Comments on: Catching Up, Lessons Learned

By: Troy (admin)

Troy (admin) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:04:42 +0000

I do plan to look at CP Notebook soon. Haven’t decided about Bento yet, though.

By: Zico

Zico — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:18:20 +0000

Could you please look into Bento and Circus Ponies Notebook as usable for PIM (or whatever you want to call it)? Regards

By: Troy (admin)

Troy (admin) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:35:17 +0000

Hi Joe! I haven’t written expressly about this, but I did mention it in my WordPress vs RapidWeaver comparison. I really like MarsEdit. I use it to draft posts offline, post drafts to a local copy of my site (using MAMP), and then to post to the live site. It’s an excellent tool. The main benefit is, of course, the ability to craft posts outside of WP – but it’s also a real time saver to with quickly add links, tags, categories, etc. on the fly with minimal effort. I don’t use the built-in preview of MarsEdit since I have a local site copy, but I’ve played around with it. In my limited experience, that works quite well, too. One final thing: it also integrates very tightly with TextMate, BBEdit for editing. Hope that helps. Thanks for dropping by!

By: joeflood

joeflood — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:03:13 +0000

Hey Troy,

Have you written about how you use MarsEdit with Wordpress? I’ve played around with MarsEdit but haven’t really gotten into it yet.

Joe

By: Troy (admin)

Troy (admin) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:13:55 +0000

Actually, so do I. Maybe it’s time to retire the acronym ‘PIM.’

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:04:50 +0000

I guess I should have said “application category”

I come from the generation where a PIM application meant a calendar/contacts/notes app.

By: Troy (admin)

Troy (admin) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:07:00 +0000

Appreciate the comments, Joel. Perhaps PIM is an outmoded term, or at least a too-nebulous term. I’m digging into EagleFiler now, giving it a test. The nice people at CircusPonies also offered me a license to test their app out, so I’ll be testing both. When you say you ‘never thought of this application as a PIM’ — what app were you referring to?

By: Joel Anderson

Joel Anderson — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:33:47 +0000

Nice to see you back. I also am looking forward to your PIM review(s). Couple of comments – I never thought of this application as a PIM – When I think of PIM, I think of contacts/calendaring/notes applications – maybe that comes from the old days of the original Palm Pilot (which I had).

But they are Information Managers. I still have that old association though.

Anyways, after you delayed your reviews, I went ahead and purchased EagleFiler. (I already had been using CircusPonies NoteBook). I keep wishing there was one app that did both of those tasks (file/data management and note-taking/outlining), and with a little bit better of an interface in both categories.

I started using EagleFiler, but then stopped. I am not sure if I got side tracked and busy, and then couldn’t get back into it, or what, but I can leave you with three comments:

a) About once a week I think about giving it another try (I really never gave it a good enough try in the first place), but never seem to.

b) For what little I did use it, I kind of felt like, why don’t I just use the Finder for this stuff? In order to organize my stuff in EagleFiler, I did two things: I placed things in folders and/or I tagged them. After doing a bit of this, I thought, OK, if I just take the same amount of time to neatly file stuff in the Finder, I am accomplishing basically the same thing (minus tags). It just started to feel like I wasn’t gaining any benefit over the Finder, with a good search tool (like HudahSpot or FileSpot). The Leopard Finder does have a number of features that helps find and navigate quickly (sidebar, dock, spotlight, aliases, SmartFolders, QuickLook, etc), and I could add primitive tagging to the Finder through a number of free tools, if I felt I really need tagging. While I was using EagleFiler, I just felt like I was doing things that I could do in the Finder. Maybe I am wrong — I want to be wrong, after all I did pay for this software, and I have spent countless hours looking at the landscape, trying the other apps, etc.

c) That’s why I am so looking forward to your reviews. See what others say, etc. Maybe I have to give it more time, before I see the payoff? I just don’t know…

By: Troy (admin)

Troy (admin) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:31:56 +0000

Thanks! Good to be back. I’m anxiously awaiting my PIM reviews too…

By: AlienSecretion

AlienSecretion — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:24:11 +0000

Welcome back!

I’m anxiously awaiting your reviews of the P.I.M. software. I’m still bouncing between Evernote for it’s web and iPhone syncing and Together for it’s robust capability and excellent interface. Of course these are still for my general thought collecting while DevonThink is my mainstay for heavy-duty note taking and archiving.

BTW, selling the iMac? Hmm…..