect anonymity, and we'll respect you for your scholarly credentials; have a look at professor Manfred Kühn, the leading (? = one of the leading without any doubt) Kant specialists worldwide (another born German, but Canadian by his heart at least, by naturalization perhaps), who some weeks ago, in the forum outlinersoftware.com, said, I don't need this, when in fact nobody really attacked him, it just had been the LEVEL of discussion there with which he finally got totally fed up... just like me, many months before him.
(Kühn isn't the guy who just whines and dines, he tries to go a little bit further here and there; see his blog, it's worthwhile your visit:
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ )
Even when I don't read the NYT on an iPad - and then, I don't like the man, politically, who's bought the NYT -, there's always this famous clipping from The New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 30, 2005, by Steven Johnson, and I wanna help with finding solutions...
So, I'm very happy to have given a push to the discussion here, in, let's put it bluntly, having given a real RISE to its level before some intelligent people (= perhaps more than I am, but as wasps knows, I'm ALWAYS ready to give in when somebody is right and I'm not, so this doesn't set the slightest problem for me) join us here (Michael) and / or RE-join us here (= Alex)... and I'd be happy to have more people of this high standard aboard... unfortunately, somebody like Florian Gehrke, from the AS forum, seems to be fed up with everything, at least for the time being... after having done a TREMENDOUS work (for free) for AS... not only on the English language forum, but also on AS's defunct German language forum, and after having "lost" one "man year" of his life there; one thing is sure, or do I overlook something really important?:
The greatest loss in software history is Framework (and that not because their programming language was called "Fred" - see the "Framework" item in the English Wikipedia!) - and the second-important loss is askSam, I think, oh yes.
But then, and this FROM THE BEGINNING ON, the AS folks NEVER understood that items have a NATURAL place in ONE category = a tree, AND multiple other places = affiliations in secondary tree structures; AS always relied on their (tremendous) search engine, but WITHOUT implementing "artificial intelligence" = automatic searching of synonyms, or automatic dismissing of non-contextual homonyms; any linguistic consideration simply wasn't in the field of vision of AS staff... whereas a Florian Gehrke told them TEN YEARS AGO about it: Thus, AS simply relied on their core ideas from 20 years ago, and weren't in any way apt to listen to any reason whatsoever, even if it came from their most prominent and incredibly investing advocate...
Of course, I've got Florian's fate there when investing here, since my position is a little bit similar: I'm working for a third party, for free: for Petko.
So, I've got in my mind some fears like, "Sharing is loosing.", and other paranoia-driven ideas, "perles before swines", etc., here and there... and on the other hand, I understand perfectly that indeed, when considering Petko's situation as a one-man-show, we MUST give him time to first eliminate all those little things that indeed do that MI is FAR from perfect as wasp pretends, AND give him time to thoroughly consider our propositions...
III
All the more so since our propositions are NOT refined yet, i.e. my "macro third dimension thing", developed in this forum, almost each day, I discover details where my proposition must be refined first, and THEN ONLY - and after discussion between intelligent people INCLUDING WASP - shall we have the "moral right" to ask Petko to implement it:
All those little things, Petko WILL amend them... but we simply CANNOT tell him, do this and this and this, which will take him a year... and afterward, we'll say, excuse us, we were mistaken, you should better do it this other way!!!
Thus, give me some more time, I'm currently becoming acquainted with AutoIt, and I'll SHARE my script with you, in order for some of yours loading it, working with it, and then we'll discuss in which way a perhaps MORE intelligent solution of the problem, than the one delivered by me, could be implemented into MI.
This is to say, I would like to "implement" many of my suggestions by AI scripts beforehand, for commun use, in order to TRY THEM, before we'll ask Petko to do the encoding... and then, it would be tremendous if Petko would give HIS opinion, as we are giving ours. Thus, I would like to trigger a REAL DISCUSSION of future MI features...
and if Petko does not follow THEN, we'll go to Goliath - but why should we do this, long before knowing?
Let's put it bluntly, a year or so before touting MI on June 22, 2010, I went to UR, wanting to discuss some idiosyncrasies of that software. The chief developer pretended to not understand me, and he said, English doesn't seem to be your native language? Of course he was right, but then, did I ever NOT succeed in making me understood, anywhere?
IV
And no, I did NOT forget to mention David Hewson's link:
http://davidhewson.com/2010/10/22/the-i ... nite-fail/
Understand me well: I'm not agains tablets, I never was. Just have a look at anoto.com, the make their living out of the absence of useful tablets - but iPad isn't that yet.
