NoteMind 1.5.3 – A Notepad Database combined personal Information Manager    

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad © 2007

Synium Software GmbH notemind@synium.de/ http://www.synium.de/notemind/index.html Released: 09 July 2007 Shareware: $20 USD

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later; Universal binary; ca. 5.5 MB Hard Drive Space; Download Size 5.3 MB. Strengths: NoteMind helps you to better organize your notes, URLs, To-Do lists, images and many other kinds of documents. Once organized the results can be displayed as a mindmap, which you can further organize. Weaknesses: The developers only provide minimal help and examples to help you learn the use this non-traditional product. When searching for either your hard disk, or for a 7.9 MB NoteMind document, the software is both extremely slow. For a 30 day demo of this product: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23339#descContainer_link/ Copyright Notice: Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.10 Disclaimer: When briefly reviewing share-freeware I will often use the developer’s product, functions and features descriptions. All other comments are strictly my own and based on testing. Why need I rewrite the developer’s narratives, if they are clearly written?

NoteMind: An Annotation of the Publisher’s Summary

NoteMind is one of a group of applications for the storing, organizing information collect and perhaps make sense of your documented thoughts and ideas. NoteMind first allow you to collect information in a variety of formats. Then using a built-in folder metaphor to organize those pieces of information centrally in one place. The product is designed to learn the way you organize your documents, and in the background tries to find a matching folder for new information you’ve added to your initial sets.

With NoteMind you can also graphically display your collected documents (information snippets) as a mind map. Each individual piece of information represented in iconic form. You can move these icons around and change the linkages so they more accurately represent how the information snippets relate to one another.

The product enables you to manage information in a broad variety of formats. You can drag text information, pictures, PDFs or web links into the product, and store them in your NoteMind-database (document), where they’ll remain easy to access, especially since your can park your notepad at any chosen locations on your screen.

An Information Junkies Introduction to PIMs

Searching for the Tools of the Trade — I'm always interested in tools that can help me harness and discipline my creative processes. When starting a project (e.g., a review, a book, organizing a music festival or a technical session at a conference) I need a way to organize the packrat heaps of information I gather. When I first started working with a computer, my first was an Apple LISA, my favored tools were a combination of outlines and hand-drawn logic diagrams and logic trees. As Moore’s law and my budgets moved into the present, my tools became more sophisticated, but at times not worth the trouble.

As a result of this ongoing need to organize and make sense of an ever-growing pile of information, I’ve chippied with the general class of project information management software. I’ve worked with, at times overcoming a steep leaning curve, a variety of graphically oriented mind map, brainstorming, ToDo List and note taking products. But after my review effort was complete, I seldom adapted such products for routine use. Such tools are by their nature different from straight databases, although a database engine may drive them.

Classical Database Software —Tools such as FileMaker Pro and the engine in TheRecipeManager (TRM) are database-generating software. However purists and reviewers don’t consider them to fall into the information management (e.g., PIMs, brainstorming, mind mapping and todo listing) category.

Classical databases organize specific sets or kinds of data in a manner that can be searched by a variety of predetermined (built-in) criteria. The books in my SciFi database can be searched by: author, book series, book title, genre, wish list, and more. Were I more dedicated I could have added publisher and publication data, form factor (paperback, hardback or trade paperback) and a synopsis book’s contents. I’m grad I avoided that because adding such information to the ca. 6,000 SciFi Book records is just a bit too much. But such a database is great for keeping a list of the SciFi books you want to collect (buy).

With tools like TRM, to which you taken the trouble to add your favorite recipes, your collection, can be searched by ingredients, cooking method, cuisine and health factor. The beauty of a classical database, unlike the index cards that were used in pre-computerized libraries, is that you can search categories at one, even constraining your search with simple Boolean search criteria. (E.g., Chinese stir-fry duck and asparagus with no 5-spice.)

General Information Managers — The category were exploring today have the ability to catalog and relate the contents of your photo collection, index cards of proverbs, technical references, links to the usual and the obscure — yeah, the kitchen sink.

Tools and More Tools — Although I am not by nature a visually oriented person, a program that not only stores a variety of information but also visually presents its relationships can be helpful in understanding that information. We at macC have reviewed a variety of products in the class of visual information managers.

Software developers identify their products by their function [e.g., brainstorming, mind mapping] but in essence all the tools in this class manage information. As the bard said “A rose by any other name…”

Information managers (PIMs) I’ve reviewed include Inspiration Software’s Inspiration (February 2003 macC) Eastgate Systems Tinderbox (September 2003 macC), NovaMind Software’s NovaMind (December 2004 macC) and Mindjet’s MindManager (January 2007 macC). This program is still on my hard drive; perhaps I use it to get organized.

