Marcus, I'm feeling with you because whenever I got serious about a project I created a new askSam database. This time I've created a new MyInfo topic and found working with it so straighforward that I've already have more than 10 topics. And; I'm working on an import plugin for askSam...
Please feel free to post any questions you have and we will see whether MyInfo feeds your need. My first guess is that this is very likely because I assume you create and structure a lot of the information yourself (either by writing or by copying). In this area MyInfo is very strong. AskSam has its strength when you do complex searching. You would have to judge for yourself if you can live with its current possibilities and wait some time for enhancements
Felix
Welcome to MI
Hi Felix,
thanks a lot for the kind words! In fact, my use of AS had been focussed on
a) full text databases: For a research on the compensation for the expropriation during the Nazi regime I imported the complete findings and reports of an Austrian commission of historians (54 books with 300 to 1,300 pages EACH!) from PDF into a single AS database. The fuzzy search for a single term in the complete database needs only a few seconds (still using AS 5.1, since the version 7.0 purchased proved to be too unstable). I get a list with the titles of all documents containing the term, and a possibility to jump from location to the next one in the same document, or between the documents by means of the list. This is an invaluable tool!
b) own structured lists with long text: When starting a research project, I use a mask for quotations, then add a short abstract of the important passage in a source (book, document). Later, when writing, I would execute a query for a specific word, or several words, and receive a list with context results: for example, four text lines before and following the word sought. Finally, for writing the footnotes, I would get complete quotation lists when searching for a string.
c) own structured lists with pull-down menus, aka pick-lists: To have a database of all the exams I gave, I use fields and specific pick-lists with the correct lecture-numbers. Every week, a report is made with a date filter, listing all exams, converted into RTF and sent to my secretary.
My "searching" is normally rather easy, and most of the time I find myself using the search line only, with one or two words as string. Complex queries are very rare, only for a few reports I am defining.
Regards,
Marcus
thanks a lot for the kind words! In fact, my use of AS had been focussed on
a) full text databases: For a research on the compensation for the expropriation during the Nazi regime I imported the complete findings and reports of an Austrian commission of historians (54 books with 300 to 1,300 pages EACH!) from PDF into a single AS database. The fuzzy search for a single term in the complete database needs only a few seconds (still using AS 5.1, since the version 7.0 purchased proved to be too unstable). I get a list with the titles of all documents containing the term, and a possibility to jump from location to the next one in the same document, or between the documents by means of the list. This is an invaluable tool!
b) own structured lists with long text: When starting a research project, I use a mask for quotations, then add a short abstract of the important passage in a source (book, document). Later, when writing, I would execute a query for a specific word, or several words, and receive a list with context results: for example, four text lines before and following the word sought. Finally, for writing the footnotes, I would get complete quotation lists when searching for a string.
c) own structured lists with pull-down menus, aka pick-lists: To have a database of all the exams I gave, I use fields and specific pick-lists with the correct lecture-numbers. Every week, a report is made with a date filter, listing all exams, converted into RTF and sent to my secretary.
My "searching" is normally rather easy, and most of the time I find myself using the search line only, with one or two words as string. Complex queries are very rare, only for a few reports I am defining.
Regards,
Marcus
Marcus, I will go over the items one by one, because time is a bit limited currently.
a) full text databases: you can import documents in MyInfo, but for PDF the textual contents is currently not extracted for searching. The PDF can be embedded and viewed directly in MYinfo and there is a notes window into which you can manually copy the textual contents for searching. This would have to be done for each PDF. Alternatively you could extract the text before importing it into MyInfo.
If PDF Import for searching is on the list for a future version only Petko (the developer) can tell.
Fuzzy search is not available at the moment, but you can search with wildcards, search for phrases, with boolean operators, in fields and more.
You get a search result list to jump from doc to doc, but you cannot jump from hit to hit: you have to scroll down in the document where are hits are highligted.
I was under the impression that Petko planned to enhance the search result list.
a) full text databases: you can import documents in MyInfo, but for PDF the textual contents is currently not extracted for searching. The PDF can be embedded and viewed directly in MYinfo and there is a notes window into which you can manually copy the textual contents for searching. This would have to be done for each PDF. Alternatively you could extract the text before importing it into MyInfo.
If PDF Import for searching is on the list for a future version only Petko (the developer) can tell.
Fuzzy search is not available at the moment, but you can search with wildcards, search for phrases, with boolean operators, in fields and more.
You get a search result list to jump from doc to doc, but you cannot jump from hit to hit: you have to scroll down in the document where are hits are highligted.
I was under the impression that Petko planned to enhance the search result list.
Since this has become an AS thread, allow me for putting my post I just wrote in the AS forum some minutes ago and without having first read new posts in this forum; if my tone appears extraordinarily cynical, that impression is right since backing real good ideas (here and) there has been underwhelming if I may say so, and even when I describe bugs AND the steps to trigger them, I don't get any, yes, I was able to repeat, no, I'm feeling like a defamator. But then, I also said, there, that I'm willing to settle for a 5.5 with just minor enhancements, and that I'm willing to collaborate to real enhancements for 6.0, and that only if 6.0 doesn't bring any real progress, I'll try otherwise, not before.
