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#1
03-29-2012, 08:37 AM
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Don't panic, I wasn't asking for CURRENT UR's price increase to 1,200 dollars!
Sorry for not having made it clear by the usual means, \irony off or something, that I switched from irony to serious argumentation within the original article. Problem of this market is, there isn't enough money in all this, so developers do their work very badly (many examples elsewhere), or, in the case of UR, as a second task, as a pastime, whilst doing serious work with their main offering, and so, individual people longing for using real good IM sw, must live with sub-optimal solutions forever. Hence my idea that there MIGHT be room for a developer who says, it'll be 1,000 bucks now, but I'll do it really good, no more endless longing for even basic functionality. I myself was begging for a better editor within UR here, then realized kinook doesn't want to spend the (tiny) money of such a component, and at the end of the day, it's not the editor alone, it's also the db. Compare with MyInfo (which has other faults UR doesn't have, no misunderstandig here): There, you can edit an item, then go to another item, go to a third one, back to any of the beforementioned: It's good FLOW of work, not hindered by response times of your system. Perhaps with your comps, even UR works smoothly then, but on my (not top-notch) systems, UR makes me wait for some seconds between these above-mentioned switchings, and THAT was, in the end, the real reason I finally left: For text processing, moving bits of texts, or copying them, or doing some minor editing here, adding a word there, it's simply not the right program because of those response times, for me, whilst MyInfo does it without problems - replacing the gratis editor by a paid one, in UR, would NOT resolve the problem that for writers (of any kind of output and) with "old" comps, UR is not the right sw. I think many of these marketing probs of outliners are caused by the fact that most corps (where the money is, and where probs are resolved by spending the money it takes) go to collaboration sw anyway, whilst those many, many tiny mom-and-pop entities, 1-man, 1-man-with-part-time-secretary, 3-people, whatever in this range, do with what they get, and didn't see yet that for the value of a weekend-trip, they'd get "incredibly better", potentially. Hence, the near-impossibility for "small" developers to address that sleeping market, but as soon as one developing corp decided to do some serious offering, and put some marketing money into, and put small collaboration functionality within it, incl. interaction with MS Outlook and so on, just for 1 to 5 users, with 1 user paying 1 grand, up to 5 paying 2 grand and a half, it would be a total success - always given that there would be real enhancement of the work flow of such 1-5 head entities, incl. IM, good text editing features, some CRM, and so on. Whilst today, they are file managers out there that are more expensive than e.g. UR Prof. is (which, for the innumerable quirks in UR is quite ok, actually). Let's face it, a lawyer takes 250 bucks the hour, many take more - why should he be entitled to work with an integrated sw system that he values at 20 minutes of his time? And indeed, he doesn't find any such a system, except for more or less mediocre offerings, UR being one of the best of these. Even if it's a cheap lawyer, "only" charging 150 bucks the hour, why shouldn't he work ONE WHOLE DAY for paying his near-perfect IM system that he gets perfectly all his work done 365 days in a year? Even for a writer my calculation would be right: Many of them are (well) paid from some university or do have got a main job for their living, so why not pay 1 grand upfront = 3 bucks a day, for the first year, and then 500 bucks a year, or any second year, for top-notch updating? "Outlining peple", i.e. 1- to several-heads entities needing / working with IM systems, do want to pay less for that system than they pay for their additional MS Word (in which they perhaps do their letters or something) - and they even succeed in getting sw for that pittance. Unfortunately, they only get what they pay for, or just only slightly more. Since on the other side on the table, offerings in that range of payment are made by hobbyists. (As said before, real hobbyists not being able to do better, or, e.g. in the case of kinook, people having better things to do, for most of their time.) So much for trolling, boy. 
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#2
03-29-2012, 03:43 PM
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"Thus, I recommend to start a thread "I'm willing to give xyz dollars for Kinook being able to order a new & really good editor, please join in" "
I agree with you, I actually had similar idea just after the credit crunch. I imagined it would work like this: Kinook or some loyal user would create a fund, i don't know, paypall account or whatever. Kinook would clearly state the price and time for developing some of the most desirable features, like multi db search $$$$, better editor $$$$ etc. And users would simply pay to this fund whatever money they would think is right towards the feature they would want Kinook to develop. Once the money for the given feature would reach what Kinook stated, Kinook would develop it within the agreed timeframe and release it, as a free update for anyone who donated towards that feature. It think it would make the best use of money, which is very scarce in today's market, to develop exatly the features that users demand. It removes the initial investment burden risk from developer, and makes life a bit easier to them. It's not optimal solution, but I think better than what we have now, ie no real release in a long time, and probably not any in the near future either ... What do you guys think? Kinook, what do you think?
