1. In my not-so-humble opinion Info Select is the best single computer program in the known universe.
2. If I were only allowed one program on my computer, Windows or Linux, it would be Info Select. There isn’t much you can’t do with it.
3. I’ve been using it since 1992 or thereabouts.
4. I’m the only person I know who uses it.
Hmm…
There’s a lesson here. If this program’s so damn good why am I the only known user this side of the black stump?
That’s easy. Info Select is the product of Micro Logic, a company whose grasp of marketing, design, pricing and customer service are, umm, different.
What’s so great about it?
IS started life as a program for storing and retrieving random text information. Now it’s evolved into a word processor, spreadsheet, database, email client, web browser, news feeder, contact manager, calendar, form builder and organiser – I could go on, but you get the picture – all rolled into one.
Having said that, I only use it for its core function. I don’t use all those extras. I have other programs which do those things better for my purposes.
I have whole filing systems of information packed into my IS data file. I can find anything in milliseconds. Here’s how it works:
The program
Let’s say that I wish to find information about the many and varied problems folk have had networking between Vista and XP. I press the F5 key and up pops a search box. Each of the little red squares represents one note in my data store:
Now I start typing, when I get as far as “vis”all the notes which contain that string remain red, those that don’t revert to black.
I type some more. Now we only have 8 notes with the strings “vista” and “netw”. I could add and xp which might narrow the field even more, but it’s not necessary.
And finally I press the Enter key and we return to the main window. The 8 items containing my search parameters are shown in the Selector pane on the left. I click on any one to see it in the pane on the right.
Even in an IS file containing tens of thousands of notes, large and small, this search process is virtually instantaneous. You can search for words, phrases (between quotes, like Google) or for Boolean strings using the AND, OR and NOT Regular Expressions as we did above.
If you have a significant amount of data, and who doesn’t, this program is a blessing. It has been the main barrier to me in switching from Windows to Linux. Now I’ve found that I can run it in Linux using the Wine Windows program loader. Some of IS’s many functions may not work under Wine, but text and image storing and the search functions, its main raisons d’etre work splendidly and that’s good enough for me.
Rob MacDougall, historian and robot fancier, put it nicely in a comment in this post :
Info Select is a weird program with an ugly interface and a lot of unnecessary googaws, but at its heart it applies the Gmail philosophy – “search, don’t organize” to notetaking of all types. The great thing about Info Select is its blazingly fast full text search, which, like Google, renders redundant a lot of the organizing and tagging and foldering you might do.
So if I read something cool or have an idea or get a business card or find a recipe or hear a funny limerick or anything I might ever want to remember again, I just type it into Info Select and include in the text itself a few plausible tags by which I might remember it later. No muss no fuss – it feels like just writing something on a scrap of paper and shoving it in a huge drawer – except that at any future date I can just type “limerick” or “recipe” or “cool” or “Timothy Burke” and every relevant scrap of paper is instantly returned to me.
It also has a tickler feature, so I can tag a note to make itself scarce and then come back and wave itself in my face at a given future date and time. In the long run, this is the only paradigm that I can see working for me. I don’t want to have to devise some system of tagging or organization now that has to cover every possible query or project I might take on 10 years from now.
That’s it in a nutshell. In the original version there was no way of even organizing notes in a tree structure. In some ways that was a good thing. Creating a structure could be viewed as an unnecessary distraction. The search capability is so good that there’s no real need for any structure at all. As Rob said above, “search, don’t organize”.
Any downside?
If you don’t use all of its bells and whistles – and I’m sure most users don’t – it’s grossly over-priced at US$249.95. Upgrades at US$99.95 are extortion.
Editor’s note, 8 Mar 2009:
I upgraded once, from V1 to V6. If I’d known how little change there would be in my usage I wouldn’t have upgraded at all. I suspect that V1 would still run under Vista.
On the other hand, if upgrades had been, say, $20, Miclog would have earned $180 from me because I’d have upgraded every time.
There are any number of good Internet browsers available to Windows users. Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome all have their merits and they all have passionate supporters.
One less worry