BTW, since a REAL toggle Tree-Text-Tree-Text... is not in the feature list for the 5.5 beta, I NEED this, as a strict minimum; having only the false toggle including the finds... and which, even when they are not displayed, often goes to the filter view / pane, in a completely unpredictable way, from the text and even from the tree itself (instead of going to the text then), I dare putting a reminder for this here, the actual unpredictability / bug being totally unacceptable, it has to be included in 5.5 - it drives me crazy, and drives me angry also.
Hi Marcus / Dr. Hanke,
I'm delighted that somebody proposes to read all recent posts, from mine alone, that'll be 129 or something, but then, there's valuable information in many of them, so your time won't be completely lost.
Searching for a practising lawyer must go on since for your canon law research and lecturing, you have (serious) needs being rather different from those of a lawyer working on completing cases from various pieces, my (comprehensive) development of those needs are waiting for optimization... but then, those needs are so badly met by MI (or any competitor) at this moment that it's not astonishing in any way that indeed no practising lawyer is using MI (or any competitor, or then, perhaps UR, but what will he do after some years of practise when UR's file limits are reached?).
You said something extremely poignant:
"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"
That's exactly what I'm desperately trying to tell folks here (and at AS's forum before): It's not really important if you pay 90 dollars or 900 dollars; it's important that the software makes you more productive an enhances your capabilities, instead of giving you headaches for interfering with any "natural" workflow you might need.
In my other post some days ago, I addressed some AS problems, especially their very good idea with trees-on-the-fly, AND their inability to see the gem quality of what they had / have in their hands with it - you currently refrain from this spectacular feature, by using an AS version about 8 years old... that says it all about AS's stability problems. (Read my post, there are other items addressed in it.)
And speaking of my AS post (copied hereunder), YOUR work, Marcus / Dr. Hanke, is exactly the work I WOULDN'T do in AS
(since AS's special goodies ain't that helpful for it indeed, and thus you find yourself with all the bugs and failings of AS (= e.g. that it (=your version) doesn't build any tree), without really profiting from its real smart features, and indeed you said that you didn't rely much on its special search capabilities)
but in any information manager (and how to do your footnotes and other in-file references, encoding them for PageMaker, InDesign or any other XPress, you know already, since you needed this special not-MS-Word-for-everything-user know-how for your thesis) -
but let's face it, YOUR special work is the kind that would profit most from UR's tremendous cloning feature (if you can restrain the global size of your work to 2 GB for some more years that is), but not so much from MI's multiple files search... and for its tagging, well, I've given my opinion in my AS post, but should append that MI and UR (and any other info manager) allow for in-text "tags", by searching for codes (MI in multiple files, UR in up to a 2 GB monster file, with 2,000 clones
) you put in your text (but attention, most codes in MI will not be indexed as such, I've found some code characters that ARE found though, in combination with further encodings, but of course, even a simple "xa12", "xb13" would be tremendously productive if used in a smart way)...
Okay now, here's my AS post from this afternoon, and again, I'm not leaving if we can realize some real progress within a year or so:
http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10005
Fred
Joined: 25 Nov 2008
Total Posts: 28
Re: Is there a GOOD alternative to askSam?
Posted: 11-30-2010 10:40 AM
I'd like to add that in transferring your data to MI, you have this advantage: MI allows for PERFECT transferring of text and pictures into UR and other progs since there's perfect export (for formatted text and pictures) to another intermediate format, which is TreeTab, so you won't be stuck with MI.
Another advantage of MI and UR is the fact that pictures
(in the text, e.g. pictoral clippings by FastStone Capture which allows for your clipping only unformatted text into MI, UR or whatever, instead of whole web pages incl. tables but also unwanted ads / pictures and so on, which is to say, make a first selection when transferring data from the web, instead of downloading 100,000 web pages in full - for this, Surfulater or Webxxx (what is it called again, downloads into a proprietary MS Access database) would be good, and neither MI nor UR or any other, but again, it's a very bad idea to download web info by downloading web pages in full, except for perhaps 1 p.c. of those pages (which is possible in MI and UR)) - I wanted to say, download the url, text clippings (which you then selectively format in your target program...
- and if you need some tables or pictures, why not use FastStone Capture (which is very fast whereas the screenshot program "everybody" uses takes 10 times longer to capture parts of your screen, especially since you can set up FSC so that ONE KEY PRESSING does bring you the feature by which you select a rectangular part of the screen, by mouse drawing (= from top left to bottom right), and when you release the mouse key, the "picture" is immediately transferred to the clipboard, and thus you could use a macro which inserts this "picture" into your MI or UR text.
This way, after some years, you'll have neat archives in MI, UR or whatever information manager, instead of having a collection of raw data where 95 p.c. is garbage - but I am aware for a very long time now that I'm preaching to deaf ears in proning this, and thus, neither MI nor UR will be a very satisfying program... but then, AS isn't so good at this either if I'm not totally mistaken.
Anyway, when doing such exporting to any other program, here's another hint for you.
If I were you, I would NOT dive deep in the particularities of any other given program, since that will probably hinder any further export to other programs.