V
I agree with you, Michael, it's caricatural, but I'm VERY glad in several respects: France has been the dream of my life - but my Wallonian compatriots are not intelligent enough to see that our joining France would make the day of our all's life -, and Belgium is so tiny that our problems don't even really get into the minds of other Europeans, let alone any "transatlantic" considerations - the US, Canada
and then, going, with your FRENCH wife, to Switzerland to make your living, well, it's PARADISE for you (and your family), it's simply not possible to get a happier life than yours... but your credentials show that you worked hard for getting where you are now... but I said so, you are a very serious guy... and then, you are even more serious than I had thought... and let's put it bluntly, expatriate Germans are an elite group, whereas most of Germans who have their say in Germany today, AIN'T worth that much... and whereas you can find, at an intermediate level, many, many Germans of very high value, even IN today's Germany... seems that the formation of Germany's elite is highly contestable; btw., there are quite a few sociological studies backing my point - so, please, wasp, not again!
VI
For your "lazy migration", Michael, this abhorrs me: You simply couldn't do this for thousands of AS items?! Of course, it would be inadequate to propose you my scripting help, since what could be difficult for me, should be less difficult (if not easy) for you, but we MUST find a solution....
I had erroneously assumed that it could be done without too much problems: As I had said elsewhere, MI exports PERFECTLY to UR, by exporting to TreePad Plus, and then by importing the TreePad files into UR [the post in the UR forum that either you lose indentation = levelling or formatting, is NOT valid anymore, and even pictures in the formatted texts are transferred in a perfect way).
But indeed, the opposite direction is obstructed! (I had hoped one could use UR as an intermediate step between AS and MI.) In fact, UR does import TreePad files, but does not export them; MI does export and import TreePad files and exports rtf files, but does not import those rtf files - if it did, any detour by UR would be unnecessary anyway.
Thus, as a first step, it would be helpful to see if the rtf export from AS can be correctly transferred into (a) TreePad file(s); if yes, I suppose that MI will then import those TreePad files correctly, since, as stated, MI does the EXPORT to this format 100 p.c. faultless.
Importing from another outliner as the original source would set the problem of indenting / levelling = getting lost by exporting the items to the intermediate rtf format; in AS, there is no real tree, hence a tree cannot be lost either. You've got many fields? MI at this time doesn't even has a "Replace in the whole topic" function, but then, I published a macro how to do this months ago yet (any macro program would do)... and Petko has promised to deliver this function soon, thus the macro necessity will not subsist for long!
A macro could even put field contents into tags or other attributes, for example: technically it's easy... And then, perhaps it would be smart to do a lot of swapping in AS yet (= in a COPY of your file(s) of course...), BEFORE any exporting? Or the other way round: First, a report in AS, with csv export, and importing this into MI, and then only, this, and MERGING by macro, perhaps with manually checking each hundredth item in order to be sure that fields and rtf texts are synched...
So what to do? Exporting into rtf, then...
On the site
http://www.treepad.com/conversion_utilities/
I found this for downloading:
Word2TreePad
Freeware program to convert an MS Word document to a TreePad file or an XML file. The Treepad 2.x file is created right from active Word document, following it's structure.
Download: word2tp11.zip (18 Kb).
Platforms: MS Word 97 or higher.
Created by: Andris Shleiters.
And from then on, importing the file(s) into MI (perhaps after checking them, if necessary, in a trial version of TreePad...) - and then, the manual building up of trees would need to be done ;-( But then, it could be done, by a macro, depending on some field contents...!!!
VII
Which would be, using TreePad as the intermediary format - where I very well hope that the above-mentioned routine gets your rtf formatting, and not just text -, AND it shows ANOTHER MI structural / marketing deficiency to Petko and to all of us: At this moment, MI does NOT yet allow import of rtf / MS Word files - WHEREAS ULTRA RECALL DOES!!!!! -, and thus, any MS word user wanting to transfer his data into an outliner program, will discover this MI inability as soon as he tries the transfer... and voilà, UR tenfold the user count of MI's!
As I often said, Petko makes real marketing errors - and again, I'm here to turn the knife in the wound... in the most constructive way -; thus, allowing for easy MS Word files import is, without any doubt, the UTMOST NEXT NECESSARY STEP in MI's development - since this transfer of MS Word users is, undeniably and by far, the greatest potential user group, and that is, up to now, virtually put off by MI:
People who want to leave MS Word... go elsewhere, simply CANNOT come aboard, by lack of, in most cases, even a tenth of the technological background Michael has...
And then, downlad the above-mentioned program (and TreePad trial version) soon... since TreePad and its human context will certainly not be happy to serve as just an intermediate step for transferring data from third-party application x to third-party application z...
VIII
See, Michael, there really seems to be that intermediate step for importing your data, without too much scripting, I hope. Let us know, we don't want to lose you for such a minor reason!
