Why I Upgraded to UR 5.0

[schferk]

... And it goes worse.

Have a look here, "Are you going to wait for Windows 9?":

http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/i...?topic=32935.0

Interesting reads there, among others not so smart. One thing seems to be evident: MS is trying, by all means, to copy Apple's "Closed Circuit" concepts, and some fear that this might bring the de-professionalisation of the Windows system as a whole, most people needing pc's - or not, when there will be enough slates one day - for the web (incl. mails and films), and - Apple has proven this - are willing to get into closed systems, with DRM, applics only when approved by the hardware vendor, etc.

So people say, prices for professional equipment will skyrock. Well, I remember those times in which I paid a fortune for my rather weak notebooks. Then, "everybody" got a notebook, and that meant that even for prof. users (= people who need a notebooks, instead of just wanting to see films, etc. at home with them), notebook prices went down in a spectacular way.

And so, when the "everybody" and the prof. markets will again split up, it's perfectly possible that these augurs will be right, and slates and such, and the respective sw, will be accessible for anybody, whilst "real pc's", with "real sw", will again become a thing for few people willing to pay the price.

Example: Micrografx Flowcharter 3 cost me 1,000 bucks then, and was totally bug-ridden, incl. loss of data. Then, some day, that same FlCh3 got into the bargain counters, for some 15 bucks.

But back to near-standstill: The real problem with FlCh3 was that there wasn't any shortcuts for adding another specific symbol (meaning, you would have needed about 10 or 12 (min.) shortcuts in order to insert them into your map, instead of having to change, with the mouse, the needed symbol first, within a palette, and then inserting with the mouse, then again going to the palette, select another symbol there, put it into your map.... The same with connector lines: Everything was purly "manual", no shortcut for, e.g., connecting the current symbol you were inserting, with the symbol you had insert previously.

So, FlCh 2000, the last I got, nothing new here, re smooth working. And the current FlCh (yes, there is one, I'm not exclusively mentioning defunct sw here) doesn't seem to have such shortcuts either. They bloat their sw with any remote functionality, but that functionality that you need 3 times the min., isn't there, and will probably never get there - the same with competitors:

I know of NO such flowchart sw that facilitates this (neither does Visio), and in fact, one of the premier "advantages" of mm sw, whenever you can manage to do an mm map instead of a flowchart, is, that mm sw allows for very quick working, whilst doing similar maps with flowchart sw is extremely strenous, for its lack of easing your burden of multiple, endless repetition of meanial tasks.

Technically, there is no problem whatsoever: As well as MM allows for assigning 9 different, often-needed symbols (of your choice) to 9 different key combinations, any flowchart sw could allow for assigning symbols / stencils to key combinations - they simply don't do it, and then, you have the great "please" to try to write mouse (!!!) macros in order to automate this by having macroed mouse clicks in fly-up palettes and such - in a word, terrible.

And to say the truth, I've been wandering for some time now that kinook's persistent silence could be explained by the possible above-described future environment in which future sw will have to exist:

Mr. Everybody will get almost nothing since the prices will not allow for thorough development, hence "portability" from pc to Android or RT or even future slate "pc" 's, but strictly on that amateur level that will certainly not stress the basic user.

And as for "prof" sw, well, developers think that given the (low) numbers, people will have to buy anyway, so no real effort needed, and given again the low numbers, they presume that competing sw will not be developed, their possible developers deciding that given that the narrow market is taken, another such sw will not be able to succeed.

Adobe with its Photoshop- and Lightroom-type programs (but certainly not with Illustrator and such) are in-between: Not slate-fare, and not profs-only: Will be interesting how they will position these progs when there will be less and less desktops out there, in the housings of the general public.

In other words, an era is possibly nearing to come to its end: That era where the limits between everyman's sw and prof.'s sw have been largely blurred (i.e. by taking everyman in the (formerly, prof-only) boat. And now it's possibly an era where everyman's sw gets really dumb (Evercrap, anyone? It's been deliberately dismantled, deconstructed!), whilst prof sw is low numbers, expensive and another market (cf. crm or laywers' sw that both were never popular with your neighbour).

And now let's come back to UR. They regularly go to bits (as said, 19.50 for them for prof., 9.50 for them for standard): That clearly indicates they go "consumer market", or more precisely, they continuously try to get out of the consumer market the max that it'll bear for them, and on the other hand, they make NO effort whatsoever to make a break into any possible large prof. market (except for having made UR network-compliant (but without access rights, i.e. half-heartedly): no doc M, no crm made easy, let alone lawyer functionality or such. (And I don't see any advertizing directed to such prof. markets.)

This all means, UR HAS MADE A CHOICE: Offering some good functionality to everyman, and that's it, since everyman's market will be brought down, functionality-wise, no more sophistication needed - which was there as a product of that simili-parallelism between prof and everyman markets -

and which era seems to come to an end now (with rare exceptions (Adobe)).