In English: MI is rather strong with tagging, so that's one of its current merits over UR and others... but if ever you have had enough of MI for any reason, as you're fed up with AS at this moment - late, in my opinion, but what do they say, hopes die last or something like that, yeah? -, the more you will have relied on MI's tagging feature, the more cumbersome will probably get any exporting business.
But I wanted to say, for the FSC and any pictures in the texts of MI and UR that those jpg's or whatever take only some bits and bytes, whereas in AS they take a lot of them (like they take in MS Works or MS Word - up to 2003 at least, I don't know Word's more recent versions).
Thus, storing many pictures into MI or UR texts will be without problem... except for the fact that currently at least, MI, but not UR, does (if you want it to do) searches on more than one loaded file, allowing for cutting up big files into more malleable ones, whereas in UR you have a lot of TREMENDOUS functions (= the best cloning feature I've seen anywhere) to work within ONE file... but if this one file gets too big, you will LOSE those advantages, no more searching in your whole stuff at once, but manually, one file after another, and also, any cloning of / into those parts of your UR file that you will then cut off into another file will be de-synched, i.e. become a normal "copy" of your (perhaps hundreds of formerly synched) item(s), which is to say:
In UR, you are well advised to cut your data collection into parts that will be more or less stable from beginning to end, since the cloning feature is so tremendously good that you will certainly not do without it, but then you'll run into terrible problems if ever you (must) cut a UR file into two or more (for having too many pictures there for example).
But then, it's possible that UR will sometime allow not only for 2 GB files, but for files that are much bigger that this; e.g., that's what TreePad even allows for today (in the most expensive version) - but TP is, in any other respect, a little bit underwhelming.
One thing seems to be sure: No program of this kind of my knowledge - and I hope to know them all - does allow for cloning over more than one file, and worse, no programs really seems to envision this feature. I've been begging at the MI forum for 5 months now, but frankly, I do NOT have the impression that its developer, let alone the majority of its user base - and most MI users are DUMB users, like in AS, whereas UR user certainly have a higher IQ on average -, has / have got the importance (also on a financial level, that is) of such a feature, since cloning (and not searching alone) between more than one file at any given moment, and synching all this at all time of course, would make any such an information management system SCALEABLE onto corporate use, and this way, the first such program that will offer it, will be not a "GOOD alternative to AS" but will be the KILLER application even if there's not much more to it than this.
(It's interesting to see that PB, PersonalBrain, does NOT offer anything like this, perhaps in order to not gnag into the corporation market of TheBrain, where prices seem to start at big Mercedes Benz limousines it seems - they don't even give prices but to bona fide would-be corporate customers, which is a very bad sign. Thus, any program under 1,000 dollars (plus dollars for the third, fourth... comp in the net) allowing for real multi-file group working, will sell by thousands and thousands, perhaps by millions - but as said, I seem to be the only one to see this at this point of time, so don't count on it.)
Two people seem to have left us without giving further notice, Flo (which is a great loss for this "community" where giving and taking were so unevenly distributed if I may say), and sovi-James-Bond. Both of them, in their times, insisted on the fact that in some respects, AS was / is without competitor (known by us), and they were and are right.
Thus, my advice is this:
Go to MI or UR or any other information manager that has some basic features AND that will allow for exporting without too much fuss later on if you wish so, but with your texts (= with tables and other pictures as pictures in the texts), AND without too much relying on the special features of any such given program, thus leave alone tagging in MI and cloning in UR, since any exporting will be impossible if in MI you'll have 2,000 tags or in UR 2,000 clones (including sub-items of cloned items, the strength of UR).
Cloning in MI is underwhelming, as is tagging in UR, so you won't risk to use them extensively, for the time being, but then, since I said, leave alone the strengths of the two programs, tagging in MI and cloning in UR, well, that will largely widen your choice, to any other such information manager of your liking; thus, even TreePad won't be a bad choice at all in the end.
But I prefer MI for the time being, since I always have some hope that its developer will at least put into action SOME of the features I've been begging for there, and if he does, I'll be quite "happy" with it - well, I'll be happy as soon as I'll have multi-file cloning, from anybody...
In the meantime, perfect cloning but only within any ONE file being UR's (big) advantage over MI and others, where's UR's any other advantage when you refrain from using its cloning feature? Well, there isn't any, as I see it. At this time, UR is less ugly than MI is, but MI's developer has promised some progress... but then, when in MI's forum I do a thread, "Graphical Considerations", only a handful of MI users were interested in reading those considerations, and certainly, its developer will think, well, if my users are happy with what they've got, why giving them something less ugly then? Just because Fred's begging for it? Restrain!
So, if you come to MI, it would be because Fred's begging there, or has been - 5 months is enough, d'après Fred -, and because Felix is there, too... but for how long?
Most of my and Felix' staying there will depend on MI 5.5 and, much more important, MI 6.0. I won't change my program unless I'll be unhappy with 6.0, but if 6.0 shows real progress, I'll help in any way there to make more progress possible; in a year or so, we'll know.
For your data that needs AS' special features, STAY WITH AS!