Oh yes, another matter, it could be that before exporting to rtf, it would be advisable to reformat in AS, or doing straightward encoding of real paragraphs vs. just ends of lines, AS has, among other faults, a very annoying tendancy to replace normal line endings by paragraph endings, so be prepared to run and reformat its rtf export file in MS Word, e.g. - but who am I to give you news about AS, knowing you know it far better even than I could ever have known it?
As for the keyboard "Swiss romande", you might indeed be that other MI user who works with it - most people never heard of this feature; it's a tremendous invention, you simply pass from English to French to German, without any crazy jumping keys from one side to the other, I've been using these keyboards (= this keyboard layout, independently on any physical keyboard designs) for more than 20 years now, from Windows 3 (or 3.11) on - there are SOME things that are WELL designed in our Windows world...
Oh yeah, and speking of design, Scrivener is a fine thing... and even more beautiful is... Storyist - and as our fellow Daly will confirm, the more beautiful your writing instrument, the better the results, all other factors maintained.
Oh, and then, the master of Belgian BD is dead, unfortunately... but this forum seems to have risen from the dead!
And yes, IOU the Johnson citation:
Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called 'As We May Think'; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called 'Tools for Thought.' Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers.
;-(
Fred, I'm not sure what I did to set off this eruption. (My initials, by the way, are WSP, not the more colorful WASP. And I would suggest, as gently as possible, that WSP is no more anonymous than FRED.) I try always to be be polite on discussion forums, and I'm sorry if I annoyed you with what I thought were fairly innocuous remarks about the iPad and Dropbox. I find both of them extremely useful, whereas you don't want them in your life. I don't know what more there is to say about that. I have no doubt that you make use of various kinds of software and hardware that wouldn't be particularly helpful to me. We all use the tools that are suitable for us.
I also use Indesign because I do a certain amount of book-designing. I am puzzled why you find that so annoying.
And I don't understand your sarcasm about my self-identification as a writer and scholar. I was simply trying to explain how I use MyInfo, because I recognize that it is a powerful, complex program that appeals to many different sorts of users, all of whom have different needs.
I'm glad that you're focusing on so many of the details of the MyInfo UI; I think you're making a solid contribution here. I hope you can be more tolerant of some of us who have slightly different needs and perspectives. When I said that MyInfo, with modest improvements, might be almost perfect, I meant that a bit ironically. Of course all software is capable of infinite improvements. I was just trying to indicate (wryly) that there were a couple of missing features that I especially needed.
I also use Indesign because I do a certain amount of book-designing. I am puzzled why you find that so annoying.
And I don't understand your sarcasm about my self-identification as a writer and scholar. I was simply trying to explain how I use MyInfo, because I recognize that it is a powerful, complex program that appeals to many different sorts of users, all of whom have different needs.
I'm glad that you're focusing on so many of the details of the MyInfo UI; I think you're making a solid contribution here. I hope you can be more tolerant of some of us who have slightly different needs and perspectives. When I said that MyInfo, with modest improvements, might be almost perfect, I meant that a bit ironically. Of course all software is capable of infinite improvements. I was just trying to indicate (wryly) that there were a couple of missing features that I especially needed.
Bill
... and yes, I'm using the Swiss keyboard Fred, and it is simply great !
There are some very interesting things about importing into MI in your last post.
I just fear that nobody else will find them because we're completely off topic.
Shouldn't we start a separate thread for this ?
Just a couple of remarks:
"Lazy" importing is certainly not possible for too many articles, I was talking of notes databases of up to 100 documents.
I managed to import MS Word in *.doc format not in *.docx format but then I just used the clipboard with amazing result, even my tables came over nicely.
Yesterday I managed to build my first MI plugin DLL. No import function yet, I first had to tweak the C++ sample into my LCC Compiler. What a fun it was going back to old times))
I will continue to do a simple import thing, i.e. importing a text file containing several documents delimited by a separator. When this works we can start discussing what we need in regard to askSam or other formats.
Felix (which is my 2nd name, but which everbody calls me by...)
There are some very interesting things about importing into MI in your last post.
I just fear that nobody else will find them because we're completely off topic.
Shouldn't we start a separate thread for this ?
Just a couple of remarks:
"Lazy" importing is certainly not possible for too many articles, I was talking of notes databases of up to 100 documents.
I managed to import MS Word in *.doc format not in *.docx format but then I just used the clipboard with amazing result, even my tables came over nicely.
Yesterday I managed to build my first MI plugin DLL. No import function yet, I first had to tweak the C++ sample into my LCC Compiler. What a fun it was going back to old times
))I will continue to do a simple import thing, i.e. importing a text file containing several documents delimited by a separator. When this works we can start discussing what we need in regard to askSam or other formats.
