by M. Sean Fosmire

Info Select

Unlike other database programs, data is entered into Info Select as free-form text. No fields need to be specified at all, and the program doesn't care what format the data comes in. The user can enter one word or up to 64,000 characters of text. In fact, on our system, Info Select has a number of entries like "Bill Jones 555-9937" or "Marquette 49855". Text can be imported from any other file or copied via the Windows clipboard from any other program. The Windows version adds the ability to assign a title to the item and provides a selector bar along the left side of the screen where those titles are displayed for quick finding and selection. (If the user has not assigned a title to the item, the first line of text is displayed.) (See snapshot 1.)

The Windows version provides some rudimentary categorizing capabilities, in the form of a series of folder tabs which can be clicked (one or several) to assign the item to categories. All items assigned to those tabs can later be retrieved by a search. The tabs can be changed by the user to suit his own needs, and the program will allow about ten tabs to be created.

Both the DOS and Windows versions also the user to sort the items.

In both its DOS and Windows formats, Info Select allows the items to be displayed as small "windows", tiled dynamically on the desktop, with several visible at once if they are small. This is the standard display in DOS format, and optional in the Windows version.

Both the original DOS version and the current Windows version have outstanding text retrieval capability. Simply press the letter "G" (for "get") or the search toolbar button and enter one or more letters. A window appears, displaying all of the items as small colored icons, and then removes the ones which do not match as the user types in more letters. At any point, the user can press Enter or the OK button and Info Select will display all of the items for which a match was found, with the text of the match highlighted.

For example, the user may want to search for items mentioning the Beatles. He begins typing in letters, and as he does so the dots representing items that do not contain that letter drop off, leaving only those that do contain a match. The hypothetical user who starts with 1,554 items will find that they narrow down as follows:

   b   1,152 dots showing - 1,152 items contain "b"
   e   701 dots showing - 701 items contain "be"
   a   23 dots showing - 23 items contain "bea"

At this point, if he feels that he has narrowed his search sufficiently, he can press Enter or the OK button and the 23 items containing that string are displayed (see snapshot 5). Some of them will contain words such as "bean", "beat", etc. He can use the up and down arrows to examine each in turn.

Once he gets used to this search technique, the user will find that he can find any item of text, no matter how deeply buried, in a matter of seconds. What he cannot do (unless he has used one of the folder tabs) is find items that might pertain to the Beatles but don't happen to include that word within their text. The searching is done on text only. Nonetheless, it is fast and powerful.

The Windows version has added the capability of organizing items into "topics" (represented by a book icon), and of storing topics within other topics. A topic may contain one item or 10,000. The DOS version uses "stacks" to organize entries, and allows the user to create any number of stacks. The DOS version allows only one stack to be open at a time, while the Windows version allows many topics to be open at one time. The Windows approach thus allows for searching across all topics, a feature not provided in the DOS version.

Some of the other features available in the Windows version include toolbar buttons (a perennial Windows favorite), the ability to choose fonts and highlighting styles (bold, italics) and the ability to apply colors to backgrounds and text. Despite such formatting, the text remains plain ASCII text, and can be copied quickly to any other Windows program.

Info Select comes with a set of pre-defined templates (documents which can be used to create a new document with formatting already defined) and the user can create his own additional templates. These allow for the quick creation of letters, memos, fax cover sheets, etc. It also offers the ability to create forms with a rudimentary form of fields, in the form of boxes into which only text or only numbers may be entered, but there seem to be several shortcomings in these areas. For instance, there is no provision for specifying a format for numbers (to add dollar signs, commas, or zeros) and in fact Info Select does not allow the user to insert a comma into a number box.

The Windows version of Info Select also offers a calendar feature, but its capabilities are also quite limited and it is best ignored altogether.

We have found that Info Select is very useful for storing items that we have snagged from the Internet or from online services. Since the text can be entered as is, without any formatting, we can simply dump small snippets or large volumes of text (if we have collected large volumes) and leave them as is. Trimming, formatting, categorizing, and filing can be done later, if desired.

