Just purchased 5.0

[tfjern]

Wordmuse!

I'm sure Kinook will be very pleased with your heartfelt tithe, but it in my opinion is completely undeserved. Version 5.0 does not by any stretch of the imagination deserve the title, "New Version." You upgraded because of what Kinook has done in the past -- UR is still a relatively good program, but now a little long in the tooth -- but the programmer (who will know what is meant by cheap grace) has kept the program virtually stagnant for the past few years, at least since 2008, coinciding with the financial crisis.

Do I get this right? You are making a 50-dollar contribution in the hope it will stimulate Kinook to begin working on the items it has listed long ago on the roadmap? Kind of risky.

[wordmuse]

Originally Posted by tfjern

Wordmuse!

I'm sure Kinook will be very pleased with your heartfelt tithe

tithe... nice reference.

but it in my opinion is completely undeserved. Version 5.0 does not by any stretch of the imagination deserve the title, "New Version." You upgraded because of what Kinook has done in the past -- UR is still a relatively good program, but now a little long in the tooth -- but the programmer (who will know what is meant by cheap grace) has kept the program virtually stagnant for the past few years, at least since 2008, coinciding with the financial crisis.

You got it partly right. I do have a certain affection for this program. And I agree it is long in the tooth. And I agree that Kinook often seems to be something of a stick in the mud.

But until this one time, Kinook has come through for its user community. And who hasn't been hurt by this unnecessarily prolonged recession? On that basis I do cut Kinook some slack - and hope.

Do I get this right? You are making a 50-dollar contribution in the hope it will stimulate Kinook to begin working on the items it has listed long ago on the roadmap? Kind of risky.

If you change the words "stimulate Kinook to begin" to "help enable Kinook to continue working", that's about right.

Also - as I said in the opener, if there are to be further developments, they will be on Version 5, not version 4. Unless I'm missing something. Upgrades for interim releases have so far been free. So it seemed easiest to be an early adopter of this version.

I may have acted foolishly. I wouldn't be the first time; won't be the last. But I didn't bet the farm, and time will tell.

- Bal

[schferk]

Ok, gals, let's put this straight.

Musing about the possible intentions of UR is futile; the developer is alive and monitoring this forum: it's time he gave a short statement. It's two corners of a coin, though: If he says he's obligeing to the roadmap, he'll trigger a lot of updating proceeds, but he'll feel bound to his words, then; so, staying quiet, he'll stay free to decide tomorrow or after tomorrow, or even will stay unaffected by his made decision to just do the strict minimum henceforward, as he's done for the last four years now, as has been stated above - since he gets steady revenu from his professional developers' environment, it could be that he judges proceedings from UR not sufficient to invest a lot of work here - I explained in length in the first part of that other thread.

And, let's face it - I explained in length in the second part of that thread there -, UR lives, to this point, with three conceptual or design flaws that prevent it from being able to do a real market breakthrough:

- bad accessibility for first-time users (since we ain't listened to when we specify and enumerate little things that could easily be changed but would make UR less so of an IQ test (not speaking of your endurance testing))

- missing superstructure for neat PM and neat (reference, etc.) document M (but which could be introduced, more or less, by preventing UR's "main" tree to follow expansions / collapses of its various hoisted sub-trees)

- UR making you wait for several seconds, on years-old pc's, after the slightest editing of an item (and if it's an item with much of content, all the more so - cf. MyInfo which is another relational db, with an index (or with multiple indexes) as UR is, but which handles this partial re-indexing after edits much better than UR does up to now, so UR could certainly do it better with further development - and this current behavior of UR will prevent it from broad usage on the slate market, since, as explained ibid., that's a market for slick, light programs not asking for much of processing power since slated need to work 10 or more hours in a row while weighting not even two pounds).

So, we have three conceptual flaws in UR that need to be addressed before anything else if UR is to make some living in the PIM market of tomorrow, but again, three design flaws that could rather easily be amended. And then only, a stylus-driven GUI could be envisioned, and could indeed make UR's fortune in that market since it would be the only self-contained offering for power users in need of such a system there... and as soon as one such a system will work smoothly, any businessman, etc. on the road would be happy to have it (there's a lot of CRM systems' development going on, so UR would be well advised to be a better storage system than those, in a 800g device, but without leaving out any such CRM functionality, and again, functions must be accessible, not only programmable).

But please: Mitt on screen? For UR? Good joke, man: It'd be an absurdity.

[Nobodo]

I've been a UR user for almost exactly 2 years now. I downloaded/installed version 5.0, and was surprised to see that even though it is almost exactly the same as what I bought 2 years it comes with a $50 price tag.

I see a lot of areas in UR that could be improved (and most are not in the roadmap), but sadly I do not see enough improvements over that timeframe to be comfortable shelling out another $50. I've tried making some enhancement requests, but they are met with either no response, a brief "not supported" response, or some extremely lengthy diatribe from another forum user.

Anyway, it's time to move on. Good luck to Kinook, and also to those paying in the hope that the future will bring renewed enthusiasm for the product.

Mark.

[seanferns]

Hi Mark, when you say that you are moving on, what are you moving on to ? I have tried several other competing products and don't find anything quite as flexible.

[schferk]

Price-sensitive, upgrade-reluctant users look here:

http://www.phantech.com/index.html

Or here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1uv-w5quH4

Or here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykp9QSY-feg

Which is to say, strategy must prevail in a market where there's need for cloud collaboration and for "having your things in your tablet with you when at your customer's desk" - whilst traditional offerings won't survive.

[Metta]

For what it may be worth, I took at look at the phantech application earlier this afternoon, and although it does appear to have a robust and versatile text editor, it has none of the task and project management features in Ultra Recall and upon which I heavily depend....

This means that, as a new UR user, I will continue building out my UR database since I have yet to find another application that provides the breadth and depth of functionality in UR.