InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Pierre_Admin on 2016/12/19 13:15

Hi IQ Users,

Integration with mobile apps is becoming a real need for IQ. Native sync with Google Calendar and other calendaring services is in the works. Same for contacts (though work is pretty much on hold for now)

Now, what about general text / outline information, whether it represents notes, tasks, etc. what are your favorite apps (and favorite mobile OS) ?

Over the years, I've tried quite a large number of them, never adopted any single one though...

Evernote
Onenote
Pocket
Google Keep
Alfred Fritz Outliner
Orgzly

(I'll update this list when I have some time to search what else I've used in the past)

Of these, most are not outliners at all, more like information repository.

One outliner I found recently is Orgzly. It appears to be the best fit for IQ:

True outliner
Tags
User-defined Properties
Some built-in dates
Dropbox sync
Excellent search
Saved searches
Multiple notebooks
Org-mode plain-text file format

Would anyone care to share their favorite ones here ?

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Comments

Is long term "support" (or development) an important consideration, in terms of investment (your own investment in developing the syncing module(s) ) ?

IQ geek

Windows 8.1

CPU: Intel i5 2.6ghz

[quote=Pierre_Admin]

One outliner I found recently is Orgzly. It appears to be the best fit for IQ:

[/quote]

What, if anything, would the IQ HTML pane correspond to in Orgzly?

[quote=David_H]

What, if anything, would the IQ HTML pane correspond to in Orgzly?

[/quote]

There is a notes section below the item, both when viewing the outline and when viewing the item. If course, this is for short pieces of text

(seen on the above screenshot, in light gray color)

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

IMO Evernote is the way to go.

If the HTML Pane can sync well with the Note Pane in Evernote, and even be able to extract information to other fields (the checkboxes) - it would be great for me.

I personally do not think the IQ experience can be recreated for Mobile App because of the inherent limitations of mobile devices - no keyboard, smaller screen etc.

Article about Evernote's long-term commitment

An Evernote sync module is planned (hopefully before Evernote folds-in because of bad management decisions...) and work was done a while back to check feasibility.

But Evernote is not an outliner... and this is why I wanted to get your feedback.

Would you want to see outlines inside your mobile device ?

If yes, what apps would be best suited ?

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Me personally, no.

Maybe I presume too much, but I don't think I can reach the same "uninhibited" speed at mobile devices, that I can at a desktop.

I largely agree with ethanrox's line of thinking. Here are my thoughts on mobile integration.

Do any of us really think we're going to be able to view our IQ content in a meaningful way on our phone? Maybe I'm just not thinking creatively enough, but I don't. In my mind the biggest limitation is that every other piece of crap program

has always made users choose between outlining, and "rich" content. You never get to have both (except in IQ). So it seems like that defines everything and we have to work backwards from that. Do we want outlining or rich content?

So then the next question is if we have to live with one of those limitations, which makes more sense to live with, based on the ecosystem that exists for mobile phones? Well for me if I have to choose, what I want above all else is to be able to get info into IQ from my phone. That means rich content. I want to be able to easily share a photo, a web page, or a manually entered note to IQ. And as it happens, I can already do those things in a very robust way with Evernote - which makes it an ideal sync mechanims for IQ.

On the other hand being able to look at Outlines on my phone, while it would be great, is probably less important. What I would like to be able to do is view items and their associated HTML content on my phone. Again, it seems to me as though Everenote has the best mechanism for this, if it's possible to sync certain text fields to Evernote, with the item field syncing as the note title, and the text field syncing as an Everenote tag.

IF a grid could also sync in Evernote as a notebook, that would be the cats meow. An Evernote notebook would represent a grid, and Evernote tags would represent text fields. Basically an Evernote notebook would be a flat flat list of an IQ grid.

The biggest challenge to all the above is that items when viewed on the phone would lack all context since you couldn't see the outlines. On second though, maybe IQ should just sync with Orgzly

Joking aside, i don't know how you make this choice. Seems like you can either choose to get rich content into IQ from your phone, or get nothing but outlines out of IQ onto your phone.

Wow, long post... thanks !

[quote=David_H]

Well for me if I have to choose, what I want above all else is to be able to get info into IQ from my phone. That means rich content. I want to be able to easily share a photo, a web page, or a manually entered note to IQ. And as it happens, I can already do those things in a very robust way with Evernote - which makes it an ideal sync mechanims for IQ.

[/quote]

EmailToIQ does it nicely too. I use it all the time...

[quote=David_H]

What I would like to be able to do is view items and their associated HTML content on my phone. Again, it seems to me as though Everenote has the best mechanism for this, if it's possible to sync certain text fields to Evernote, with the item field syncing as the note title, and the text field syncing as an Everenote tag. IF a grid could also sync in Evernote as a notebook, that would be the cats meow. An Evernote notebook would represent a grid, and Evernote tags would represent text fields. Basically an Evernote notebook would be a flat flat list of an IQ grid.