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#3
03-31-2012, 04:40 AM
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Schferk,
I work as a software architect, and have been in IT since 1978 (concentrating on software development for the past 20+ years). I know very well how hard it is to make a profit on a piece of software that you develop and market yourself, having done it myself a few times over the past years. But I also know that to stay competitive in any software market, you have to invest in the future. Stagnation is death to any piece of software because evolution happens very rapidly in this industry. Using the example that is in this thread which you for some reason hijacked, the cost of an editor to replace the freely distributed MS one is a pittance compared to the cost of the development itself. For example, I pay nearly $4,000 per year for an MSDN subscription to support my software development effort. The annual cost of updates to other software component subscriptions rivals and in some cases exceeds that annually, but has to be done to meet the needs (i.e. demands) of my clients. Without that type of investment, I would be out of contracts in no time at all. If you are willing to pay $1000 or more for a single license for an outliner that meets your needs (which would obviously have to be developed by a team, not an individual), then it really makes no sense that you are trolling the posts of people asking about the possibility of very reasonably expected updates to a $99 product. Competitive products are in the same price range as UR, and many much less. To be willing to pay $1000 for such a product would mean you must have requirements that are far beyond those of a typical user of an outliner product so perhaps you need to hire somebody to do a personalized software project for you. Anyway, in an attempt to get this thread back on track, what I am asking for here is a feature that is present in many competing products in the same or lower price range. MyBase (wjjsoft) has this ability, and also several other nifty features such as the extremely desirable feature of an MDI interface so you can view several client windows at the same time. TreeDbNotes has this ability, and is much easier to style notes on the fly than UR could dream of. InfoQube has this ability along with a ton of other unique and amazing features, and has many very devoted followers but only a grand total of 131 people who have paid the $49.95 price for a pre-release license. Perhaps the extremely low pre-release funding of InfoQube can be used as an example of how futile it would be to ask users to donate money for the possibility of features being added to UR. It just is not a working business model. There are many features of UR that are not in the pieces of software I discussed above. However, many of those features are probably of no use to many users, like me. Some features of UR I like a lot compared to competitive software, but some like the topic of this thread are an extreme frustration likely to drive users away if they keep getting met with closed answers like "That sort of outlining within the UR rich text editor is not supported.". So for me at least, the question is just are there any plans to update this for the future? The free MS editor is a dead-end, and needs to be replaced. I would gladly pay for an upgrade to UR if this would be done; there are enough things I like about UR that I would rather not abandon it. In spite of that, competitive software is evolving and moving past the currently stagnant UR in many ways. But to propose that users should be willing to donate money in the hopes that a seemingly disenchanted developer would suddenly become inspired to do large amounts of new development is purely cabaret. Thanks, Mark.
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#4
03-31-2012, 11:27 AM
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I just took a look at the roadmap for the development of UR, which was last updated in 2010. I really don't see a lot of features there that are relevant to my use of UR, and those that I do care about are pretty low on the list.
For example, there seems to be a lot of demand in these forums for multi-db search, and I find that very confusing. To me it would be completely useless; multi-db search is something I would never use at all and really do not see how it belongs in this type of software. As a developer, I'm well aware of what a huge amount of development time would be required to implement something like that, in the existing app, especially considering that UR currently opens multiple databases in distinct instances of the application. To top it off, after all the painstaking work to add such a fringe feature, after release it would be sure to be met with tons of complaints from those users who expected it to work differently. In my opinion if a feature like multi-db search should be added at all, it should be a completely separate product that users could purchase in addition to UR. I think a good strategy would be to get back to basics and add the features to UR that are currently found in competing products and could be relatively easily implemented in UR. I'm willing to bet the current roadmap is way out of touch with the actual desires of the average UR user, but perhaps it does represent the very vocal minority. There are many features of UR that blow away competing software, but there are also many very basic features that are lacking and should be prioritized way above current 'top of the roadmap' items. Anyway, just my opinion. Each user of an outlining product is going to use it differently and many will have polar opposite desires for the future of the product. I just think the basics need to be hit first.
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#5
03-31-2012, 11:42 AM
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<nobodo>
In spite of that, competitive software is evolving and moving past the currently stagnant UR in many ways. But to propose that users should be willing to donate money in the hopes that a seemingly disenchanted developer would suddenly become inspired to do large amounts of new development is purely cabaret. </nobodo> I am using various outliners for many years now, supported and supporting some projects and can only second the posts of Nobodo. It would be nice to read something with content from Kinook. Is it time to move on from here or is it worth it to wait ? It might be time to show some official commitment to keep people on board.