To maximize the speed of using Info Select for such "information harvesting", we also use a utility called ClipMate, from Thornton Software. This utility extends the Windows clipboard so that a number of things can be copied in a series, to be pasted at a later time, without having to paste text immediately after copying it. (The Windows clipboard, even under Windows 95, allows for only one item to be kept at a time.) With a combination of Info Select and ClipMate, we can go online, copy text from numerous web pages, then read e-mail, copy URLs or other pieces of information from the messages, then go online with CompuServe, read messages in the forums we belong to, snipping what we want, and then go into Info Select (later that evening or several days later) and paste the copied items into Info Select wherever we desire. For rapid-fire pasting, ClipMate also offers a PowerPaste feature, so that items in the list can be pasted one after the other, machine-gun style.

Despite the fact that it is very popular among its users, Info Select suffers from very anemic marketing. It appears to be available only from MicroLogic directly, for about $150. MicroLogic does not have a presence on CompuServe or America Online, although it has just begun to offer the product on some CIS forums on a shareware basis. It has recently set up a web site, found at http://www.miclog.com.

ClipMate is available from a number of shareware sources, including CompuServe, America Online, and ZDNet. Thornton Software is on the Web at http://delta.com/tsoft/clipmate.htm.

Zoot

Zoot shares many of the strengths of Info Select, but adds a number of features of its own. It allows for the quick entry or importation of free-form text, and is exceedingly fast at text searches. It has more of a hierarchical organization approach -- items (called Notes) are contained in Folders, which are contained in Libraries, which are contained in Projects.

The default display shows three panes, listing the Folders in the upper left pane, the contents of the currently selected Folder (its Notes) in the upper right, and displaying the content of the current Note in an edit window in the lower pane. The bottom display is an edit window, not just a viewing window -- the text can be directly edited in this mode as well. One feature of the editing screen which is useful for writers is that the status line includes a running total of the number of words in the Note.

With version 3.1, the Folders list now allows for collapsible lists, so that Folders which are subordinate to others can either be displayed or hidden. Users of Ecco Pro will recognize this capability and will immediately appreciate its usefulness.

Zoot does not have the capability of making any formatting changes (different fonts, sizes, or attributes such as bold or italics) within the Note Editor. It does offer easy selection of fonts and sizes for Notes, but the selection applies to all text in all Notes.

The standard display can be toggled among three modes by mouse clicks: one click to expand the edit window to full screen, another to display just the list of Folders and list of Notes, without the edit screen, and a third to return to the default view.

Other views are available. A double-click on a Note brings up the contents in an individual editing window (see snapshot 8). A larger font size can be used for this display, if desired.

The Stellar Features

Zoot also offers the reverse of this operation, called the Zooter. The user can either highlight text or, if he does not, the entire text of a Note will be copied to the Clipboard when the Zoot It button is pressed. The user then has 60 seconds to switch to another program and, with a single mouse click, the text is copied to that location. If he cannot do it in time, or if the Zooter does not recognize or does not like the destination program, the text remains in the Clipboard and can be pasted by the usual methods. Showing a bit of humor, the manual advises:

"When you Zoot information - actually say the word 'zoot' out loud so your co-workers can hear you. Soon they will admire and respect you."

The only problem with this suggestion is that any of your co-workers who speak French will mistakenly think you are unhappy with this feature.

The third power tool that this program offers is the Abstract Search. Zoot has the capability of doing a very fast search for strings of text within files, including non-ASCII files such as word processing files. That is similar to the search-within-files capability of several other programs, including Windows 95 itself. Zoot has added the powerful capacity to look for each occurrence of a search string and collect an "abstract" consisting of the 50 or 100 words surrounding the key word (very similar to the Key Word In Context feature offered by some legal vendors) and collecting these abstracts in a series of Notes in a Folder. The Folder contents are then displayed using the split screen for quick perusal. (In the Zoot lexicon, a Folder is simply a temporary Folder. The results of any search appear in a Folder, which can be saved as a Folder if the user wants to keep it.) Zoot adds a "link" at the top of each abstract, identifying the source of the entry for ease of referring back to the original source; the user can use the Launch button to launch the program with the file loaded.

Zoot can manually "file" (or "assign") a note to any Folder by a drag-and-drop operation. Previously, the only choices when dropping a note on a new Folder were "copy" and "move". Assignment of a note to additional Folders could be achieved indirectly, by library searches and the like, but there was no way to make the assignment manually. Now, the user can now directly assign a note to several Folders. On dragging a note to another Folder in the same Library, a menu presents the old choices -- "Move" or "Copy" -- and a new third choice: "File". If an item is assigned to or filed in more than one Folder, it will be presented with the contents of each when they are listed. This gives the product a good deal of power. An item like the draft of this article might be assigned to "Information managers" and to "pending work" and to "web site uploads". It remains one note, but will be shown whenever any of those Folders is viewed.

