UR vs OneNote
 

It appears a product similar to Ultra Recall, that's, OneNote.
Has anyone compare the two products? Are there any OneNote features not available in UR?

UR's auto keywording and rapid search are still the best on the market.

Armstrong

I own OneNote. Before I came across UltraRecall, I used it a lot. But it doesn't support any kind of real nesting, and it's interface is clunky compared to URP.

That said, it is a very good product, its ability to handle graphics is superb, it's search capability is also very good. If I didn't have URP4, I might very well be using OneNote.

- Bal

I have not used Onenote but I have been beta testing Zoot 6. It will have both POP3 and IMAP mail sync plus it has built in RSS handling. I like the smart folders. Define rules for a folder and database items automatcally go to that folder. That's a great feature for parsing a flood of inbox traffic. This concept would be a huge benefit to ultrarecall.

When I looked at OneNote I found it lacked the organisational features of UR, eg., linking items, stored searches where you can define the columns you want, user-defined attributes, etc.

I'm a former Zoot user and that's the feature I miss most. Zoot's search is easier to use than UR's also.

I used Onenote for a time too, and while there were many things I liked about it, it stopped working for me when notebooks grew beyond a certain size. I found it difficult to move things around and keep them organized.

I like the way UltraRecall integrates with the file system. With Onenote you have to print a PDF to a page or store it as an attachment, while with UR you can open it inside the program. UR also preserves Web page formatting better than Onenote. Onenote irritated me the way it would lose the spacing between paragraphs when you copied and pasted a Web page, for example.

lascasas,
I'm surprised by your assessment of OneNote. Most products are wrong in focusing only on a narrow set of features. Like MindManager, the overall design (structure) of OneNote looks visually attractive but impractical. It takes a long time to learn.
On the other hand, UR covers a comprehensive set of features needed by information users. For example, it includes an intuitive data explorer, which at least allows some organization of data, even though UR never requires any organization, data types, structures,...etc.
UR's speed to locate information is definitely the fastest. I don't know any other products could rival UR's speed.
Just my 2 cents.
Armstrong

Completely different products with different intended uses, IMO.

OneNote is primarily for clipping information from just about anywhere - web or any other info that happens to be on your screen. It is also for creating notes.

Nice ability to drag and drop content to and from anywhere on a page.

I don't like the organization in OneNote. Left side of UI has tabs representing "Notebooks", while tabs across the top of the UI represent "Sections" of each notebook.

Tagging is limited to assigning provided icons/categories to a note. You cannot add your own icons and frankly, the ones they provide are pretty useless. You can supposedly rename categories to your liking - and I have done that several times only to have them revert inexplicably to the original categories. Causing all my added ones to be lost of course.

Organizational strength is supposed to be extremely quick "as-you-type" searching, but that is available only if you install Windows Desktop Search (WDS). Of course WDS comes with Vista but I have had many problems with it on XP-Pro and therefore have uninstalled it. OneNote will not allow any other search engine to replace WDS so if you do not use it you can only search very slowly and not "as-you-type".

Key feature: You can search for text within images, but that only works well using WDS. Doesn't work well at all using any other search facility.

I still use OneNote sparingly, only for web clipping of small areas and for jotting down info quickly into tables. I don't have much use for it otherwise.

Jim

Hi Jim,
FYI, dtSearch (www.dtsearch.com) can search the contents in OneNote.
Armstrong

Really? Including text within images? That's pretty impressive.

Then again, at $199 (Yikes!) for dtsearch it better include text within images!! Sorry but that's too rich for my blood for a desktop search program.

Thanks!

Jim

No, dtSearch can't find text in images. Sorry, I didn't mention it. But there's a similarity between UR and dtSearch in one respect--auto keywording. BTW, it can also find text in unencrypted URDs.

On the other hand, I wasn't aware that OneNote can find text in images. I tried OneNote a long time ago and gave it up for one reason--its search is too slow.

Armstrong

It is claimed that searching OneNote 2007 with Windows Desktop Search is very quick, though I didn't see that. Plus I couldn't stand to keep WDS on my machine - it indexes whenever it feels like, uses obscene amounts of CPU resources when it does, and it is set up as an auto-restarting service so you cannot easily shut it down.

Jim