In addition, there are reviews of such software by others on our staff available on our site www.macCompanion.com/. Wayne LeFevre reviewed Contactizer Pro by Objective Decision in October 2006. Last month Robert Pritchett reviewed Computer Systems Odessa’s Concept Draw, which falls in the information management category.

Compared to many of the other visually oriented PIMs, NoteMind seemed to both simpler to use and less expensive than the competition. That is why I was drawn to test it. But to put things into perspective, the tools I like and use. Almost as often as MS Word and Acrobat manage information, but do not visually relate the snippets you’ve collected. Each information item, for the most part is treated like an island unto itself.

NoteMind is a nontraditional snippet manager (PIM), which uses an empirical graphical interface to display related the information in a schematic form. [Wow the fog rolls in.] The tool takes your from the more usual grab-bag of snippets in a folder or data collection to one in which the relationships between items are highlighted in a mapped format.

Semantics Information and Data — I use these terms almost interchangeably; but in reality they mean “meaningful (to me) stuff. Rigorously speaking, data is qualitative, likely measurable; and information may be either quantitative or qualitative, the later including things visual in nature.

Getting Started

After a standard installation, and entering the serial number, the product was ready to use. Although there are preference panes that let you tune the product, I was able to work in NoteMind in the default setting.

Inserting Documents into NoteMind — According to the developer, to insert new text into NoteMind, simply select (highlight) the desired passage in any application and hit the "F1" key (on Laptops, the "FN" key has to be pressed along with "F1").

Not on my Macintosh

In Macintosh OS X Tiger, F1 is the expose access keyboard shortcut. But drag and drop of selected materials works just fine, thank you. According to the publisher, when adding material to a NoteMind document, it automatically tries to find an appropriate name and folder to paste the new text passage into. I could not make this function work, perhaps I’ve created the wrong test cases.

Another way to add data to you collection is to press the "F2" key to open the QuickAdd window to add Notes and To-Dos even when NoteMind is in the background. This worked, but I could not figure out how to make effective use the function. Perhaps finalizing my testing on a Friday the 13^th got in my way. Finally you can use the add feature and with the finder interface gather what you need from your hard drive

Adding Information to NoteMind

Using the Software

My initial test was done by extracting the more important bits and pieces of this macC review and used NoteMind to aggregate them both for easier access and perhaps to organize them in folders, a Finderish thing to do. Easier that what you may ask? Two or three 20 page sets of notes in MS Word and a folder full of images that are my usual “shoe box” of stuff, prior to logically integrating the important pieces into my review.

The information I selected varied from text dragged from my draft notes, paragraphs of interest from PDF files printed of a website, and directly from the websites themselves. My only selection criteria was — Is this snippet likely to be important to my review or project? I also gathered up appropriate images from Google, screenshots of my tests results and software interface images from the developer’s website.

I selected several dozen pieces of the rough information I’d gathered and dropped them into the left hand side of the main NoteMind window. The resulting file was about 5 MB in site, considerably less information that the 30 MB size of my collected review information.

Alas, this first experiment with NoteMind was a disappointing experience. Yes the information I selected became part of my NoteMind document. It was, by default, installed on the top database layer where its contents were easy to view. All it took to see their contents was double clicking on them. However, I could not create a mind map of those pieces. More on this later, there is indeed a non-intuitive solution.

In addition, nothing I tried could meaningfully extract other information related to my review from either my hard disk or the Internet. All the items “collected” had minimal if any relationship to the subject of the snippet. I could have done better with a poorly phased search in HoudahSpot.

Back to the Drawing Board

I reread the product descriptions in the readme file, the developer’s website and in the clear but limited user manual I learned two things therein, neither of which were explicitly mentioned in the software’s instructions.

Mindmaps, a Deeper Look — First, searches and mindmaps require the core information be stored in a NoteMind folder. The topmost layer of the information collection doesn’t either count or work. When I created a new folder, and filled it with appropriate items, I could visualize the contents as a mind map.

Having learned this trick, I experimented with the results. One exercise, still in my original “NoteMind Review.notemindSQL” document was to create a folder set organized by information type. You know, text, images, links and complete PDFs. Moving my stuff into the new folders was fast. However, the resulting mindmaps were dull, but elegantly constructed.

Okay, I then regrouped the individual snippets into folders I called background, PIMs as a Tool, Test One Study, and Other Reviewer’s Opinions. When I redistributed my snippets into these new folders, they now contained information in a variety of formats. Not only were the resulting mindmaps potentially more interesting, but also I could by reorganizing their contents start to identify meaningful relationships among the items.

