Sales demotivators

[Brains]

I am currently looking for a decent serious outliner to migrate from the morally and technically outdated TreePad+, and so gave MyInfo a testdrive as one of possible candidates.
Unfortunately, what I expected had been much much better. Even the latest MyInfo version has huge gaps in making data usable functionality I for years consider the most basic in any data outlining and storage piece of mature software. Therefore I am writing this to find out if there are any chances to get a professional product in the nearest future. The main discrepancies are listed below.
Internal document data structuring: impossible
Capturing of the meaning or function of the elements of the text body is implemented not much better as in this forum posts. Although the concept of style markup that creates internal document structure seems to be per se somewhat familiar to developers, everything is done to repel a user from giving their documents a meaningful functional content hierarchy. There is no way to assign any keyboard shortcut to either built-in or user-defined styles, so any civilized (i. e. semantic and functional) formatting of a newly created document with 18 headers of 3 hierarchical levels and 72 inline highlights of 2 types leads to an hour of pulling-teeth mousework session. Select the text. Select the style from the list. Apply and lose all the legacy formatting, like it or not. Then find and re-select the words to be highlighted. Select the style from the list. Apply. Find and re-select the next. 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. Just export the topic file to the Web Site, look up into the source code of the resulting frameset mockery of HTML (sic!!!), and voilà: the Heading 2 style presents as

Code: Select all

<p class=rvps1><span class=rvts3>Editing</span></p>

! Guys and gals, we have 2012 year A. C. out there…
Data taxonomy and research capabilities: Mesozoic fossils
Developers candidly can't tell a keyword from a tag; for them they are one integral concept, full synonyms. As a result, a user typing, say, “types of collateral” (a tag representing a conceptual meaning) literally gets 3 extremely useful keywords: “types”, “of” and “collateral”. Of course, there are no traces of even the most primitive tool of tag management: no suggestion, no tag thematic structure, no preset taxonomy (UDC? WHF is UDC?), just memorize them all and then woodpeck manually (sic!) as you wish in all the Tags attribute fields again and again and again. No typos please!
Anchors are also kinda supported since 5.0 milestone. They were even happened to be uttered about once (sic!) in “What's new in MyInfo 5.0” section of the the Help file. But the implementation is the most queer I've ever heard before:

Just click on the exact spot where you want to link to and select Edit > Copy Link > Copy Link To This Paragraph. This will create an anchor in the text and copy the link to the Clipboard. Now, you can link to this spot of your document from any Windows application that supports hyperlinks.

Not that such strikingly innovative approach was entirely useless, but… why pay for it with the ability of internal linking to the specific spot in any MyInfo document? And why in the world only a paragraph can be linked to (and not the any place inside any line) for fast, easy and convenient information referencing and retrieval the MyInfo was theoretically developed for? That is not to speak about the lack of any means of anchor management. You had your one-time clipboard link copy, and that'll suffice.

[gcoulthard]

1) I agree - styles can be improved greatly. While the implementation is better than most, I'd love to see a style pane (ala Word) and shortcut keys that would allow quick inspection and application of styles. As for exporting topics, I also use full text search & replace in my exported HTML files to rename styles to H1, H2, etc. Personally, I'd like to see a separation of content, structure & style using HTML+CSS stylesheets, rather than embedded "proprietary" styles.

2) Tagging and/or keywords are fine for my purposes, but I'm sure they could be improved also.

3) Here's my wishlist:
a.) Improved image handling within notes (e.g., floating images), but that would require a Word-like editor.
b.) Right-click on image to display "Properties" (e.g., size, aspect ratio, padding, alignment)
c.) Ability to search within attached files (e.g., PDF articles)
d.) Option to turn on "line numbering" and to display "syntax highlighting" in a document
e.) Incorporation of more "wiki-like" features (e.g., inclusion, where one document may be "included" in another)
f.) And, most important for my usage, distribution of a "brandable viewer" or compilation to EXE (or the various e-book formats) that would allow me to distribute my topics to non-MyInfo users (e.g., students). I know that I can do this via exporting to HTML and then converting to CHM/EXE, but that offers a "less-than-professional" version.

Did I miss anything??
-- Glen

[wsp]

Like Glen, I have a little personal list of improvements I'd like to see in MyInfo, but I'm baffled, Brains, by the tone of heavy sarcasm of your note. I'm not sure I understand all of your complaints, but I would just comment on one thing: you're unhappy that MyInfo can't link to a particular word in a paragraph, but my experience suggests that even linking to a particular paragraph is relatively rare in the world of note-taking software.

And I take your point about the unpredictability of styles, but I suspect that is a limitation of the third-party text editor MyInfo uses.

[Coolrat]

Glen, thanks for those suggestions too. They seem well-thought out and cover some of the things I'd like to see too.

The first post by Brains is such an incoherent and incomprehensible mash that seems unproductively sarcastic (thought its hard to understand any of it). I suspect most of us would prefer to see three sentences encompassing the main points.