Felix (which is my 2nd name, but which everbody calls me by...)
-
Daly de Gagne
- Posts: 52
- Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 6:15 pm
Fred, greetings. You wrote:
"Thus, wasp, please, leave your perfect anonymity, and we'll respect you for your scholarly credentials; have a look at professor Manfred Kühn, the leading (? = one of the leading without any doubt) Kant specialists worldwide (another born German, but Canadian by his heart at least, by naturalization perhaps), who some weeks ago, in the forum outlinersoftware.com, said, I don't need this, when in fact nobody really attacked him, it just had been the LEVEL of discussion there with which he finally got totally fed up... just like me, many months before him.
"Kühn isn't the guy who just whines and dines, he tries to go a little bit further here and there; see his blog, it's worthwhile your visit:"
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/
I'm the guy whose comments lead Manfred to leave outlinersoftware.com - and I am pleased to see it was apparent to someone other than myself that, in fact, he was not being attacked.
My comments, which infuriated Manfred, were directed toward Connected Text - a program of which Manfred is a great advocate, and which from what I have seen, is perhaps one of the best wiki-type programs on the market. In my comment I was, as I had on other occasions, been expressing my extreme frustration at the way the help file for CT is written (and yes, I recognize the developer is a Portugese speaker). I made it clear that the way my own brain works has made it hard for me to understand exactly how to take the directions in the help file and translate them to actions in CT - part of the problem is that my mind does not do well conceptualizing the wiki model. Nonetheless, that does not stop me from realizing that were I to get my thick head around the CT instructions, it could well be a helpful program for me.
In any event, I think Manfred took my comments as a personal attack on the CT developer and himself. They were meant as neither, and in fact I respect both gentlemen. Manfred's work on Kant may (ok, definitely is) above my ability to read philosophy, but his blog, the url of which you provided, has provided me some very pleasant reading and reflection - both Manfred and I share a fascination with the process of making notes and information gathering.
I was shocked by Manfred's response, and realized immediately I had inadvertently - to use the English vernacular - pissed him off to the max. My response was to write a note of apology to Manfred at outlinersoftware.com . I have not seen any reply to it from Manfred, and so I fear he may have followed through in cutting himself off from the site completely. That, of course, is his choice, but I do apologize to him that my comments were of such vehemence that they motivated this move. My hope is that if Manfred reads this forum, or if you have correspondence with him, that he may be made aware of my apology, and perhaps consider coming back to outlinersoftware.com where he was considered by many of us as a valued member who contributed a great deal.
Daly
"Thus, wasp, please, leave your perfect anonymity, and we'll respect you for your scholarly credentials; have a look at professor Manfred Kühn, the leading (? = one of the leading without any doubt) Kant specialists worldwide (another born German, but Canadian by his heart at least, by naturalization perhaps), who some weeks ago, in the forum outlinersoftware.com, said, I don't need this, when in fact nobody really attacked him, it just had been the LEVEL of discussion there with which he finally got totally fed up... just like me, many months before him.
"Kühn isn't the guy who just whines and dines, he tries to go a little bit further here and there; see his blog, it's worthwhile your visit:"
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/
I'm the guy whose comments lead Manfred to leave outlinersoftware.com - and I am pleased to see it was apparent to someone other than myself that, in fact, he was not being attacked.
My comments, which infuriated Manfred, were directed toward Connected Text - a program of which Manfred is a great advocate, and which from what I have seen, is perhaps one of the best wiki-type programs on the market. In my comment I was, as I had on other occasions, been expressing my extreme frustration at the way the help file for CT is written (and yes, I recognize the developer is a Portugese speaker). I made it clear that the way my own brain works has made it hard for me to understand exactly how to take the directions in the help file and translate them to actions in CT - part of the problem is that my mind does not do well conceptualizing the wiki model. Nonetheless, that does not stop me from realizing that were I to get my thick head around the CT instructions, it could well be a helpful program for me.
In any event, I think Manfred took my comments as a personal attack on the CT developer and himself. They were meant as neither, and in fact I respect both gentlemen. Manfred's work on Kant may (ok, definitely is) above my ability to read philosophy, but his blog, the url of which you provided, has provided me some very pleasant reading and reflection - both Manfred and I share a fascination with the process of making notes and information gathering.
I was shocked by Manfred's response, and realized immediately I had inadvertently - to use the English vernacular - pissed him off to the max. My response was to write a note of apology to Manfred at outlinersoftware.com . I have not seen any reply to it from Manfred, and so I fear he may have followed through in cutting himself off from the site completely. That, of course, is his choice, but I do apologize to him that my comments were of such vehemence that they motivated this move. My hope is that if Manfred reads this forum, or if you have correspondence with him, that he may be made aware of my apology, and perhaps consider coming back to outlinersoftware.com where he was considered by many of us as a valued member who contributed a great deal.
