MI 6.06 and other goodies (or not)

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Fred
Posts: 216
Joined: Wed Jun 23, 2010 8:07 pm

MI 6.06 and other goodies (or not)

Post by Fred »

Please allow for some remarks upon 6.06.

I bought 5.07, and afterwards, every new version wasn't but a time-limited beta, before the paying upgrade to 6, so I always use 5.07, in spite of its looks.

Now, one year after release of 6, a lot of FRESHLY introduced bugs have been exterminated up to 6.06, but I wonder why they came in in the first place.

Some bugs remain in 6.06, e.g. if you select a tag in the tag pane, you'll get the filter pane displayed, and there, you select any item, the title line above the item's text/content will remain the one that had been displayed before, from selection within the tree. Incredible that within almost a full year, no MI user has mentioned this.

The overall graphical aspect of 6.06 is MUCH better than that of my 5.07, but sloppy screen design can always be found: On a standard 1280x1024 screen, the top border of the title ribbon above the text/content is 1 or 2 pixels higher than the corresponding ribbon ('s right corner) above the tree pane, to its left.

As said a year ago, I'm deeply disappointed by the project function since it's much too basic and asks for much too many manual interventions upon even minor file changes/renames, let alone the fact that it's not visible when working on your projects.

Some functions are implemented in a way no real user would need them: They're realized from a technical encoding view, without the programmer making any use of the function himself. GoLastViewedDoc/Topic is very nice to have (and was asked for by me) but if you toggle between two docs, it's for editing their texts, hence and forth, not to land within the tree each time, then having to press F8 additionally in order to get back in the corresponding text. And I don't mention the facts that there isn't a real toggle but back and forth commands instead, and that there's no visible list of these items/topics. (I wrote in length about these a year ago.)

As developed in length by me in 2010, the tag pane should not only be accessible instead of the filter pane, but in addition, concurrently to the latter, i.e. in the attributes pane, upon request (instead of the attributes that is, right as the search results). This goes without (me) saying (it) but isn't too easy to implement for components reason perhaps, and thus it's not done.

It goes without saying that the tags pane should be processable not only with mouse clicks, but also with arrow keys and then with the Enter key... and if designed in a really smart way, there should be alternative trigger commands, one for focus changing to the filter pane, the other one with focus remaining within the tags pane... and key assignments should allow for shifting focus to every such pane of course.

And it's clear as day that tags should be organizable into trees, as in EverNote, Citavi, etc.

One feature which is offered nowhere to my knowledge (except in the on-the-fly trees of askSam): Alternative trees, i.e. you could have the "normal" tree, built up manually, and several trees depending on your choices upon which attributes/tags an alternative tree should be built up (refer to askSam's feature for better understanding), with the original tree to be restored upon request - in other words, not only the flat "filtering" currently available in MI, but filtering building up a (complete or partial) tree on its own.

Hoisting is very fine even if I don't know how a database of 100k items in MI will behave, hoisted or not. For my bulk of files, I went back to ActionOutline, in which I currently have got about 400 files/topics, and being dissecting into more numbers. As soon as you've got 100k items, that makes perfectly sense, provided you've got a really good pm sytem above your files, much more sophisticated than MI's rudimentary workspace system. Not getting any such super-system from anywhere, I've got an additional system, not perfectly integrated but perfectly superposed upon my AO file system... and always visible, and presenting, at any time, groups of files I need, and ONLY them upon request. I lengthyly developed such an INTEGRATED superposed "level zero" above the tree(s) here in this forum in 2010, to no avail whatsoever, so I tried UltraRecall for some months, but got totally lost within my 100k of items in ONE file there, UR's fine hoisting notwithstanding, and so I went back to a most basic tree system, AO, but upped it with the most sophisticated supersystem imaginable... which normally would have been to be WITHIN a perfect outliner / information management software I couldn't get - I would have been willing to spend $ 1,000 for such an integrated solution, but developers simply don't do them, so I made the jump back to AO PLUS the pm system add-on.

Similar remarks for MI's now much better cloning feature: Cloning an item took (/ would take me) minutes with 5.07; the same cloning of an item just takes several seconds now with 6.06; I had praised the UR cloning feature, and I'm pleased this has indeed be cloned here, use-wise. But then, for some time now, I've realized that "cloning" is better made on a "cluster" level, and that's why I cut up my information into hundreds of different files now, making them available in whichever project I'm working on, thus this "referential cloning" is done in my super-system, not within the files.