And possible UR (and others) will have mused around such considerations - when the inherent "tragedy" here is that in the past, UR has realized so much of what'd be needed in order to make it a prof. program within a future dual market, that the additional effort in order to succeed there, instead of just getting some crumbs out of everyman's market where there's lots of progs much easier accessible to that everyman.

In other words, kinook seems to be lacking the guts to see that they could make UR prime time-ready for that secondary, the prof., market, with applying rather restricted effort and means to do so, and would not have to look out anymore for bitsdujour crumbs in the 10 to 20 dollar range, only attaining a remote position in that everyman market since it's not slick enough in order to spontaneously please.

About 12 years ago, Adobe bought Macromedia and buried FreeHand. I was outraged then, as were thousand of loyal FH customers. Looking at it from today (i.e. from Win8 desaster point in time), I brood if back then, there might not perhaps been at Adobe very smart people who foresaw that the seemingly so democratic, in very large portions "common market" for profs and everyman that existed in 2000, wasn't just a transitional period that would soon come to an end.

We seem to be leaving that passage soon (the first big step out being made by the iPad 3 years ago), and UR is stuck, by its lack of courage, within the consumer market where it could claim a very remote, minute position at best: from a consumer perspective, there are lots of "better" progs.

And that's the explanation for what we see.

kinook don't have a communication problem, as some disappointed ex-user stated in another forum this year, kinook have a perception problem: They rightly see the consumer market and know there's nothing to gain from that, for them, hence their unwillingness to further invest within their program.

But they don't see their possibilities within the prof. market: They only see UR isn't ready for that market, but this undenial fact seems to blur their perception that it would not take so much of an effort in order to get it ready for professional prime time - and that their position there could become a rather comfortable one.

This analysis could refocus kinook's percption, though, and that would mean very good stuff to come from them.

Or, when they don't consider it "the new element" that changes the lot, then some of us had better leave. (And yes, normally you'd had to pay for marketing consulting.)


EDIT:

Just for the joy of it:

"And again. And again. And again. And even after that the freshly marked up document will remain the same unstructured presentation soup bulk

as one finds in any braindead blonde's Word file."

from once-and-only poster "Brains" (not me) in the MI forum, a highly instructive post anyway, deserves to be read: Both parts are current probs for UR, too, so the link is not just for fun. He's bold as brass: "Data taxonomy and research capabilities: Mesozoic fossils" - but he delivers his points! 265 visits to this date, let's see if we cannot get them some more page clicks here:

http://forums.milenix.com/viewtopic....9f4dc756dfd1e9

[wordmuse]

So - I don't disagree with much of what you wrote. I write per what my relatively modest needs are and believe that things are better now than they were.

For instance, For most of just over 25 years I've been keeping a hand-printed journal since 1986. About two years ago, my hand began fatiguing faster, and I could not find pens with a wide enough barrel to help. (And at some point a too-wide barrel would prove equally problematic, yes?) I'd been reluctant to go to a keyboard since I connected with pen and paper much more intensely than with keyboard and screen.

But, alas, my hand just couldn't keep up with my mind. Not that I had anything profound to say - just that what I did have to say needed written expression.

A few years ago, Word would not have supported what I want to do. Now it does so easily. And there are third party programs that make transfer of images to and from Word child's play, e.g., Snagit. So my Word document can be almost (not quite) as visually rich as a hand-printed page with doodles, drawings, things overlapping, crossouts, etc.) It's not as much fun as it used to be, but it's sufficient and getting better as third party software makes some things that were difficult easy. Example: I just found a music keyboard for my Galaxy Tab. It records music ideas I have and I can then send them via Dropbox to my PC where I can then import the music into Harmony Assistant which will score what I played. I can then take a screenshot of the score and paste it into my journal. And I can annotate it such that Ultra Recall can find the relevant document when I need it.

All that would have been darned near impossible for me (not a techie) just a few short years ago.

Given the synergies that are out there, and again, assuming the free market doesn't get mucked up (I'll accept that we need not identify "by whom"), the incentive to keep on moving things toward richer digital environments will continue, and people like me will benefit from this.

Here's a digital environment that I would love to see come down to level where someone like me could afford it both in terms of price and ease of use.
http://fooyoh.com/nowwatch/watch/8Ez6UQ69iQ0

And I believe one day, environments like this will emerge for the everyone.

Hopefully, I'm not too optimistic.

- Bal

[schferk]

"I connected with pen and paper much more intensely"

Oh, I loved handwriting in my day - beautiful pen, blue ink! My minor prob was fatigue, as in your case, but the real prob was, I got more and more difficulty to read my own handwriting, and for editing purposes, constant deciphering needs considerably slows down the process! (Oh, and I loved these IBM Selectrics (even when my handwriting was very ok yet), with their balls and their possibility to print "print-like", I mean not mmm like it was standard then, but one m taking the place of perhaps 4 i's - that was spectacular in that time! And their cases were really beautiful - well, with IBM pc's, nobody would call them pieces of art, really ugly stuff (even Macs were ugly then). And I remember those grandiose keyboards then, expensive, but with about 40 or more special keys... (News agencies even had their special keyboards, even more sophisticated...) - Yeah, the old times!