Making the Find Function Useful, Perhaps — My second find, using my secret Batman ring, was that the program is not psychic.

I’m guessing that the search function depends not on the contents of the text snippets, but rather the single word name the program assigns to that snippet. Also, its AI engine is not very smart and has no way for a user to train it.

By changing those individual words (see the image above) to something, hopefully, more appropriate than those names auto selected by the program (e.g., selected, images, nontraditional, untitled, relationships and… duh) the software hit list of relevant found items got better. Better, but not my much —as a trial and error method for searching either my drive or the Internet, the NoteMind find feature sucks.

More Testing

Have learned a bit, I also used the program to store and begin to organize information associated with my new book. This second test was more immediately fruitful. After all I had swallowed some of those smartness pills.

I collected a large combination of text snippets; links to reference documents, PDF formatted documents themselves and images for a book I’m writing. I extracted 7.9 MBs of material; from the 500 MBs of raw information I’d gather or created while researching and then writing an edit draft of the book. I did not try to add audio files to my collection… the book requires none. I organized the materials into folders by book chapter, adding an extra folder for asides and to be remembered. The later is an old brainstorming trick that prevents the process from being sidetracked.

Using the find feature at a Folder Level — I was able to find some additional related information to supplement a few of the items I’d already found by using the program’s find functions.

Caveat emptor — the buttons for doing so are almost invisibly small.

Creating a Mindmap of my Data — I was then, using the mindmap function, perhaps was better able to organize my collections of notes.

NOTE: This test evaluation test is not fair, although my intuition about the software is accurate. After all I’d written the chapters, whittled long-winded 30 page chapter versions to less than ten pages long. Then I reworked them so that the information they contained was easer to understand.

No mater, I was beginning to like this program better than when I initially started working with it, at least until I tabulated my discomforts. As an illustration, the mindmap for the technical chapters of the book is illustrated below.

Veni, vidi, vici; “I Came, I Saw I Conquered” — I compiled information collections and created mind maps associated them for both this review and my book. They looked attractive, albeit low in resolution. Alas, having done the exercise, climbed the learning curve, walked the walk, and hopefully talked the talk — I have absolutely no use for the visual output I created with this program. Poor doc!

More Discomforts Than I Wound Prefer

Insufficient Documentation — This product defines a new metaphor for organizing and relating bits and pieces of information. Despite the program’s unique and potentially useful feature set, its developers are negligent in their lack of documentation or tutorials with examples. That shortfall makes it almost impossible for potential new users to determine how NoteMind could facilitate their workflow.

For example it took me over 17 hours to figure out how the features described by the developer (1) worded, and (2) how best to make use of them. Neither the readme file nor the 17-page manual teaches the reader how to explore the potential benefits in managing information with this otherwise useful and unique program.

A Flawed Slow Search Function — In principal, NoteMind indexes your documents and finds similar entries for you that will be displayed below your list of notes. [Its not clear from what I’ve read, what is searched.] The program can also search your hard drive-using Spotlight, to find any related files. It is even possible to find relevant material by searching the Internet. Under those conditions, NoteMind shows you related websites, which you can explore or download.

Although I got the find function to work, the search function was tediously slow. Did I say slowly? The process, in my book related document, was slow enough for me to go downstairs to my kitchen and pour a cup of coffee, add my sugar and creamer and return to my office. All this before the search results were completed. In addition, at that point, the program sometimes crashed, losing all unsaved data. [Auto save anyone — after all this is a “database” program.]

I spent much of the effort testing the Find function working with my 7.9 MB textbook-related document. I not only had an in depth understanding of the subject matter but was well aware of the relevant contents of my hard drive. I’ve been after all, collecting information on the books topic for 30 years. After grinding away, the search results were not what I’d expected. A large number of relevant document on my hard disk, were ignored. Bottom Line — I could get more focused results, related documents, by searching for information on my drive using EasyFind (titles) and HoudahSpot (contents.)

Snippet Names — It is easy to add text items (snippets or excerpts) to the database, as visualized in the image of the software’s working window. The program gives each text snipped so entered a name; but any relationship between that name and the snippet content is purely coincidental. Of course you can rename the item, but why not let the user do that initially while adding the information to the database.

To Folder or not to Folder — By default, adding new data to the database by way of the program’s main window, places that information into the topmost level of a data hierarchy. Alas, nowhere do the developers not that one can only create a map of material within a folder and that top level is NOT a folder. Nor is there any explicit acknowledgement both at you can created nested folders with the database AND that by doing so you can better display relationships when “projecting” that list as mindmap.