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#6
03-31-2012, 12:38 PM
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Quote:
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#7
05-03-2012, 07:32 PM
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Hello Mark and quant.
(The "boy" was for your "scherk", but exchange of serious arguments is possible anytime, so  Yes, I hijacked this thread, but you did the opposite: You created a new thread for a problem that had been treated in another thread - you didn't add up to that one but authored a new one. I might be considered quite intrusive by many people, but then, if there's a thread to which I can add my additional details, I prefer people NOT having to read those "as they were all new" - might considered paradoxical within an overall view of my various contributions. You're quite right, 100 bucks' sw has nothing to do with 1,000 bucks sw, but the problem is, there is NO such software that might be considered top-notch within this field, not for 100, and not for a thousand bucks, but you find many offerings within the legal field, within that second price range and above, but then, these are specialised tools that would present many quirks, every day, hampering your workflow, if ever you tried to use them for more general - or let's say, other than legal - uses. When I "asked" for donations, it was cynicism (born out of disappointment from precisely that arrogant treatance we're entitled to here, and which you mention by saying "an extreme frustration likely to drive users away if they keep getting met with closed answers like "That sort of outlining within the UR rich text editor is not supported."" when in fact UR is a good product that is in need of much developments in order to cope with the 3rd milennium - it's more and more left behind, a you guys state more or less clearly) I KNOW that this is not a viable business venture. But quant WAS serious about it, so there's no reason to ridicule this ("cabaret" - btw, it had been I who introduced that term here, long ago), but then, I did top-notch IM sw in the late nineties, of which I sold FIVE light versions, and many of its details can't even be found today in high-priced products, so I know a little bit about the intricacies of marketing. On the other hand, as we all know, quant is the real UR expert here, and we're all indebted to him for that. All the better if he's not been in our position to market real good sw but with insufficient means. (Spectacular details of my sw then can be found here, in the MyInfo forum and in the outliner sw forum.) Since I, a non-programmer, built it from a really bad sw language (ToolBook), I had to cope with a 32 k limit of any item's main content field, and even today, that sw language comes with the same 32 k limit (interesting here: Zoot was marketed with such a limit up to 2011, it's only now that they overcame it). So I went away from my own product, using askSam instead (which I had used earlier, then programming my own thing in order to have something "better" - better in many, many ways, but certainly not in AS' core functionality of fast and complicated search, of course). It hadn't been but in 2008 - just 4 years - I had been so fed up with AS that I bought the very first and easy outliner I could get hold of, which was ActionOutline: It's not able to "do anything", but creating a sibling, creating a sub, is unbelievably "natural". I quickly got aware of its multiple shortcomings, so I evaluated "better" outliners; my choice went to MyInfo. In its day (5.07), it presented good searching capabilities, i.e. "search current db", "search open db's", "search all db's". It was buggy, it wasn't that stable, so I had several MI db's - I acknowledge that with UR's stability, you easily can do a monster db, hence the lesser need for trans-db search capability here. After a time, I considered MI the "lesser" product to UR (two main reasons to that: MI's GUI which I think was really ugly (now with 6.07 it's become just a little bit less so), and the absence of any "super tree", i.e. no way to load multiple "projects": it's always "the whole big stuff" that clutters your screen, and that clutters your mind - be assured my own system, 15 years ago, had been almost incredible in this respect (you would be highly mistaken to infer from my saying that I'm a non-programmer, to any kind of simplemindedness in the realization of that product), so I imported my stuff to UR. This is my 73rd post here, so some people here at least know that from beginning in, I was stuck with the - excuse me - INCREDIBLE un-intuitiveness of UR, and nobody could pretend I wasn't willing to share good ideas here in order to really improve this product. When I asked for a "recently-viewed items list", I was told there were too many subframes in the UR frame already, and this with 24" screens becoming ubiquitous, and without my having asked for mandatory display of such a list. Main problem with UR is the monster file. I've got about 90 k of items in my workspace, with several hundred additional items every week. Not having any positive feedback when I asked for a super tree within the UR db here, and not getting any positive answer when I asked to leave at least the very first tab of several one (when hoisting in the prof. version) the way the user wants it to be, which would have made a "super tree" by doing all sorts of cloning there, then you would open just that sub-tree = "project" there you need at that very moment, and perhaps some other, "reference" parts of that primal tree), I was NOT able to do real PM (project management) with UR since whenever you open a (hoisted) subtree in any other tab, this expanding will be reflected within the very first, global tree, which by that can't serve you as a reference point within the chaos anymore. My departure from UR was delayed by my "discovery" of the possibility to mis-use UR's related