[/quote]

That is exactly the plan for Evernote sync. On hold, due to lack of time and $, otherwise planned

[quote=David_H]

The biggest challenge to all the above is that items when viewed on the phone would lack all context since you couldn't see the outlines. On second though, maybe IQ should just sync with Orgzly

[/quote]

One does not prohibit the other, IQ data could be synced to both EN and Orgzly

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Hi Pierre,

All good to hear. Although it seems like it would be a lot of work to develop for more than one of them.

Re: email to IQ I use it often to email notes. However, at least last time i tried it, it could not receive embedded pictures, I don't recall if I've ever tried sending them as attachments.

It looks like Orgzly has a lot of rave reviews, I'm going to have to download it and try it.

[quote=David_H]

However, at least last time i tried it, it could not receive embedded pictures, I don't recall if I've ever tried sending them as attachments.

[/quote]

So true...

In v90:

New: EmailToIQ: Now supports embedded images and attached files

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

My use case is taking notes on my phone that I will later import into InfoQube, preferably as an outline of items rather than plain text in the document pane. Not trying for two-way sync or viewing IQ on my phone (yet).

So, encouraged by this discussion I have installed Orgzly on my phone and created some sample data. I would now like to import it to InfoQube, but I don't see an Org importer. Is that being planned, or is it not high priority right now?

I tried a workaround to convert Org to OPML using Pandoc. Pandoc makes non-standard OPML so InfoQube cannot read that output. I also tried Org2OPML. Unfortunately, it loses all the rich metadata from the Org file and treats everything as note text, so that's not good either.

Alternatively, can anyone recommend a mobile app that saves its outline in OPML form? I've been eyeing the paid version of the Mindly App, whose sample OPML output can be imported into InfoQube. Any others that work well?

Regarding the OPML Import, can InfoQube have an option to import the <title> field as the top-level item? This is a nice-to-have, not a priority.

The Org importer would be my preferred solution over OPML because it's better at keeping the metadata that can go into IQ fields.

Thank you!

I'd also be keen to see import functionality for Orgzly.

Android Outliner by Alfred Fritz (it's on Play) might be a workable OPML option. I have a pro licence but haven't used it for ages. Maybe it's time to have another look. Hasn't been updated in almost a year, though.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out!

Continuing on the theme of OPML imports into InfoQube from mobile apps, I have tried three different files, and I am finding some of them being imported "upside down" unless I misunderstand how IQ grids work. If you look at the attached image, I have started a new grid, and the first line I typed is labelled "1", row 25 in the grid.

First I imported an OPML file from Mindly, and it added the items in the rows above (in the green box) and the rows are added upside down.

I typed row 26, labelled "2", then I imported an OPML file from Halna Outliner, and again it added the rows (in the blue box) upside down.

Then I typed row 27, labelled "3" and imported an OPML file from Orbit Mind (in the red box) and it was the only one where the rows were not upside down.

Continuing my investigation (not shown here due to length), OPML from Dynalist is in the right order, as is OPML from ConnectedText. So it's a bit of puzzle what is going on.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the item sort order in the grid, and "above" is newer instead of "below"? Pierre, let me know if you want to have the OPML files at any point for testing.

Not to hijack this thread too far, but I just copied XML items and sub-items between two IQ databases, and they also got pasted in the upside down order. Hmm...

Pierre,

Maybe related two the two .txt files I sent you by e-mail a couple of days ago - some of that stuff was also pasted in reverse order.

[quote=Cyganet]Not to hijack this thread too far, but I just copied XML items and sub-items between two IQ databases, and they also got pasted in the upside down order. Hmm...[/quote]

If you select say, ten items -- selecting from bottom to top, they will be pasted in the order they were selected -- #10 first and so on.

Could this be what is happening? (I haven't read the whole thread, so may be way off the mark here...)

Hi Tom,

I tested and you are right, the order in which the items are pasted does depend on the selection order. However, copied items are also getting pasted upside down. So if I want to copy items in the "right" order, I need to select them from bottom to top.
When importing from a file, the item order is determined by the file itself, so I cannot select these from bottom to top.

Oddly enough, I just reopened a grid (after a crash) that contained 3 top-level items that I had manually created earlier. They were also upside down.

Pierre, any idea what is going on here?

[quote=Cyganet]

I tried a workaround to convert Org to OPML using Pandoc. Pandoc makes non-standard OPML so InfoQube cannot read that output.

[/quote]
I stand corrected. Pandoc does make correct OPML when you use the command line flag -s to make a standalone document. So Pandoc syntax is

pandoc -f org -t opml -s filename.org -o filename.opml

Then InfoQube can import it, where the note title is in the grid and the note text is in the document pane. However, the InfoQube OPML importer cannot currently import tags or states because OPML renders them as part of the note title, for example:

Orgzly itself does Org markup <span class="tag" data-tag-name="#richtext"><span class="smallcaps">#richtext</span></span>

OPML also loses the timestamp information contained in the Org file.
So if you're just making simple notes in Orgzly, Pandoc can help you get those into InfoQube via OPML.