There are other less serious issues with this seemingly incompletely developed product, some of which are detailed on reviews posted on the Internet. Good developers, Google on. Fixing some of the more serious problems could quantum leap the products usefulness.

Conclusion

A is an information organizing tool that can serves to organize personal information as well as research information. It is inexpensive and once figured out, easy to use. In NoteMind's case, it has a special feature allows you to create visual mind maps of information. Using it, unfortunately, is not as easy or effortless as it should (could) be.

Indeed by the time I was done experimenting, and taking notes of what I learned, I could have doubled to tripled the size of its Users Manual. This is a flaw that significantly degrades the usefulness of an otherwise well-conceived application.

With better documentation, NoteMind could be a boon to writers, bloggers, students, teachers, and budding data analysts as well anyone else who needs to organize related data. However version 1.5.3 just feels unfinished. Between (1) German language illustrations in an English language user manual, (2) mangled overlapping check box narratives in the preference panes to the (3) poor documentation, I kept wondering how much more useful the product would be if someone spent a day or three just cleaning up documentation and interface flaws.

Recommendation

I would encourage anyone/everyone to try out the product and see if it can facilitate your making order of the chaos of the bits and pieces of information in your life. How one identifies needs, organizes and relates information, whether for a project such as a book or for a major event for your church, is a highly individualized thing. So is other software designed to facilitate those tasks. I’ve worked with a variety of PIM, project management and mind map tools. Tools that other reviewers and users loved often left me cold. The reverse was also true. Try NoteMind; if it works for you, after 30 days at $20, the product is a bargain. If not, do as I continue to do — keep looking.

Review Afterthoughts — Organizing Tools I Like and Daily Use

My favorite tools are one-dimensional… essentially a flat file enhanced listing tools. Omicron Software Systems To Do X is such a product. [November 2006 macC.] Another tool I depend upon daily, DEVONnote [March 2006 macC], falls into that category. These two tools differ primarily in their approach in the mechanics of information collection and retrievability of my data. To Do X is by driven by an outline generator compared to a more sophisticated database engine that underlies DEVONnote.

Some tools of this kind of software are more powerful than the so-called one-dimensional tools I use because they add a strong visual element to the organizing function. In English… you can link pieces of information together, to show their relationship to one-another. As a result, such information managers can create and display a hierarchy of topic/information from your stuff lists. They are harder to learn, but with a little bit of practice, are more powerful.

Such tools transform a collection of file boxes or clipping stacks such as those we all used in our youth, to a more accessible and we can hope orderly array of information. By their nature one-dimensional card sets often contained identical pieces of information in different format. [In a library the set of cards do a book would include, Author, subject, title and ID number.] Using modern software one has tools that were able to point to a piece of information in a wide variety of ways, without any need for record duplication. The functionality was all in the search engine.

A even more recent approach to information management is based on the premise that if you can relate pieces of data to each other, you gain a better understanding of what the information really means. If your snippets of data can be optimized by assigning a degree of relationship between the snippets of information, the sum of its parts becomes greater than the pieces. In reality, that means that any given piece of information may belong to various sets of data and function in a variety of roles. It also acknowledges, like in classical databases, that there are a myriad of ways to search for that snippet of data you need. [But you who’ve googled, know that!]

Jeff Gamet View of NoteMind — The most penetrating review of the product and its features I’d read was written by MacObserver’s Jeff Gamet. Overall, Jeff was less frustrated by the product than I was. But remember picking a PIM is a personal thing like picking a fragrance or a word processor.

I agree with Jeff Gamet of the MacObserver “Computers are great at creating and storing information, but without a way to organize and sort that information - to build data relationships - it's not really of much value. NoteMind from Synium Software aims to bridge that information gap and help you discover the relationships hiding inside the data on your Mac.” I disagree with Jeff that NoteMind is the tool I shall want to use. http://www.macobserver.com/review/2006/12/19.1.shtml/.

Macintosh information organizing software comes is a huge variety of forms and metaphors. I’ve referenced two fine articles on the subject for you convenience. These and other things I’ve read clarified my not inconsiderable knowledge of such tools. Read these articles before you test NoteMind. They provide the orientation that developers left out of their readme file and product manual.

• Litter Sorters: A Personal Evaluation of Mac Organizer Software. An article dated March 5, 2007 - http://melodien.blogspot.com/2007/03/litter-sorters-personal-evaluation-of.html

• Organize those Documents, Notes & Thoughts, jennsbl's gems, by Jennifer Landefeld, May 5, 2007 - http://www.jennsbl.com