All those information managers do NOT have those special features, and they perhaps will never have 'em, to that extent. But it's a big, big mistake to put your TEXTS / pictures into AS, as it would be a big, big mistake to put your data in any other program (of the given information managers kind of course, real databases are something other and would be a real alternative, that goes without saying), data that needs
formalized analysis.
But then, texts, etc. don't; data databases do.
Thus, it would be foolish to export your AS goods databases or your AS customer databases or your AS sales / contacts databses
into any information management program, be it MI, UR, PB or any of the other about 80 programs of this kind I happen to know more or less well: Stay with AS as long as possible, even by buying old comps running Windows XP / 7 32-bit if necessary, but do not change for something less good than AS is for those special purposes. If change is necessary, pay somebody to do the transfer to Access or some other data base that will be adjusted to your special needs, but up to then, do some macro programming, and use some AS databses concurrently, each having its own stored searches, its own macros, its own tree building by macro, etc. - for your business, and not wanting to "program" in Access or other, AS is always the program to keep (using), its non-relational character being overcome in some respect by having several databases open at the same time, and having macros to switch between them, and to automatically search in any given AS file, depending on your needs at any given moment.
Thus, my advice is to multiply your AS files in order to keep them straight and to keep them not-too-big... But this implies some macro programming at the very least.
I know that AS is marketed in another way: They promote it for dumbos who do not do ANY programming whatsoever, and let me tell you, folks, that will never be possible in a reliable way with AS 7 at least since it's not automatically unstable for any purpose, but as soon as you want it to do for you what they pretend it'll do for you... well, in my opinion, you're lost.
Put all your gigabytes of data into one AS file, that's their advertizing. Has EVER ANYONE succeeded in putting several hundred MB's only into some AS file and then working heavily on this file, without any problems?
Keep AS as simple as possible, do some work around it, and for special tasks it's better than anything else on the market.
But then, we ALL ask one question, why did they never succeed to make it really stable at least, for normal file sizes at least, when, believing them, it could hold TERABYTES in a file? This is so gross.
Do what you want, folks, but don't tell you hadn't been perfectly advised beforehand; my posts here, and my 120 posts on the MI forum had been intended to give you some valuable information. Those who an't even able to read, why have you got a real computer, then?
Try the iPad instead, some of yours.
And again here in MI, since there have been intermediate posts:
Felix' a) same for UR, whereas in PB pdf's and other contents are searchable in the information manager - but this applies to scientists I suppose, in law, pdf's are not predominant. MI gives false search results for non-English characters at this moment, and even for single "normal" characters like the English "I"; hopefully, the search component will be replaced in 6.0; if not, we have a real problem; for the time being and in practical use, it's not as awful as it may appear from what I just said, but people who rely heavily on searching, should indeed try some typical searches in order to see if they can live with SOME false finds situations; they normally do not abound.
But let me add that 54 books with 300 to 1,300 pages each, from pdf, that asks for doubly commenting:
That's tremendous, old AS versions seems really stable as long as they only contain text, but what MB size are we speaking about? Let's say 50 books x 800 pages x 3,000 characters = 120 MB, right? So you see, ANY information manager can do this (I hope; MI and UR certainly do), and it's the absence of any graphics that helps enormously whenever importing in AS.
But then, if there's a scientist, with formulas (= graphics) and other illustrations, even in your pdf's, all this will be gone...
which is to say, whoever needs pdfs (and not only the extracted, and in the process mandatorily unformatted, text out of them) should search for an information manager (even if it's as crazy as PB indeed is) that treats pdf's as marvellously as does PB.
BTW, since a REAL toggle Tree-Text-Tree-Text... is not in the feature list for the 5.5 beta, I NEED this, as a strict minimum; having only the false toggle including the finds... and which, even when they are not displayed, often goes to the filter view / pane, in a completely unpredictable way, from the text and even from the tree itself (instead of going to the text then), I dare putting a reminder for this here, the actual unpredictability / bug being totally unacceptable, it has to be included in 5.5 - it drives me crazy, and drives me angry also.
Hi Marcus / Dr. Hanke,
I'm delighted that somebody proposes to read all recent posts, from mine alone, that'll be 129 or something, but then, there's valuable information in many of them, so your time won't be completely lost.
Searching for a practising lawyer must go on since for your canon law research and lecturing, you have (serious) needs being rather different from those of a lawyer working on completing cases from various pieces, my (comprehensive) development of those needs are waiting for optimization... but then, those needs are so badly met by MI (or any competitor) at this moment that it's not astonishing in any way that indeed no practising lawyer is using MI (or any competitor, or then, perhaps UR, but what will he do after some years of practise when UR's file limits are reached?).
You said something extremely poignant:
"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"
That's exactly what I'm desperately trying to tell folks here (and at AS's forum before): It's not really important if you pay 90 dollars or 900 dollars; it's important that the software makes you more productive an enhances your capabilities, instead of giving you headaches for interfering with any "natural" workflow you might need.
In my other post some days ago, I addressed some AS problems, especially their very good idea with trees-on-the-fly, AND their inability to see the gem quality of what they had / have in their hands with it - you currently refrain from this spectacular feature, by using an AS version about 8 years old... that says it all about AS's stability problems. (Read my post, there are other items addressed in it.)
