For the sake of being fare to Kinook and its users (and I'm one of them), I can certainly mention what UR is lacking from a 'hard-core research' perspective. First things first, I have and will always be recommending UR to other users when I see that it does address their information management issues. Here is an example I just wrote recently
http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/...topic=2362.500
I consider my self a power researcher. I spend 10 hours a day or more writing research papers and articles on different issues. I generate 3-5 papers a week. Once I'm done with data gathering, I have may be 8 pdfs, 20 web articles, 3-5 docs, 2 ppt, 30-50 emails. My job is to put all this data together in one final paper.
This process relies heavily on 5 main efficiencies ...
1- ability to capture content
2- ability to save and organize content
3- ability to compose content.
4- Ability to compare and contrast content
5- ability to publish it
Please note that the objective here is to come up with one final document that addresses issue at hand based on all gathered content. I say this because the mere fact that I can create tree branch containing everything I captured is not the goal in-of-itself, rather a step in towards the final goad.
UR does an excellent job in 1 and 2. Its capturing and organization facilities are the best I have see (I saw at least 20 others). I enjoy working the UR for this very same reason.
UR, however, falls short on 3 and 4. A lot of users probably need not proceed to these steps. They consider their ability to capture content and organize it the end of the story and they're happy with that. This is why we can both talk about same thing but sound as if each one is on a different wave length.
The ability to compose content is severely lacking in UR. Imagine having to deliver a document that is 10 pages long. How can you do that with such limited editing features in UR. Not being able to do style formats, indentation at minimum is restricting. I brought this issue to kinook several times. A quick forum search will show you this effort. Furthermore, UR does not provide an efficient way for us to edit web pages inline (as does many other products). This is very important for my work as it allows me to study web content and highlight and annotate content.
Another feature I find lacking is the ability to concatenate content. In its latest release, UR implement info item merge feature which is great. As much as I needed it, the implementation proved it cumbersome to use. The fact that I have to go the option panel to turn it off and on is absolutely fatiguing. I want to concatenate content all the time and I also want to do multi-selection to move and organize pretty often. If I want to reorg, I do not want UR to merge content, there is no way to do this other other turning it on and off. I have no idea why is it so difficult to simply provide a right click menu item to 'merge selected' vs having to bury it deep in the options dialogue and having to go there so often.
The ability to compare and contrast content is another problem with UR. So often, I have to put 2,3,5 docs next to each other in one view so I can tell how a graph looks like, or how each content solves a particular problem differently, or how each content image compares. There is not easy way (or even a way) to do this in UR. You can go as far as using tabs which you're advised to keep to a minimum prevent instabilities. Other products allow you to tile your info item content pages as you like. You can pin a particular one or more, can generate a copy of it for read-only and many other facilities.
Believe me, I tried and spent hours to work around these issues and found some ways. But all, even though sounded workable in theory, proved to be impractical and short-lived at best.
Initially I thought I can use UR for this kind of work and soon I realized It just won't work. However, its elegance, capturing and organization facilities are so attractive to resist. I just love working with it during the day. So I kept it to manage my tasks and some minor editing work. For every thing else, I use a more powerful product.