items pane as an "intermediate" pane (cf. the "tips and tricks" section here), and I tried to do all my work within that pane, in the middle now, leaving UR's tree as a "super tree" only. But then, the sparse functionality of that related items pane wasn't that suited to do all work there (i.e. no tree, not even a graphically acceptable indication if an item has children or not), so, in the absence of any chances to have some really good PM functionality within UR and within reasonable time - please understand that the functionality is there, and that I know that: you can do multiple clones of subtrees and create a "perfect" PM system this way, but graphically, it's so terribly cluttered then that I simply cannot cope with such chaos; if you guys hadn't had similar problems on a further-down level of things, you'd never had asked for hoisting, right? -, I finished by cutting up my UR db's from 1 to 5 to 50 to more than 100... if I remember well, it was quant who incredulously asked how in heaven I could imagine such a collection of UR files to be "working". And indeed, it did NOT work for me. (In my last months with MI, I had done almost the same there, cutting up my db into many db's, hence my "need" for a trans-db search function.) Within brackets: A search add-on for trans-db search in UR? Well, the big difference is not the additional payment, the big difference is that such an in-built function (cf. MI - but there's no Boolean search in MI, which makes it worthless for my needs) guides you to the very item in which the hit is found, whilst by using an external search tool (and even today, there are several such search tools able to search UR files, and even processing European characters correctly!), you will then have to open your UR db and do a second search within that db in order to identify the corresponding item.
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#8
05-03-2012, 07:32 PM
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Another consideration of mine was, how would UR work on a slate, considering my almost 2 GB db? Ok, cut it up into 100 or more db's, so technically it would be feasible... but would it be reasonable? Of course not.
So, as many of yours know - since I related my export adventures here in this forum -, I finally went back to AO, from which I came four years ago. Now it gets interesting, since at this time, some 6 months after my transition, I've got about 500 AO files; of course, these binary files are much more suited to such file multiplication than single db's: 500 or more UR db's within the same system, when you say, you can't understand why people would have more than a single one? And by the end of the year, I'll certainly have a thousand or so. I know that out there, there are some advocates of the "single file" theory, preferably within the ASCII format, i.e. without formatting, and they go to great lengths explaining you that outliners just offer something the file system already has on offer for you. Well, these people are tremendously mistaken. Does anyone imagine you could manage 100 k of single files within a file system, in any manageable way? Storing, yes, but processing? (The advocates of such systems praise various naming conventions by which you then could filter, and yes, they squeeze multiple tags into one single file name, easily...) In fact, my AO files contain anything from 20 to perhaps 800 items, and if in doubt, I avoid additional sub-levels, inserting separator lines instead: This gives me a good overview of something which "normally" would be an intermediate (but unnecessary) level: Grouping things, clustering things is always preferable to subordinate things (and my cutting up a monster db into up to now 500 single files is another embossing of my underlaying philosophy. You will observe that I'm here in the vicinity of that old debate "outlining or tagging"?, but than, as with "100 k of single files" vs. "1 monster file with 100 k of items", there's always the right thing to do FAR AWAY from these extremities. Yes, today I'm against monster files, and I would never come back to them, seeing that their developers are unwillig to supply them with a "super system" that allows for immediate handling of projects, of reference needs, and so on, but continue to force you into their "chaos systems" (cloning and hoisting is very good for a start only, but when you'll have got 2,000 cloned sub-trees, you'll have got an impenetrable jungle, not an information management system of any value anymore). But this, in no way, will make me desaffect trees, outlines! I've got two principles in cutting up: Make it self-contained; make it as tiny as possible (and a third one, derived from the two, would then be: and don't bother if one has got only 10 items and another a thousand: don't try to "normalize sizes"). And then, for everything "pm", I use the file system, which offers, as you all know, (sub)directories / (sub)folders, links (= references = "clones"), and, among others, the "comment" attribute. Then, you have some rather good file commanders, and whilst others can't even display these columns, some of them are able to filter by various "tags", trigger codes, etc., and with an extensive macro / scripting system (and with additional trigger keys, e.g. those of your numeric keyboard, simple, with control, with alt...), you'll realize a really good workflow indeed, and whenever I switch from my browser back to AO (i.e. with all the content I need, within multiple clipboards), my systems brings my back to a screen where AO has three fourths of the screen real estate, whilst a file commander, just showing a simple list of file names together with their "comments", takes the fourth fourth of my screen. But then, most people out there didn't even replace their Alt-Tab with a simple key, or put their shiftlock key to a better use. Now compare with my system that's perfectly scaleable, as said before, in