Images in Word?

I'm not sure here, but think.... Don't know Word 2010, but in 2003 at least, a picture of 10 kb blew up the Word file by several mb's - it's the same phenomenon in AO and in other minor sw, whilst both MI and UR are top-notch here: 10 kb stay 10 kb. (Couldn't take an oath on it, there is a chance that behavior was in the Works text processor but not in Word. But I remember I wasn't happy with this.)

Word as DTP for the masses?

Word has perhaps become better in that, but for DTP, there are progs, and I know legions of horribly-dtp'ed printed books that would have been much more pleasant to read had they been typeset by mark-up-processing by a DTP prog (don't be afraid of mark-up, it doesn't have to be CT-style: You can perfectly bold, italicise, underline your text as before, in Word e.g., but just for the special things, you'd use the codes the dtp prog "understands. Blah blah<F:This becomes a footnote.> blah. Much better results than with traditional Word; as said, don't know the last versions and their possible better output. (Not speaking of crashing Word files here, especially when containing pictures, tables, and several hundred pages.) - The beauty of dtp is, you can do your writing within any acceptable editor field of any sw out there - even within UR (if they get to the prob of the edit wait when switching between items).

Galaxy Tab?

As said, connectivity is the big "progress" the computer "science" for everyman has made - and it's the only such progress. So I'm searching for answers, and indeed, it's the money, as it's the money in all cases.

"assuming the free market doesn't get mucked up "

It's evident Apple does everything for doing just that. And I tend to be convinced by people (hence the link to DC) claiming that MS will do anything in their reach to do the same - for the years to come, we speak of RT probs here, Win8 being an "open" system as former Win versions were. But as said, the market will split, and time will probably come where on a pc you can do lots of things with very few and very expensive sw, whilst on your tablet, you can shift things around and around... but you won't be able to do much with them. It's a theory, it's not yet reality. But then, today you can photocopy a chapter from a book; some people say most books will not even be published in paper form anymore, 5 years from now (let it be 10, and they might be right). So, with all that DRM there, what about taking a chapter you need, out of a book?

Right, you buy the whole book, for let's say 149 euro, in order to get electronic access to some 23 pages - or you do screenshots: It'll be the same with Apple (who invented all this "closed system" s***), the same with amazon, and the same with your MS tablet - and in the street, we're followed by cameras identifying us (the technology is all there, and indeed I forgot, here, real progress has been made), every 20 m.

fooyoh?

It has been quant who recently posted a similar link here, in the mm thread, and I answered there. In short: Yes, this looks so "promising", and for a long time I thought an optimization of such a paradigm would be the solution to IT. And now I know better: Our brains need some 2D-simplifications, multiple ones, yes, in order to get the whole picture, step by step, and with all the interactionism in there - but 3-D representations are too much for most of us. And there is not one man in this world who regrets this more than I do.

Conclusion

Apple has started it, amazon will not change, MS even now is trying to jump on the bandwagon. In the streets, we ain't free anymore (if we let our smartphone at home or take it with us). And re the web, in China there is perhaps 10 p.c. of the web available for Chinese people, and even "democratic" countries interact this very time in order to "better regulate" the web, i.e. a) to censor it, and b) to let nothing anymore go unnoticed. In some "democratic" countries, it's become an offence to use encryption, e.g. for your mails. Then, again Apple the culprit, consumerism has overtaken pc use, i.e. these days, pc's, netbooks, slates and such are, by an overwhelming proportion, used for consuming data that others created (on quite other machines of course (past times: Silicon Graphics - splendid beauties!)), whilst 10 years ago, everyman even needed a kb! Today, many people even don't buy the additional kb for their slate since even their mails - mails are dying, too, btw, d'après what they say - are short enough in order to not making you need a kb.

Young people, 20 years ago, were living in the streets, as much as they could. Today, it's media consumption, within their parents' home (of course there are exception, we're discussing trends here). Media consumption, I say: it's not know that hunches of people create on their pc.

Anyway, these different phenomena SEEM TO CONVERGE.

And hence, it's only a question of speed: When will be have become a closed world, with regulated access if there is access, and with creation being suspect? When? But that day will come. Have a look at Egypt. Arab spring has become Arab winter, as they call it now.

But the point here is, smart people and even I, WE KNEW BEFORE. It's the same with our data processing. And they promote data consumption (cf. television):

It's bread and circuses, and it's all about maximizing our circus time, whilst minimizing any other move we might be inclined to make.

It's a question of how long it will take, but the direction things will take, is clear as day.

And as for Adobe, well, that might be transitional, too: Working on your photos? Even simili-creational activities? Automatisms will do that for you.

As said, sw developers look out and observe that two very different camps are building, and they try to chose their camp, and their feet follow their eye.

And that's why in a closed system for iPhone, iPad and iCrap, there's 200,000 (or is it 300,000 now?) applications of which 99,99 p.c. are pure rubbish.

But some developers might be mistaken in chosing their camp, and to prevent such a potential mistake here my above post was meant for.