And speaking of my AS post (copied hereunder), YOUR work, Marcus / Dr. Hanke, is exactly the work I WOULDN'T do in AS
(since AS's special goodies ain't that helpful for it indeed, and thus you find yourself with all the bugs and failings of AS (= e.g. that it (=your version) doesn't build any tree), without really profiting from its real smart features, and indeed you said that you didn't rely much on its special search capabilities)
but in any information manager (and how to do your footnotes and other in-file references, encoding them for PageMaker, InDesign or any other XPress, you know already, since you needed this special not-MS-Word-for-everything-user know-how for your thesis) -
but let's face it, YOUR special work is the kind that would profit most from UR's tremendous cloning feature (if you can restrain the global size of your work to 2 GB for some more years that is), but not so much from MI's multiple files search... and for its tagging, well, I've given my opinion in my AS post, but should append that MI and UR (and any other info manager) allow for in-text "tags", by searching for codes (MI in multiple files, UR in up to a 2 GB monster file, with 2,000 clones
) you put in your text (but attention, most codes in MI will not be indexed as such, I've found some code characters that ARE found though, in combination with further encodings, but of course, even a simple "xa12", "xb13" would be tremendously productive if used in a smart way)...Okay now, here's my AS post from this afternoon, and again, I'm not leaving if we can realize some real progress within a year or so:
http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10005
Fred
Joined: 25 Nov 2008
Total Posts: 28
Re: Is there a GOOD alternative to askSam?
Posted: 11-30-2010 10:40 AM
I'd like to add that in transferring your data to MI, you have this advantage: MI allows for PERFECT transferring of text and pictures into UR and other progs since there's perfect export (for formatted text and pictures) to another intermediate format, which is TreeTab, so you won't be stuck with MI.
Another advantage of MI and UR is the fact that pictures
(in the text, e.g. pictoral clippings by FastStone Capture which allows for your clipping only unformatted text into MI, UR or whatever, instead of whole web pages incl. tables but also unwanted ads / pictures and so on, which is to say, make a first selection when transferring data from the web, instead of downloading 100,000 web pages in full - for this, Surfulater or Webxxx (what is it called again, downloads into a proprietary MS Access database) would be good, and neither MI nor UR or any other, but again, it's a very bad idea to download web info by downloading web pages in full, except for perhaps 1 p.c. of those pages (which is possible in MI and UR)) - I wanted to say, download the url, text clippings (which you then selectively format in your target program...
- and if you need some tables or pictures, why not use FastStone Capture (which is very fast whereas the screenshot program "everybody" uses takes 10 times longer to capture parts of your screen, especially since you can set up FSC so that ONE KEY PRESSING does bring you the feature by which you select a rectangular part of the screen, by mouse drawing (= from top left to bottom right), and when you release the mouse key, the "picture" is immediately transferred to the clipboard, and thus you could use a macro which inserts this "picture" into your MI or UR text.
This way, after some years, you'll have neat archives in MI, UR or whatever information manager, instead of having a collection of raw data where 95 p.c. is garbage - but I am aware for a very long time now that I'm preaching to deaf ears in proning this, and thus, neither MI nor UR will be a very satisfying program... but then, AS isn't so good at this either if I'm not totally mistaken.
Anyway, when doing such exporting to any other program, here's another hint for you.
If I were you, I would NOT dive deep in the particularities of any other given program, since that will probably hinder any further export to other programs.
In English: MI is rather strong with tagging, so that's one of its current merits over UR and others... but if ever you have had enough of MI for any reason, as you're fed up with AS at this moment - late, in my opinion, but what do they say, hopes die last or something like that, yeah? -, the more you will have relied on MI's tagging feature, the more cumbersome will probably get any exporting business.
But I wanted to say, for the FSC and any pictures in the texts of MI and UR that those jpg's or whatever take only some bits and bytes, whereas in AS they take a lot of them (like they take in MS Works or MS Word - up to 2003 at least, I don't know Word's more recent versions).
Thus, storing many pictures into MI or UR texts will be without problem... except for the fact that currently at least, MI, but not UR, does (if you want it to do) searches on more than one loaded file, allowing for cutting up big files into more malleable ones, whereas in UR you have a lot of TREMENDOUS functions (= the best cloning feature I've seen anywhere) to work within ONE file... but if this one file gets too big, you will LOSE those advantages, no more searching in your whole stuff at once, but manually, one file after another, and also, any cloning of / into those parts of your UR file that you will then cut off into another file will be de-synched, i.e. become a normal "copy" of your (perhaps hundreds of formerly synched) item(s), which is to say:
In UR, you are well advised to cut your data collection into parts that will be more or less stable from beginning to end, since the cloning feature is so tremendously good that you will certainly not do without it, but then you'll run into terrible problems if ever you (must) cut a UR file into two or more (for having too many pictures there for example).
But then, it's possible that UR will sometime allow not only for 2 GB files, but for files that are much bigger that this; e.g., that's what TreePad even allows for today (in the most expensive version) - but TP is, in any other respect, a little bit underwhelming.