Daly
Hi Daly, Gosh! You're really hurt by his "reaction", whereas I, knowing that he had zeroed in on you, did not see any reason whatsoever in connecting your name with this, here, see my quotation marks, it had NOT been a reaction, it had be looking out for a pretext to saying goodbye, and you had the infortune to deliver him the occasion. Your post was
a ) innocuous
b ) totally justified
c ) unwanted by professor Kühn who is a very PARTIAL advocate of CT (whereas I am very fond of MI... of an MI that I have in mind, and that's perfectly possible).
You must see that Kühn (who I don't know at all) is a guy who, just like me, is not only keen on giving his opinion, but on really helping, on analyzing, on getting beyond the ordinary things, his blogs shows this.
Thus, the level of discussion on that outliner forum WAS to frustrate him, as it had frustrated me... but instead of saying exactly this = attacking the community there (= as I had done, without hesitating), he did the thing most people do when being in front of a group, he singled out one victim, attacked that victim and put it, falsely, as if that group member had attacked HIM - thus working off his anger, and at the same time staying assured the group would not attack him for attacking them all; it's human, but then, a university professor / scholar of his stature should be able to not act as a manual worker would act when in a group he's discontented with.
So, I'm never shocked, I've seen it all, really, don't be shocked by a standard group dynamics' procedure - YOU were to beg HIS pardon? hahaha, but you see, he made you believe that - that's censorship... but then, on American campuses, today, first lesson first year: What you may say, and what you're forbidden to say... The land of freedom, oh yeah... (Yep, I prefer Antonioni's view on that land, as expressed in Zabriskie Point.)
And I can easily top your assertion: Since I work with a German Windows (necessarily so since computers bought in Germany), CT imposes a "German" menu on me. Then I opt for "English GUI", and all I get is a total mess of some English and mostly German menu entries. Then I opted for "Portugese" - just to have a look -, and, yeah, a total mess between Portugese and, again, German menu entries.
Besides, you hadn't been the first one Kühn had attacked; I remember having read somebody else's post somewhere who had dared to say, in a sense, that CT's developer could have some better translations of some ununderstable passages, and Kühn had been there with his PC ("politically correct") nonsense, i.e. the poster, d'après Kühn, hadn't the right to discuss non-English language issues when developer is Brazilian. I shorten his arguments a little bit, and I cite from my memory, but that was what I understood.
There is a third difference between me and Kühn, besides his group-manipulating tries / unconditionally advocating, and his being an erudite university professor: He presents a lot of third-party things in his blog whereas I try to think for myself.
On CT, he has about 90 blog entries, but his own ideas on not-CT things there are rather sparse and not so much impressing, whereas his finds of third-party findings are extensive and helpful, giving real insight.
Thus, I would like to offer a theory: Whereas I defend MY ideas - and can do so in developing them further, not having to recur to manoeuvering -, Kühn is trained (too much trained, perhaps) to defend third party's ideas, thus his completely freaking out when somebody dares to criticise his beloved CT.
My departing from there had nothing to do, by the way, with my being frightened to stand up against some unlikeable people - I'm trained in this -, but by the very simple fact that from beginning on, the owner of that site did CENSOR me, literally, and since I had not yet understood that the discussion level was rather low - new features, new opinions, and for having some pieces of analysis, you have to browse years back -, I had wanted to comply to this condition... when having discovered intelligent people there were at party time, not trying to train their brains, I thought, well, censorhip, for this?! I don't need this!
But I said so, I told my opinion in my last post there; Kühn wasn't man enough to do the same; instead, he preferred to culpabilize you, Daly - don't take it!
This being said, have party time at that site, I would NOT give the impression to spit in the soup, as we say in French! And yes, I browse the posts there, in fact I want information - it's sparse, but then, it's kind of meta information: instead of having to browse 80 developers' sites, I see Julie's or whoever's post telling me developer a has brought out a new version of software x - that helps.
Much more important: You said, with a nice pen, you write with joy - as usual, I cite from memory, I try to cite the essence!
And I said, it's the same with software: With beautiful software, you'll get not too ugly results!
Wasp doesn't need it, wasps have everything they need from birth on. But we need it, we need perfect tools - why would we be so heavily crimping incessantly? We need better than there is at this time.