An alternative to drag-and-drop for assignment of Folders is the View Parents window. This window, selected by hitting a small icon at the top of the Folders list, shows all of the Folders to which the current note is assigned. They are called the note's "parents", a term which will be somewhat confusing to those used to the hierarchy of categories in Agenda; the term in Zoot refers to the folders containing the note. The View Parent Folders window shows the primarily assigned Folder and other Folders, and allows the user to break the assignments or make new ones without having to resort to drag-and-drop operations.

The most recent and most useful innovation is a small text box which appears at the bottom of each library and which allows text to be typed in for a quick search of all notes in the library. Zoot will collect all notes which match the text in a new folder and display it at the top of the Folders list. The user is given the choice of displaying notes which match the entered text in the note titles or in the text of the notes.

The program has a number of other unique features. Projects, libraries, directories visited, and Notes edited are all kept in "Trails" (history lists), so that the last-used entries (up to 300) are always readily at hand for revisiting. The print dialog box allows the user to create, save, and select grouped settings for printing operations. Thus, the user can enter a header (such as "Today's Downloads"), a font type and size, and other preferences, and save that configuration so that it can be recalled and used again whenever he wants to print another selection of the same type. File names, e-mail addresses, and URLs take the form of links and can be launched by pressing a single button. The manual claims that Zoot will load a web browser and visit the selected site, or load an e-mail client and create a mail item. On my system, it did indeed launch Netscape 2.0 but needed a mouse click in the Open Location dialog box (apparently silently using the Zooter!) before linking to the site. It likewise launched my e-mail client, but I had to open the New Mail dialog box and click once in the address line to have Zoot print out the address we had chosen.

Zoot makes very extensive use of the right mouse button, a tool used rarely in Info Select.

Scripts

Zoot now includes a powerful scripting language which approximates the "auto-assign" feature familiar to users of Lotus Agenda. Scripts are simply Zoot notes (containing ordinary text or some special codes) which use the Script file type. Any note using that file type is treated as a script.

Scripts can be created to do three things:

• assign a note to one or more Folders (categories)
• handle other file maintenance chores, such as deleting notes or moving them to other libraries
• allow temporary "what-if" views (displays)

The first of these is the most basic, and uses ordinary language (with some Boolean operators). A script which reads "Zoot" will collect in its Folder any notes which contain that word, either by itself or as part of another word. Similarly, a script which reads "author" will bring in any notes which contain "author", "authority", "authorize", etc. (Zoot gives the option of restricting matches to whole words or to matching case.) The words can be used in combination and with logical operators. For example, "CompuServe NOT Compuserve.com" will include all notes which include the phrase "CompuServe" except those in which that phrase is part of an e-mail address originating from the CompuServe domain. "Compuserve NEAR service" will match only those items in which the two words are within a defined number of characters from each other.

Going beyond the natural language scripts, the assign function can also be used to collect notes of a certain file type, of a certain color, or bearing a date within a specified range. These functions must be designated through the script dialog box, described below.

A script can contain several lines, each of which is evaluated in order. Words on separate lines are considered as an implicit OR under Boolean logic.

The second purpose, file maintenance, is for the more sophisticated user. Scripts can be set up to automatically delete the matching Folders, copy them to other libraries, automatically sort the notes in the Folder, or any of a number of other actions. The script programming language is quite complex, but the user needs have no knowledge of how it works. The script options are chosen from a collection of menus, accessed by double-clicking on the script, and choosing OK after making the selections tells Zoot to create the script commands automatically.

The third purpose is similar to the use of filters in other programs. The list of notes can be narrowed with the use of scripts, but the change is temporary unless it is explicitly made permanent. By use of "script views", the user can temporarily change the notes list to:

• show the other notes in the Library which would be added by the script, by using the Add Matching Notes selection (F6)
• show which of the existing notes do not match the script, by using Remove Matching Notes (F7)
• show which of the existing notes match the script, by using Sift Matching Notes (F8)

The fact that these actions are temporary makes them ideal for a quick "what-if" view. The user can quickly be returned to the full notes list by a mouse click on the Folder title (or by hitting Shift-F5). If the user prefers to keep one of the resulting views, he can choose Save View or hit Shift-F8 and the changes are made permanent.

