In Search the Holy Grail
For over three years know, I've searching for a knowledge management tool that is capable of keeping with information needs.
My motivitaion. After years of reading news groups, web sites etc., I'm struggling to keep track of the things I've read (and tried to saved). I would like to find a tool that allows me to capture nuggets and search for information.
My needs
- Store and search quickly: plain text, rich text, html [1]
- Allow me to reference (link to) files (often PDF, word documents) on my disk
- Support attributes/tags (see Adobe Photoshop Album as an example)
- each item/note can be tagged with many different tags
- the tags are organised in a tree structuretags can be used as part of the search criteria, for example: If I've a number of items with the "Java" tag and then I search "Security" in Java. Only items tagged Java are searched for the word security.
- text search over all entries
- search must return a list of items (not just jump from one item to the next)* scales well (handles > ten thousand of entries)
- search supports regex or (wildcards and booleans)
- doubles as good bookmark manager (after all bookmarks are just knowledge).
- Export all contents to text/XML format -- so I can change to a different piece of software at a later date.
Here is what I've tried:
- MDE Infohandler - strange UI, no html support
- Anynotes - database doesn't scale well, no html support, graphics objects must be pasted in one at a time.
- Mybase - searches to slow
- askSam - no navigable organisation (tree based or otherwise), search only. Everything must be added as a form.
- TreePad - no html support
- Zoot - no html support, hostile GUI
- various wikis - most can't save HTML files, except Twiki - which I found impossible to manage (in addition I should have to run a web server on my machine just to do this).
- Zope - too painful to manage. Managing my notes would be come a fulltime job. * The Brain - too slow, doesn't scale, ...
- Omea from Jet Brains (think IntelliJ and Resharper) - the version I played with was very slow (and it hogged a half gig of memory - not acceptable even on a dev box). Update: Dmitry (Omea developer), says things have improved. I will take another crack soon.
- One Note - great for taking notes but not very good (yet) for keeping track of information.
- CodeLib - very professional looking UI. But it doesn't allow me to paste a web page into the notes area. In addion I'm not sure I like the breakout of notes/code/files/url's etc into seperate categories. When I'm trying to read something I expect it to flow. I don't expect to change windows to see the images etc.
After much playing in the past year, I've realised that what I want is UI/structure of Adobe Photoshop album glued onto a PIM.
So far the only serious contenders I find are Chandler (OSAF - due ???) and Project Hystack at MIT.
How do you manage information? Are they're any other app's you've tried??
Update: Tried CodeLib (see notes above, as per Alex)
[1] I need rich text/html because I want to be able save webpages including pictures for later reference, even if they go offline.
Technocrati tags: PIM