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Old 11-25-2004, 07:30 PM
srdiamond srdiamond is online now
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Join Date: 11-23-2004
Location: Los Angeles
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Re: Re: Re: Why Ultra Recall is so great!

Quote:
Originally posted by bkonia

* ADM - The developer claims that ADM will "change the world," but this program is a complete mess. It has a hideous user interface and I tried on several occasisions to figure it out without much success. It's one of those programs that has tons of features, but the design is so poorly organized that it's pretty much unusable. … One other point I'd like to make is that it's easy to add features to any application. However, if the fundamental design of the application is not conducive to an easy, intuitive workflow, then all the features in the world won't make it better. So far I've submitted over 20 features requests to the developers of Ultra Recall, but even if they didn't do a single one of them, I'd still be satisfied with the existing functionality.
ADM tries to unify the brainstorming, information gathering, and even the writing phase of a project. People differ on whether this ambition is best viewed as bold or as grandiose. Maybe it's encouraging that some veteran's say the DOS program GrandView had already once achieved this.

So far the price of unification is inferiority to the top products design for a single purpose. As someone else mentioned, BrainStorm is a lot better for brainstorming; I would say that UR and Idea! are clearly better for data gathering. If you want a unified approach, however, it may be the only product on offer for Windows. And the outliner is very powerful, probably the most powerful Windows outliner today. The problem is it isn't very ergonomic, although it's not bad for simple brainstorming. Pure outlining, unfortunately, is more about ergonomics than anything else. Not only BrainStorm but NoteMap does better.

What I most miss in UR is the ability to outline within a note. ADM doesn't have this either, but it's outlining is sufficiently robust that the outline pane can be used for notetaking purposes. In Windows today only MS OneNote gives you outlining within notes, but then, it lacks outlining of notes, a pretty basic shortcoming.

Just as writers have different styles, that make some products more suitable for some or make flexible products suitable for all [is there a division of schools of thought on this question?] so developers have different ways of organizing the development process. Or so it seems to me, a non-programmer. I don't think it is necessarily illegitimate to first proliferate features and then figure out how they are best organized. This seems to have been Microsoft's style, particularly in the development of WinWord and MacWord. It encountered a lot of criticism in the first phase, but the consensus today is that Word has become a pretty good product. The interface was refined later rather than first. To me--again a non-programmer--this makes some sense, because the optimal interface will be a function of the feature set, not the other way around.

But you need to have some confidence in the developer--a lot of confidence--to buy into a product on the implied promise that it will eventually become ergonomic. It is easier to trust a company like Kinook, which doesn't release its product unless it has matured significantly both in feature set and interface.

Last edited by srdiamond; 11-25-2004 at 07:42 PM.
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