both directions: No problems with slate computers, and a big corporation with 10,000 or more staff can rely on such a system easily also. Nobody can blame me for not having tried with outliners, cf. my contributions for a better MI, than for a better UR - but instead of just complaining, I've got the means to do my own thing. I don't critizise UR for what it is; as said, in ancient times I created my own monster file application. But since I didn't get ANY help or encouragement whatsoever in my tremendous efforts to make other people's monster file applications really good, I stepped back from that concept I today consider obsolete. It has been today that somebody on the outliner sw forum pretended, in writing, that UR had stopped development, and that brought me here, in order to check for any news on that. There wasn't any, so I seized the opportunity to relate my findings, grosso modo, of these last months without UR now: I finally got my 3-pane outliner. And you know what? At this very moment, I'm considering begging file commander developers for enhancing their products, since of course my system, as elaborated as it might be in direct comparison with traditional, self contained "outliners" like UR and similar ones, is always a little bit rudimentary as I see it, but even if these file commander developers let me down, as have done outliners' developers, I'll do just more and more scripting, and I'll all get what I need even for the most elaborate standards. And I even have got divider lines within my file lists there, i.e. I managed to group files within several groups on the same level of subordination, and any combination of data is now available on my fingertips... and ONLY that. I only see those 30 or so outlines I need for my immediate work, and if ever there's missing something, I just do a single further key press, and these parts of my information system get available, too. I've said it a thousand times within this forum and the other ones: The problem of IM (information management) is not a technical one, but a conceptional one, and not being heard is not necessarily being wrong. In the outliner sw forum there has been a discussion re granulation of information recently, i.e. how = up to which atomic level information should be cut up (I'd been heavily into these questions 15 years ago, so nothing new for me here). When you, Mark, want to do an outline within an item, it's exactly that problem you're discussing; when MI user (and history prof) "wsp" touts MI (and rightly so) within the outliner sw forum for the former's ability to reference not only items (as UR does) but paragraphs, it's again information granularity he's discussing. There might be a lot a theoretical possibilities to that, and indeed, on that champ de bataille, I've got my very precise ideas also (just for a start: cut it up into sentences as the atomic level; do 1 sentence 1 line within monster text files (any formatting being encoded by special characters that are resolved accordingly, afterwards); do heavy referencing, cut up the monster text files into as many monster text files as you need for your big corporation... but do all the technical processing on a referential level, processing "atoms", not any more half-way physical combinations, and half-way references to other parts in other physical combinations). But on a practical, application level, with what we've got today, everybody must search for his individual solution how he will granulate, then re-combine his information bits in order to make them useful for him, and all I can say now, after 6 months' heavy information processing in and out of my new heteroclite, scratch, homemade system: It works like a charm, and it's the first of my many information systems that does so. But it stands and falls with both components: Hierarchical systems are a necessity then, provided you hold 'em flat and combine 'em ingeniously. And yes, kinook could have done this, within UR's borders, not for big corporations, but for all those freelancers and 1 to 5 head business gathering here. But instead, they don't do any super system that would drive UR into another sphere of utility. Cannot help those, but could help myself. Yes, We Can Do. Individually. Ingeniuosly. Don't be customers, you'd be waiting forever for the manna to come.
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#9
05-04-2012, 01:52 PM
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Quote:
I can assure you that calling you 'scherk' instead of 'schferk' was an accident and not intended as an insult. If I had actually intended to be insulting it would have been something more like 'schjerk', but since nothing intentionally insulting like that was done hopefully you can see it was a typo. I'm sorry if you have read the kinook forum so much that people's suggestions in the forum category set aside for suggestions are becoming repetitive. I would guess in a perfect forum world there would be an organizational system so efficient that all postings which might possibly be related to the RICHED32.DLL would all go under a single thread titled something like "Please post your reason here why Microsoft's riched32.dll should be left for Microsoft apps to use and not reused as a free rich text editor in this application". I suppose that thread might contain a lot of different reasons, but it could also be that people would be afraid to post in that thread because they might have mistakenly organized their posting incorrectly, and then the whole organizational system would just break down. Anyway, I did not see a thread describing the same problem and asking about a future resolution to the problem. If there does happen to be one, I missed it. But one thing is absolutely certain - this thread has been so derailed that it really might as well not have existed in the first place. So much for organization. Thanks, Mark.
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