Well, let's realize it, with our ideas, here and now. I'm not a philospher, but if I understood well, Kant was the guy who said, even to rescue an innocent victim from his killers, you may not lie. I do not sympathize with such views, whereas I suppose Prof. Kühn will NOT allow us to criticise dear Kant. May he be happy in this dead's company; MI is living and well if we show some loyalty here.
a ) innocuous
b ) totally justified
c ) unwanted by professor Kühn who is a very PARTIAL advocate of CT (whereas I am very fond of MI... of an MI that I have in mind, and that's perfectly possible).
You must see that Kühn (who I don't know at all) is a guy who, just like me, is not only keen on giving his opinion, but on really helping, on analyzing, on getting beyond the ordinary things, his blogs shows this.
Thus, the level of discussion on that outliner forum WAS to frustrate him, as it had frustrated me... but instead of saying exactly this = attacking the community there (= as I had done, without hesitating), he did the thing most people do when being in front of a group, he singled out one victim, attacked that victim and put it, falsely, as if that group member had attacked HIM - thus working off his anger, and at the same time staying assured the group would not attack him for attacking them all; it's human, but then, a university professor / scholar of his stature should be able to not act as a manual worker would act when in a group he's discontented with.
So, I'm never shocked, I've seen it all, really, don't be shocked by a standard group dynamics' procedure - YOU were to beg HIS pardon? hahaha, but you see, he made you believe that - that's censorship... but then, on American campuses, today, first lesson first year: What you may say, and what you're forbidden to say... The land of freedom, oh yeah... (Yep, I prefer Antonioni's view on that land, as expressed in Zabriskie Point.)
And I can easily top your assertion: Since I work with a German Windows (necessarily so since computers bought in Germany), CT imposes a "German" menu on me. Then I opt for "English GUI", and all I get is a total mess of some English and mostly German menu entries. Then I opted for "Portugese" - just to have a look -, and, yeah, a total mess between Portugese and, again, German menu entries.
Besides, you hadn't been the first one Kühn had attacked; I remember having read somebody else's post somewhere who had dared to say, in a sense, that CT's developer could have some better translations of some ununderstable passages, and Kühn had been there with his PC ("politically correct") nonsense, i.e. the poster, d'après Kühn, hadn't the right to discuss non-English language issues when developer is Brazilian. I shorten his arguments a little bit, and I cite from my memory, but that was what I understood.
There is a third difference between me and Kühn, besides his group-manipulating tries / unconditionally advocating, and his being an erudite university professor: He presents a lot of third-party things in his blog whereas I try to think for myself.
On CT, he has about 90 blog entries, but his own ideas on not-CT things there are rather sparse and not so much impressing, whereas his finds of third-party findings are extensive and helpful, giving real insight.
Thus, I would like to offer a theory: Whereas I defend MY ideas - and can do so in developing them further, not having to recur to manoeuvering -, Kühn is trained (too much trained, perhaps) to defend third party's ideas, thus his completely freaking out when somebody dares to criticise his beloved CT.
My departing from there had nothing to do, by the way, with my being frightened to stand up against some unlikeable people - I'm trained in this -, but by the very simple fact that from beginning on, the owner of that site did CENSOR me, literally, and since I had not yet understood that the discussion level was rather low - new features, new opinions, and for having some pieces of analysis, you have to browse years back -, I had wanted to comply to this condition... when having discovered intelligent people there were at party time, not trying to train their brains, I thought, well, censorhip, for this?! I don't need this!
But I said so, I told my opinion in my last post there; Kühn wasn't man enough to do the same; instead, he preferred to culpabilize you, Daly - don't take it!
This being said, have party time at that site, I would NOT give the impression to spit in the soup, as we say in French! And yes, I browse the posts there, in fact I want information - it's sparse, but then, it's kind of meta information: instead of having to browse 80 developers' sites, I see Julie's or whoever's post telling me developer a has brought out a new version of software x - that helps.
Much more important: You said, with a nice pen, you write with joy - as usual, I cite from memory, I try to cite the essence!
And I said, it's the same with software: With beautiful software, you'll get not too ugly results!
Wasp doesn't need it, wasps have everything they need from birth on. But we need it, we need perfect tools - why would we be so heavily crimping incessantly? We need better than there is at this time.
Well, let's realize it, with our ideas, here and now. I'm not a philospher, but if I understood well, Kant was the guy who said, even to rescue an innocent victim from his killers, you may not lie. I do not sympathize with such views, whereas I suppose Prof. Kühn will NOT allow us to criticise dear Kant. May he be happy in this dead's company; MI is living and well if we show some loyalty here.
Hi Felix,
"Yesterday I managed to build my first MI plugin DLL. No import function yet, I first had to tweak the C++ sample into my
LCC Compiler. What a fun it was going back to old times"
what? what? If you were up to make me miserable, you succeed, plenty!
