Post from markfoley in the old forum (nov 4th 2008)
My path started with Evernote, which is powerful but doesn't reinforce good practices. You can add checkbox 'to dos' anywhere in your notes, but they disappear up in the 'endless tape' kind of like inbox items that get forgotten once they are off the bottom of the page. Also I realised project management (and life in general) is filled with 'issues' or tasks (see about power bill, ask bob for presentation) rather than a stream of notes. So, tracking the same issue with a new note every week got out of control, and soon it was so hard to find my previous notes on that subject I'd just start repeating what I could remember from last time.
Over the last few months I've moved to abstractspoon todolist, which is a free tool mainly providing 'nestable' todo's, but also quite useable as an outliner. That's helped me a lot, but what I've really been looking for is something richer where I can apply filters and views to a single underlying dataset. And also determine what is just a 'note' and what's an action. Now I have found it! This was exactly the type of thing I had in my minds eye, a kind of 'semantic' outliner where each sentence or point in your meeting notes is an 'entity' you can link to an issue, or mark as a question that must be solved. I've heard lots of references to Ecco but figured I'd missed that boat and wasn't going to start using something that hasn't been developed for year.
I am yet to move my life into IQ but am trying my best to contribute to testing. I am really looking forward to having IQ's power working for me.
Comments
Also from the old forum I believe - my copy of it is dated 2008-10-02 but I dont know when it was posted
[quote]lucky_phil wrote
Where do I start with the advantages on SN?
Its ability to have a rich, functional data model,
Its flexibiltiy for screen use, dockable everthing, directly editable everything,
NOT being one of the multitude of USELESS two-pane outline editors, for which the outline is only a simple single index.
Its rich filtering & view control, including all the 'little things' like being able to fix x columns in a wide grid,
Its gantt (now) & promise of calendar & tree-view for WBS & Org Charts (future)
Its developer putting in such an effort & responding continually quickly, although sometimes he had the resources to gear up & get this finished in 6 months, but my own experience in software developement tells me this would just result in 1) less responsiveness, 2) probably more time to complete, and 3) potentially killing viability due to cost.
I could go on, but frankly, before SN, Ecco was the best by far. They both have a surprisingly long learning curve, something Ecco suffered less from, as it was remarkably mature, well-written for its time, and stable. With current SN learners, they are a little hampered by the extra learning curve of not-yet-finished software.
Guess I've rambled on a bit. Have a look at a few. I don't think you'll find anything close.[/quote]
Pierre,
I dont think you'll get a better testimonial than that :-)