One thing seems to be sure: No program of this kind of my knowledge - and I hope to know them all - does allow for cloning over more than one file, and worse, no programs really seems to envision this feature. I've been begging at the MI forum for 5 months now, but frankly, I do NOT have the impression that its developer, let alone the majority of its user base - and most MI users are DUMB users, like in AS, whereas UR user certainly have a higher IQ on average -, has / have got the importance (also on a financial level, that is) of such a feature, since cloning (and not searching alone) between more than one file at any given moment, and synching all this at all time of course, would make any such an information management system SCALEABLE onto corporate use, and this way, the first such program that will offer it, will be not a "GOOD alternative to AS" but will be the KILLER application even if there's not much more to it than this.
(It's interesting to see that PB, PersonalBrain, does NOT offer anything like this, perhaps in order to not gnag into the corporation market of TheBrain, where prices seem to start at big Mercedes Benz limousines it seems - they don't even give prices but to bona fide would-be corporate customers, which is a very bad sign. Thus, any program under 1,000 dollars (plus dollars for the third, fourth... comp in the net) allowing for real multi-file group working, will sell by thousands and thousands, perhaps by millions - but as said, I seem to be the only one to see this at this point of time, so don't count on it.)
Two people seem to have left us without giving further notice, Flo (which is a great loss for this "community" where giving and taking were so unevenly distributed if I may say), and sovi-James-Bond. Both of them, in their times, insisted on the fact that in some respects, AS was / is without competitor (known by us), and they were and are right.
Thus, my advice is this:
Go to MI or UR or any other information manager that has some basic features AND that will allow for exporting without too much fuss later on if you wish so, but with your texts (= with tables and other pictures as pictures in the texts), AND without too much relying on the special features of any such given program, thus leave alone tagging in MI and cloning in UR, since any exporting will be impossible if in MI you'll have 2,000 tags or in UR 2,000 clones (including sub-items of cloned items, the strength of UR).
Cloning in MI is underwhelming, as is tagging in UR, so you won't risk to use them extensively, for the time being, but then, since I said, leave alone the strengths of the two programs, tagging in MI and cloning in UR, well, that will largely widen your choice, to any other such information manager of your liking; thus, even TreePad won't be a bad choice at all in the end.
But I prefer MI for the time being, since I always have some hope that its developer will at least put into action SOME of the features I've been begging for there, and if he does, I'll be quite "happy" with it - well, I'll be happy as soon as I'll have multi-file cloning, from anybody...
In the meantime, perfect cloning but only within any ONE file being UR's (big) advantage over MI and others, where's UR's any other advantage when you refrain from using its cloning feature? Well, there isn't any, as I see it. At this time, UR is less ugly than MI is, but MI's developer has promised some progress... but then, when in MI's forum I do a thread, "Graphical Considerations", only a handful of MI users were interested in reading those considerations, and certainly, its developer will think, well, if my users are happy with what they've got, why giving them something less ugly then? Just because Fred's begging for it? Restrain!
So, if you come to MI, it would be because Fred's begging there, or has been - 5 months is enough, d'après Fred -, and because Felix is there, too... but for how long?
Most of my and Felix' staying there will depend on MI 5.5 and, much more important, MI 6.0. I won't change my program unless I'll be unhappy with 6.0, but if 6.0 shows real progress, I'll help in any way there to make more progress possible; in a year or so, we'll know.
For your data that needs AS' special features, STAY WITH AS!
All those information managers do NOT have those special features, and they perhaps will never have 'em, to that extent. But it's a big, big mistake to put your TEXTS / pictures into AS, as it would be a big, big mistake to put your data in any other program (of the given information managers kind of course, real databases are something other and would be a real alternative, that goes without saying), data that needs
formalized analysis.
But then, texts, etc. don't; data databases do.
Thus, it would be foolish to export your AS goods databases or your AS customer databases or your AS sales / contacts databses
into any information management program, be it MI, UR, PB or any of the other about 80 programs of this kind I happen to know more or less well: Stay with AS as long as possible, even by buying old comps running Windows XP / 7 32-bit if necessary, but do not change for something less good than AS is for those special purposes. If change is necessary, pay somebody to do the transfer to Access or some other data base that will be adjusted to your special needs, but up to then, do some macro programming, and use some AS databses concurrently, each having its own stored searches, its own macros, its own tree building by macro, etc. - for your business, and not wanting to "program" in Access or other, AS is always the program to keep (using), its non-relational character being overcome in some respect by having several databases open at the same time, and having macros to switch between them, and to automatically search in any given AS file, depending on your needs at any given moment.
Thus, my advice is to multiply your AS files in order to keep them straight and to keep them not-too-big... But this implies some macro programming at the very least.
I know that AS is marketed in another way: They promote it for dumbos who do not do ANY programming whatsoever, and let me tell you, folks, that will never be possible in a reliable way with AS 7 at least since it's not automatically unstable for any purpose, but as soon as you want it to do for you what they pretend it'll do for you... well, in my opinion, you're lost.
Put all your gigabytes of data into one AS file, that's their advertizing. Has EVER ANYONE succeeded in putting several hundred MB's only into some AS file and then working heavily on this file, without any problems?
