Showing posts with label Personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Personal. Show all posts

Sunday, November 3, 2013

ConnectedText 6 review: Personal wiki adds long-requested features

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
ConnectedText 6 screenshot ConnectedText 6 $40.00 If you've used and liked older versions of ConnectedText, this upgrade is well worth it. If you think you might need a personal wiki, check out the trial.

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Offline personal wiki tool ConnectedText is ideal for college students, researchers, writers, and anyone else who needs the ability to mix freeform text with keywords and structure, or to perform queries and aggregations based on arbitrary criteria. The new version 6 adds long-needed enhancements to content aggregation, display, and searching.

ConnectedText 6 screenshotAt long last, you can open multiple views of the same project in ConnectedText.

With ConnectedText ($40. 30-day free trial), you create projects composed of topics. Editing a topic requires toggling into edit mode and using a simple markup language that rapidly becomes second nature. Flipping out of edit mode renders the topic according to a style sheet. Those who know CSS can edit the style sheet or enhance it in many ways, but I've found the default to be perfectly fine.

Enclosing any word or phrase in brackets marks a link. Click the link to create a topic (if it exists already, you just jump to it). This makes content creation highly dynamic, for people who tend to think while they write. At the same time, those with more organized minds can create a topic fully, then go back and mark up keywords that deserve topics of their own.

ConnectedText 6 screenshotThe built-in browser lets you drag URLs into your topic.

Flexibility is a watchword in ConnectedText. You can use attributes, categories, and properties to organize or find topics, or rely on full text queries. You can create very long topics, or split information into dozens of small topics, which can then be displayed as a single large topic by using queries or by explicitly including a set of topics, or both.

ConnectedText 6 adds a new feature named "blocks." You can surround a block of text with tags to give it a name, then include this block, by name, in another topic—or all blocks with the same name. For example, you might have many topics which all contain some text relevant to "London". You can enclose those blocks in the "London" tag, then create another topic which shows all the blocks with that name (or only the blocks with that name, which also appear in a topic in the category "England", or a wide range of other options.)

ConnectedText 6 screenshotConnectedText allows you to view your project as a web of connections.

For any given project, you can only have one editing window, but you can now open multiple views into a single project in floating windows. This much-needed enhancement makes working with large projects much easier. Anyone who has used ConnectedText extensively would probably find this feature alone worth the upgrade.

There are many other enhancements as well, such as a "trash can" to allow recovery of deleted topics, and the usual round of bug fixes and small upgrades.

ConnectedText is not intended for group or online use. Its primary audience is individual users who manage a lot of non-tabular information (though clever use of properties, attributes, and queries can produce an approximation of a structured database, doing so is like using a screwdriver as a hammer). As a consequence, it really shows its strength in how many ways it offers to present, organize, and collate disparate bits of information, and the features in ConnectedText 6 play to those strengths.

ConnectedText 6 screenshotIf you prefer, you can view your project as an ordered tree.

A 30-day trial with no feature limitations (just a watermark and a startup reminder) should provide anyone curious about the potential of ConnectedText to test it thoroughly.


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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Earth Day and the Power of Personal Connections

Today is Earth Day, and in 2011 we are encouraged by the Earth Day Network to join its “people-powered” campaign of pledging our acts of environmental service, with the goal of reaching a billion Acts of Green by 2012. It’s no secret that as a company, Adobe has been at the forefront of implementing green operating practices – in fact, we were the world’s first business to achieve four Platinum-level certifications for energy and environmental design excellence by the U.S. Green Building Council.

This year I also find myself reflecting on the various ways that our enterprise technology helps organizations leverage green business practices that ultimately help them decrease their environmental footprint, while increasing business efficiency and connecting people across geographies and time zones.

Acrobat solutions allow our customers to reduce the use of paper documents, while Adobe Connect makes it possible for people to collaborate and communicate globally in real time, helping reduce business travel and its related environmental impact.

For example, the U.S. Government Printing Office was able to save 20 million tons of paper over five years by using Acrobat and LiveCycle to generate, authenticate and share documents electronically. Adobe Connect enabled more than 50,000 SAP employees to communicate around the world instantly, reducing the company’s travel by as much as 90%.

And all along we have been focused with our Customer Experience Management platform on delivering highly personalized, engaging online interactions between enterprises and their customers to power great customer experiences that build brand loyalty without all the environmental damage caused by burning fuel for worldwide travel and wasting paper when electronic means would suffice.

That’s why I found it so interesting when I heard recently about an acquaintance who received a personal, handwritten note – not a personalized email – from leading online retailer Amazon.com, thanking him for his business over the past nine years.  That act of personal outreach had a marked impact.  He not only felt valued by Amazon.com after receiving this note, he now associates a human face with the company.

Can this be done in more environmentally friendly ways?  Of course it can.  Record a quick Flash video and send it on to someone you want to thank.  Send them a personalized PDF portfolio complete with pictures of past experiences together.  The Amazon story is about personal touch – about a real person inside a company reaching out to another real person to establish trust and loyalty.  Just because we are using greener means to communicate doesn’t mean we have to lose the essence of one-to-one personal communication.  In fact in many cases the technology allows us to do it more effectively.

This act of a real person at Amazon.com reaching out to a customer in a very personal way underscores the desire for us to connect with each other, even in our always-on, always-connected online business and personal lives.

We have powerful technology that enables us to know our customers and connect across geographies without the need to ever leave our offices — and that’s a great thing. Yet, we shouldn’t forget that behind the technology lie people.

And so on this Earth Day, I’m going to follow the “people-powered” examples of the Earth Day Network and leverage our great technologies to send something personal – you should do the same!

– Rob

Follow me on Twitter for more perspectives.


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