A Folder might contain a series of scripts for quick checking of new items. A series of scripts containing the single words "Windows", "Microsoft", "Netscape", and "Java" could be invoked in turn, quickly telling the user how many newly-imported files match those terms, before they are assigned to other Folders by use of similar scripts in other Folders.

The running of all scripts is called a "refresh". Zoot does "refreshes" in a number of ways. The user can manually choose to refresh the entire library or just selected Folders. In addition, refreshes occur automatically when the user finishes editing a note or on key text-gathering operations, including Auto-clip, Auto-note, and importing.

Inheritance

Another major improvement in version 3.0 was the addition of an inheritance feature. This concept will be very familiar to Agenda users, but has not been adopted by any other software program until now.

"Inheritance" is a metaphor which is somewhat inapt, since inheritance flows upstream in Zoot, as it does in Agenda. Ancestors "inherit" the qualities of their descendants in these programs.

Inheritance is premised on the relationship between parent and child categories. A product which organizes its categories in a hierarchical fashion places "child" categories under and subordinate to "parent" categories. A child category is one which is a subset of the larger set which defines the parent. Examples might include:

	United States
	   Montana
	   Tennessee
	      Nashville
	      Chattanooga
	   West Virginia. . . 

	Literary figures
	   French authors
	   French poets
	      Rimbaud
	      Beaudelaire. . . 

In the first example, Nashville is a child of Tennessee. Tennessee is a parent to Nashville but is a child of United States. The premise of inheritance is that any item contained in a child category should also be automatically to be contained in the parent category which contains it. Using the second example, a note which is assigned to the "Rimbaud" Folder should automatically be assigned to and found in "French Poets" and in "Literary figures" as well. In the first example, an assignment made to the subordinate "Nashville" Folder should normally pass to the "Tennessee" Folder which contains it.

Properly understood, the inheritance concept should be central in any information manager which uses a hierarchical list of categories, but until now its logic seems to have eluded the authors of all other products. The author of Zoot has enthusiastically adopted the concept and has provided an excellent implementation of it.

Automatic inheritance would not be desirable, since sometimes the user will not want the items to flow to the parent categories. Zoot allows the user to control inheritance either by specifically designating Folders or by identifying levels of inheritance. The specific designation approach also allows the "inheritance" or automatic assignment to be made between Folders which are not related to each other. In this fashion, Zoot also approximates the estoeric function of "actions" and "conditions" as used in Agenda (though understood by few).

Other miscellaneous features

Zoot does very well on file imports as well. It gives the option of saving the resulting text in one file or many. If the file to be imported has recurring "delimiters" (as do CompuServe library files, for instance), the user can have the program use those delimiters to split the file into Notes. It will even combine all items with the same characters in the first line into one single "threaded" message. When importing a CompuServe library catalog, the result was that all files uploaded by the same individual appeared in a single Note.

A recent improvement is the Import Wizard, which takes the user step-by-step through the import process, including the selection of a destination Library and Folder, and the selection of delimiters. Delimiters recently used are remembered and can be recalled, making the process quite simple for repetitive imports.

The same Wizard can also be used to insert a file link and to view a file in Agent X.

Agent X is a separate-but-related file management utility. (See snapshot 9). The text search and Abstract Search capabilities are accessed through the Agent X window, but their results are then displayed in folders back on the Zoot desktop.

All in all, Zoot has done a very nice job of implementing a number of additional features while continuing to emphasize ease of entry and ease of retrieval of information.

The author of the software is constantly working on updates, and is very responsive to suggestions. When we first began this review, we noted that Zoot did not include a search and replace function in any of its edit windows. We mentioned that in an e-mail message to the author, and within two days a new update to the software had been created, incorporating this feature, and posted to Zoot Software's web site. By sharp contrast, a call to MicroLogic for some basic information about Info Select was not returned for a week.

Concluding observations.

Both of these programs are easy to use and, most importantly, provide for quick and easy retrieval of text which is buried deep in their data files. The search capabilities of InfoSelect, in particular, are incredibly fast and powerful, and the friendly interface makes it extremely easy to use. Under Zoot, the search function is perhaps a little more cumbersome to the new user, but it makes up for this relative deficiency by (1) keeping the search results and (2) adding a number of "power-search" features. Each program is very stable, and fatal errors (the bane of the Wintel user) are very infrequent.