On the other hand, for SOME files, there is indeed a need for "cloning", but then, when you've got 1 or 2 or 3 k of prospects and customers you want to sort geographically, by interests, by (possible) value, etc., etc. - now that even MI allows for "instant cloning", is submitting every such 3k items under 4 or 5 different sub-trees a good idea? No, it would be a joke, and nobody tries to do so for even several hundred items to be classified by just 2 or 3 aspects/attributes.

Thus the tremendous interest of better tagging (alternative trees, better handling of all the tagging functionality). In fact, "cloning" is done best as explained above, on the superposed pm level, not here and there in the depths - that's my opinion. (Remember I had UR's tremendous cloning functionality at my disposal during those months - indeed UR's spectacular feature, but then there's a lot of underwhelming stuff around it, then - and understand I did NOT see any real usefulness in it... and I tried hard! Tagging is the way to do psychological analytical work it seems to be, so MI's fine for that: Have a chronological tree, then do heavy tagging (and not cloning) for subjects, themes, relationships, whatever - but of course, MI would be of much more usefulness yet if its tag handling - including presentation of pre-fetched tag lists, in order to avoid to do similar but slightly different tags, the problem has been discussed already but not yet attacked yet - was a lot more sophisticated (and to begin with the switch of the tag pane to the attributes pane).

MI's caption is fine without the ugly "Milenix" part, I obviously made myself heard here. Milenix' site is PURE GRAPHIC JOY: my warmest congratulations! (But when you click on these elegant symbols, you do NOT get additional information yet, so there's always room for improvement.)

Please forgive me if I didn't see more "things", I only tried 6.06 for 30 or 40 minutes (no, that's not a joke). So I've got my main system, with 400 (and more) AO files superposed by a pm system... and I use (at this time) MI 5.07 with just THREE but special files in which I need tagging (but not cloning), impossible to do within AO. BTW, my system is doubly scaleable, i.e. it works perfectly on bad netbooks (try this with a 100k items UR database...), and on the other hand, you can use such a system in a 5k seats corporate architecture (try this with a UR database, again...). It goes without saying that I could perfectly replace AO with MI in my system, getting MI's search facilities which I miss in AO. But of course, within my pm compound, there's a search tool that gives me all results within their context. It's far from being as handy as MI's integrated search function, but then, my pm system is so well organized now that I do about ONE trans-file search a day, or even less: There simply isn't any need for searching when every info is right there at your fingertips.

I've always been in search for excellence; to my deep regret, I didn't find that in MI's programming efforts, but then, I neither found it in UR (which has been a BIG disappointment in every respect; let me give you just one example, I could bring dozens: They've got a function that flattens out the text of several items into one pane. Oh, very good, you think, it's only (?) Citavi (but look at Citavi's text editing pane!) and Evernote (but they now cut up those snippets now, something they didn't do in the past) that do that, and that's sooo handy! (In AO/MI, I do export that way, in order to have such a view.) But then, where (in UR) are the item's titles, in between? They're missing! Ok, so you inform the developer... who doesn't even give you an answer, let alone an explanation: He got some hours to implement some new function, had a look at the contenders, thought, oh may, that would be nice, did it... but left out the important part: so what: users are cattle: we're speaking of good-enough-quality here, even if such a thing is completely useless... As said, dozens of such examples could be given. BTW: I had thought MI's printing/exporting functions were bad (since AO's corresponding functions are outstanding) - now compare with UR, you won't believe your eyes...), let alone minor contenders, so I had to design my own compound. As for excellence, I've said, and have developed, it here, in the summer of 2010, right at the beginning of my posting here: MI's outstanding feature is its tagging system, and (as said then already): It's in your utmost interest, then, to optimize that tagging system. Build up on your strengths.

(Forget Evernote, they're going from bad to worse, I don't have the slightest idea what they're doing with all their money. Oh yeah, the cloud. But their tagging system is really basic, and that's a shame, considering they do it in lieu of outlining, not on top of it...)
wsp
Posts: 518
Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 8:54 am
Location: Washington, DC

Post by wsp »

Fred, thanks for enlivening this otherwise rather quiet forum.

I just want to respond to your remark about tags in MyInfo. I find MI's system of tagging fairly good, but it's frustratingly invisible. I need to be able to see my tags more easily -- perhaps something like the tags in Evernote?

Incidentally, like you, I find Evernote a mystifying company. I've been using EN since it was a Windows-only program, and I am constantly baffled by the direction its development. Instead of announcing fashionable things like meal-recording software, I wish they would just improve their editor. But then what do I know? EN is conquering the world at the moment.
Bill
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