But this shows Petko's got real experts here, it's just to him to take fully advantage of this enviable situation!
(There's those Swiss Paola and Felix - I said I'm not young, but then, TV is past me for many years: what mountains of crap! -, so I thought Felix was your family name and Michael your Christian name.)
I am aware my (other) threads put some pressure upon Petko, but then, there are some prerequisites a software of 2012 must met in order to be marketable on a professional level - and we're not the guys who say, I want this, I want that, we are people who try to be helpful.
That's an offer an intelligent developer like Petko cannot refuse.
"Yesterday I managed to build my first MI plugin DLL. No import function yet, I first had to tweak the C++ sample into my
LCC Compiler. What a fun it was going back to old times"
what? what? If you were up to make me miserable, you succeed, plenty!
But this shows Petko's got real experts here, it's just to him to take fully advantage of this enviable situation!
(There's those Swiss Paola and Felix - I said I'm not young, but then, TV is past me for many years: what mountains of crap! -, so I thought Felix was your family name and Michael your Christian name.)
I am aware my (other) threads put some pressure upon Petko, but then, there are some prerequisites a software of 2012 must met in order to be marketable on a professional level - and we're not the guys who say, I want this, I want that, we are people who try to be helpful.
That's an offer an intelligent developer like Petko cannot refuse.
-
Daly de Gagne
- Posts: 52
- Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 6:15 pm
Hey Fred, thanks for the kind words, and the benefit of the doubt.
First, I must say I was unaware of your being unwelcome at outlinersoftware.com - or if I had once been aware of it, have forgot whatever brought it about. I think you could make a worthy contribution to the group there.
With regards to the interaction between Manfred and myself, my motivation was that he know I intended no offence, and that having obviously caused offence unintentionally, I was sorry for it. Also, your having mentioned the incident here, I thought in the interest of transparency, I should own up to being the other party involved.
As a therapist, I am aware of some of the possible group dynamics. However, especially since Manfred is not here, I prefer to speak simply of my own part in what occurred.
With warm personal regards,
Daly
First, I must say I was unaware of your being unwelcome at outlinersoftware.com - or if I had once been aware of it, have forgot whatever brought it about. I think you could make a worthy contribution to the group there.
With regards to the interaction between Manfred and myself, my motivation was that he know I intended no offence, and that having obviously caused offence unintentionally, I was sorry for it. Also, your having mentioned the incident here, I thought in the interest of transparency, I should own up to being the other party involved.
As a therapist, I am aware of some of the possible group dynamics. However, especially since Manfred is not here, I prefer to speak simply of my own part in what occurred.
With warm personal regards,
Daly
Hi Daly,
I
Prof. Kühn is not here, so you're 100 p.c. right.
(But I felt free to utter some words since he attacked you then left = "below belt", so here tit for tat.)
II
You a therapist?! Petko, hear, hear! Now it's the middle manager and the lawyer who are missing yet, but would be more than interesting to have your detailed advice, Daly, on my ideas on MI, perhaps after Petko giving us an intermediary result since I intend to re-arrange my developments into a readable form then, now I'm collecting my posts (= within their complete threads of course) to pour them into MI for better grouping of its elements.
I suppose that MI's cloning function will indeed help your work, since therapy work is mostly referencing within current case, not cross-case... as long as you do not research work on those cases that is...
III
In that site, I tried in vain to start a discussion on the big problem, how to cut up info in order to have it at your fingertips afterwards, without knowing your-info-needs-then, beforehand, and nobody got to a solution of this, up to now, hence the preponderance of search solutions (e.g. dtsearch from 199 dollars and much more...).
Here, I try better, I try to establish a real-world approach Petko'd be able to realize, for intermediate results on a technical level, but especially on the conceptual level: how to do better than with existing solutions, sort of gradual concept enhancing by trial and error.
IV
And I know today it's possible with MI since it was myself who discovered MI's ability to link in the tree, then only got lost in my own findings and trials, see my additional post in "the real thing".
I do not want to lure people here, then disappoint them - this is you, Felix -, and I knew I was able to develop something realizable within MI - now I can prove it, so see that thread (again).
V
What I tried in "MI for psychologists..." was to get nearer that solution, you cannot atomize info ad libitum without it getting useless = unmanageable, but you need to ACCESS it in a multi-dimensional level, as atomized as possible. Thus, the problem is, how to store info, how to store access ways to it.
VI
For a psychologist as for everyone, grouped access to dispersed paragraphs is certainly more than helpful (as I developed there), and I think now that perhaps not only (current) linking to parapraphs is a good thing (but from the tree, as is technically feasible indeed), but a BIG STEP AHEAD would be TAGGING not only for items, but for paragraphs!