Keep AS as simple as possible, do some work around it, and for special tasks it's better than anything else on the market.
But then, we ALL ask one question, why did they never succeed to make it really stable at least, for normal file sizes at least, when, believing them, it could hold TERABYTES in a file? This is so gross.
Do what you want, folks, but don't tell you hadn't been perfectly advised beforehand; my posts here, and my 120 posts on the MI forum had been intended to give you some valuable information. Those who an't even able to read, why have you got a real computer, then?
Try the iPad instead, some of yours.
And again here in MI, since there have been intermediate posts:
Felix' a) same for UR, whereas in PB pdf's and other contents are searchable in the information manager - but this applies to scientists I suppose, in law, pdf's are not predominant. MI gives false search results for non-English characters at this moment, and even for single "normal" characters like the English "I"; hopefully, the search component will be replaced in 6.0; if not, we have a real problem; for the time being and in practical use, it's not as awful as it may appear from what I just said, but people who rely heavily on searching, should indeed try some typical searches in order to see if they can live with SOME false finds situations; they normally do not abound.
But let me add that 54 books with 300 to 1,300 pages each, from pdf, that asks for doubly commenting:
That's tremendous, old AS versions seems really stable as long as they only contain text, but what MB size are we speaking about? Let's say 50 books x 800 pages x 3,000 characters = 120 MB, right? So you see, ANY information manager can do this (I hope; MI and UR certainly do), and it's the absence of any graphics that helps enormously whenever importing in AS.
But then, if there's a scientist, with formulas (= graphics) and other illustrations, even in your pdf's, all this will be gone...
which is to say, whoever needs pdfs (and not only the extracted, and in the process mandatorily unformatted, text out of them) should search for an information manager (even if it's as crazy as PB indeed is) that treats pdf's as marvellously as does PB.
Marcus,
I used AskSam briefly during the early nineties, though I'm afraid I can't remember it well enough to offer any detailed advice on how to achieve the same results in MyInfo. But here are a few thoughts about using MI for academic writing.
First, I maintain a very large bibliography of all my sources for various projects in a separate topic (which is MI-speak for a file). I put each source in a separate document (i.e., note): most of these are books and articles, but I also list websites of interest here. For this topic, I have created two attributes: "Source" and "Done." When I want to do a search, it often takes a form like this:
tag:XXXXX [any subject or project] custom:LC [i.e., the source of the book or article is the Library of Congress] custom:no [i.e., the item is not yet "done," because I haven't looked at it to take notes]
I can of course add (or subtract) words or phrases to narrow down the search.
The advantage of putting all potential references in a single document is that you may well want to use some of these books or articles in more than one project. In that case you simply add the appropriate tags.
As for the actual note-taking, my experience suggests that it's fairly easy to create all the preliminary structuring and outlining in MI for something short like an article or talk. But for a book or some other long text, I find the the great mass of notes can become confusing. A technique that I have been experimenting with is to do all my note-taking in one topic but also create an outline of the book in a second topic, with all of the elements in the outline linked to elements of the first topic. This is entirely feasible, because MI allows you to create links to particular paragraphs. And of course it also permits you to have two or more topics open side by side on the screen.
I hope this will be helpful to you in contemplating a possible switch to MI.
I used AskSam briefly during the early nineties, though I'm afraid I can't remember it well enough to offer any detailed advice on how to achieve the same results in MyInfo. But here are a few thoughts about using MI for academic writing.
First, I maintain a very large bibliography of all my sources for various projects in a separate topic (which is MI-speak for a file). I put each source in a separate document (i.e., note): most of these are books and articles, but I also list websites of interest here. For this topic, I have created two attributes: "Source" and "Done." When I want to do a search, it often takes a form like this:
tag:XXXXX [any subject or project] custom:LC [i.e., the source of the book or article is the Library of Congress] custom:no [i.e., the item is not yet "done," because I haven't looked at it to take notes]
I can of course add (or subtract) words or phrases to narrow down the search.
The advantage of putting all potential references in a single document is that you may well want to use some of these books or articles in more than one project. In that case you simply add the appropriate tags.
As for the actual note-taking, my experience suggests that it's fairly easy to create all the preliminary structuring and outlining in MI for something short like an article or talk. But for a book or some other long text, I find the the great mass of notes can become confusing. A technique that I have been experimenting with is to do all my note-taking in one topic but also create an outline of the book in a second topic, with all of the elements in the outline linked to elements of the first topic. This is entirely feasible, because MI allows you to create links to particular paragraphs. And of course it also permits you to have two or more topics open side by side on the screen.
I hope this will be helpful to you in contemplating a possible switch to MI.
Bill
mfelix, yes, indexing of the embedded files is in the todo list for the next major versions. As for going from hit to hit in the search results, this maybe available even for MyInfo 5.50 final.
Fred, there will be direct toggle between tree and text shortcuts in 5.50. Not all little enchantments are listed the thread.
Fred, there will be direct toggle between tree and text shortcuts in 5.50. Not all little enchantments are listed the thread.