And of course with saved filters, giving then a list = report onscreen and printable of those paragraphs... and holding together some paragraphs should be possible (let's say the first paragraph is tagged, but there will be a special character before every clrf as long as following paragraphs are included)... and saving such a saved filter as a normal item... building the list up in its text pane on the fly whenever that item is focused... these tags could be called intags... for the item, it would just be a special link, triggering the predefined filtering and displaying...
(And again, with a timer function: Just browsing 200 ms thru it would not trigger the linking, but after 300 ms perhaps...)
I
Prof. Kühn is not here, so you're 100 p.c. right.
(But I felt free to utter some words since he attacked you then left = "below belt", so here tit for tat.)
II
You a therapist?! Petko, hear, hear! Now it's the middle manager and the lawyer who are missing yet, but would be more than interesting to have your detailed advice, Daly, on my ideas on MI, perhaps after Petko giving us an intermediary result since I intend to re-arrange my developments into a readable form then, now I'm collecting my posts (= within their complete threads of course) to pour them into MI for better grouping of its elements.
I suppose that MI's cloning function will indeed help your work, since therapy work is mostly referencing within current case, not cross-case... as long as you do not research work on those cases that is...
III
In that site, I tried in vain to start a discussion on the big problem, how to cut up info in order to have it at your fingertips afterwards, without knowing your-info-needs-then, beforehand, and nobody got to a solution of this, up to now, hence the preponderance of search solutions (e.g. dtsearch from 199 dollars and much more...).
Here, I try better, I try to establish a real-world approach Petko'd be able to realize, for intermediate results on a technical level, but especially on the conceptual level: how to do better than with existing solutions, sort of gradual concept enhancing by trial and error.
IV
And I know today it's possible with MI since it was myself who discovered MI's ability to link in the tree, then only got lost in my own findings and trials, see my additional post in "the real thing".
I do not want to lure people here, then disappoint them - this is you, Felix -, and I knew I was able to develop something realizable within MI - now I can prove it, so see that thread (again).
V
What I tried in "MI for psychologists..." was to get nearer that solution, you cannot atomize info ad libitum without it getting useless = unmanageable, but you need to ACCESS it in a multi-dimensional level, as atomized as possible. Thus, the problem is, how to store info, how to store access ways to it.
VI
For a psychologist as for everyone, grouped access to dispersed paragraphs is certainly more than helpful (as I developed there), and I think now that perhaps not only (current) linking to parapraphs is a good thing (but from the tree, as is technically feasible indeed), but a BIG STEP AHEAD would be TAGGING not only for items, but for paragraphs!
And of course with saved filters, giving then a list = report onscreen and printable of those paragraphs... and holding together some paragraphs should be possible (let's say the first paragraph is tagged, but there will be a special character before every clrf as long as following paragraphs are included)... and saving such a saved filter as a normal item... building the list up in its text pane on the fly whenever that item is focused... these tags could be called intags... for the item, it would just be a special link, triggering the predefined filtering and displaying...
(And again, with a timer function: Just browsing 200 ms thru it would not trigger the linking, but after 300 ms perhaps...)
Every now and then, with increasing hopelessness during the last six to ten months, I scanned the AskSam site and "support forum" for recent information on a new version, or only a sign of life of that great software I am using since the DOS days. AS has accompanied me since my student time, it organized all my references and sources for all my articles and books since my master thesis. Whenever a new project is begun, setting up an AS database for it is what marks the "real start".
However, I had to slowly accept that this my favorite "personal computer" tool will sooner or later be a mere footnote of software history.
You guys made me curious about MyInfo, which is why I am here now. Funnily, I did not yet download the trial version. I have invested a major share of my lifetime in AS databases, and do not want to loose some more only for trial-and-error. Therefore, I will spend some time reading all the posts here in the forum, and when I think it is worth a try for me, I will start using MI.
I hope you are not annoyed when I post a question or two, even without being an active MI user for now.
Regards,
Marcus from Austria
P.S.: Your search is over: I am a lawyer - although not a practicing one, since I am teaching law at university.
However, I had to slowly accept that this my favorite "personal computer" tool will sooner or later be a mere footnote of software history.
You guys made me curious about MyInfo, which is why I am here now. Funnily, I did not yet download the trial version. I have invested a major share of my lifetime in AS databases, and do not want to loose some more only for trial-and-error. Therefore, I will spend some time reading all the posts here in the forum, and when I think it is worth a try for me, I will start using MI.
I hope you are not annoyed when I post a question or two, even without being an active MI user for now.
Regards,
Marcus from Austria
P.S.: Your search is over: I am a lawyer - although not a practicing one, since I am teaching law at university.