First of all, thanks for the welcome - and the study material offered by your postFred wrote:
But let me add that 54 books with 300 to 1,300 pages each, from pdf, that asks for doubly commenting:
That's tremendous, old AS versions seems really stable as long as they only contain text, but what MB size are we speaking about? Let's say 50 books x 800 pages x 3,000 characters = 120 MB, right? So you see, ANY information manager can do this (I hope; MI and UR certainly do), and it's the absence of any graphics that helps enormously whenever importing in AS.
. You are of course right: the file with the books imported is not too large. In fact, it has only about 50 Megabytes (I found the old AS 5.1 version to be much more efficient in keeping file sizes small than the 7.0 version I tried to use). There is only text, and some tables, but no pictures, graphics, symbols etc. The footnotes were imported as body text, but for the searches, this is not a big problem. Theoretically, it would have been possible to copy the full text from the PDF into the clipboard, and into an AS document from there. However, what is a PDF import filter problem, proved to be invaluable: The page numbers were imported as paragraphs in the body text as well. Now this permits me to easily find the matching passage in the real book, or to save time when writing the appropriate quotation in my footnote reference.My largest AS file is also the one causing most trouble: Since years, I saved my e-mails into an AS file, including the converted attachments (texts from WORD and PDF): 780 Megabytes, 52,000 documents. However, since three years, any effort to import the additional mails collected since then, resulted in only one or two additional records made; apparently, I have reached some kind of sonic barrier of AS. In fact, this problem was the only reason why I purchased AS 7.0, but whenever I tried to import the mails there, the program crashes after exactly 190 imported messages (I still use Eudora, mainly because of my hope to get the saved messages and their text attachments into a searchable database somehow), so I gave up. Privately, I started to use Thunderbird, but have not yet tried to import its messages into AS 7. I thought I'd rather wait for a more stable version, haha ....
What about E-Mail import into MI?
Thanks for your hints, I can certainly use them! Especially the tag thing is cool. In AS, I had to add other, earlier project files to the search environment manually. So I could use that other data, but the search would become very slow. Additionally, I could not limit the search to specific records, AS would always use the full files. Thus, I think the tagging function of MI could come in handy.wsp wrote: As for the actual note-taking, my experience suggests that it's fairly easy to create all the preliminary structuring and outlining in MI for something short like an article or talk. But for a book or some other long text, I find the the great mass of notes can become confusing. A technique that I have been experimenting with is to do all my note-taking in one topic but also create an outline of the book in a second topic, with all of the elements in the outline linked to elements of the first topic. This is entirely feasible, because MI allows you to create links to particular paragraphs. And of course it also permits you to have two or more topics open side by side on the screen.
Regarding book abstracts for further reference: I know the problem. In the past, I bypassed it by first defining fields for the most important bibliographic data: Author, (short) title, year, journal title (for articles in journals and festschrifts - ???? - I did not know that the German word had been adopted into the English academic language. What is the plural then? festschriften, festschrifts??), and page. Then follows the abstract, containing all the words I would later use for searching. Here, for example, the German spelling reform of the past years is still causing trouble, when I forget that today's "ss" often was "ß" in the past, besides many other changes.
Since the abstract of a book is rather long, and books normally contain many paragraphs with interesting opinions on different issues, I found it best to open a new record/document (together with all aforementioned fields) for every substantial "issue". This permitted to have the relevant page reference in the appropriate field at top. Later, when searching for all opinions on a specific issue, I could produce a report, immediately showing the page numbers of this specific passages.
Regards,
Marcus
Marcus, you already have had a lot to read, but I will nevertheless go thru the remaining issues.
b) own structured lists with long text: what you know by now is that MI's search caps are not comparable with askSam's. In addition there is no report generator and there is no "Show" command that lets you output lines etc before an after a hit. There's a reason why we got stuck with askSam for all those years after all....
c) own structured lists with pull-down menus: MI has custom fields that you can populate with values just like askSam's pick lists. Generating a report is another thing: I'm pretty sure you could create the query as a filter in MyInfo and then you could export the filtered documents either to a single file (with page breaks) or (in the professional version) export it to a csv file. You wolud have to check for yourself whether this is enough.
Regarding mail import: all my mails get imported into askSam, but I use several databases (5 years in one file). The attachments are not in the ask file. I save them to disk (done automatically by the email client) and include a the name of the attachment only in askSam.
The import plugin I'm working on will allow me to import the mails as well. I have, however, to export the mails from my email client first.
b) own structured lists with long text: what you know by now is that MI's search caps are not comparable with askSam's. In addition there is no report generator and there is no "Show" command that lets you output lines etc before an after a hit. There's a reason why we got stuck with askSam for all those years after all....
c) own structured lists with pull-down menus: MI has custom fields that you can populate with values just like askSam's pick lists. Generating a report is another thing: I'm pretty sure you could create the query as a filter in MyInfo and then you could export the filtered documents either to a single file (with page breaks) or (in the professional version) export it to a csv file. You wolud have to check for yourself whether this is enough.
Regarding mail import: all my mails get imported into askSam, but I use several databases (5 years in one file). The attachments are not in the ask file. I save them to disk (done automatically by the email client) and include a the name of the attachment only in askSam.
The import plugin I'm working on will allow me to import the mails as well. I have, however, to export the mails from my email client first.