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I have to admit to being in awe how far ahead of the world the Ecco programmers were.

The Ecco data itself is a model of elegant simplicity. (Understanding the underlying model can help you understand how best to use Ecco. If someone thinks it would be useful, I'd be willing to write up something -- but "columns are folders are columns" is a pretty good short summary.) The real magic is that the same data can be shown, arranged, and filtered in a gazillion different ways.

As I fantasize about having a more modern Ecco, I'm not put off much by the thought of having to re-implement (and perhaps slightly enhance) the data model. I'm put off by the notion of having to re-build the very powerful -- and user-extensible -- GUI.

The underlying Ecco data is available through its API, if one wants to write code to display it (and potentially to make changes, though obviously that comes with a bit more risk). Information about the current state of the GUI is not available through the API, which makes it likely that some things would take more setup than we'd like. (For example, the folder hierarchy -- needed for display of multi-folder columns -- is not available.)

What is it that you want to be "more modern"? If you're looking for XP look-and-feel, I've got no sympathy. (Remember when MS said that an advantage of Windows was that all programs looked the same, so you didn't have to re-learn each from scratch? I hate using a computer which has been "themed" in some fashion so I can't tell which window has the focus...)

There are capabilities I wish were there, and I know I could build some of them. A "flattener" is one thing I've already discussed in this forum. Another example: more powerful "snapshot" filtering is possible -- that is, a program could make a Checkmark folder have the right values to reflect almost any desired filter. (However, if you wanted that folder to be automatically updated as you make changes, as it would be if that filtering capability were built into Ecco, that's more difficult.)

J. Merrill / Analytical Software Corp 11/8/2002

I have not used current versions of Zoot or TreePad. However...

It's my impression that TreePad does little more than what the "outlining" part of Ecco does. It doesn't do it particularly better or particularly worse.

The magic of Ecco is that each "item" (an entry at any level of an outline) can be associated with as many "folders" as you want. When you view the contents of a folder (in a notepad), you see the items that are associated with the folder (and you see the associations of each item with other folders in columns of the notepad). The key is that you are seeing the item itself, not some kind of duplicate. If you change an item in one notepad, it is changed -- and everywhere else that you see the item will reflect the change.

I do not think that TreePad has any notion similar to Ecco's folders, or the ability to see multiple views of the same information. You could, I believe, do everything that TreePad does by simply ignoring the Ecco folders/columns -- but doing so would not take advantage of what Ecco does that makes it special.

It's my impression that Zoot has some of the "same item can be viewed and edited in more than one place" magic that's in Ecco. It apparently has more powerful tools for automatically associating an item with (what Ecco calls) a folder, but that setting those up is a lot of work.

My impression is that Zoot's outlining is related to the way its folders are arranged, and that the ability to manipulate an item as an outline is limited.

As a software developer myself, the fact that Ecco's data (but not its UI, unfortunately) is available for manipulation by software that I right is a Very Good Thing. It's my belief -- perhaps looking through rose-colored glasses -- that I could provide just about any auto-assign or filter feature that I want, by having the ability to manipulate Ecco's data in a program I write.

If either TreePad or Zoot "surfaces" its data to programmers, I don't know it.

If you are going to have a very large amount of information, the ability of Zoot to manipulate the contents of multiple files at once could be valuable. In Ecco, you can't see data in multiple files at once without duplicating it (or writing your own software).

If there are multiple people working on the same data, Ecco's ability to set up a "shared file" and automatically synchronized replicas for each user is unsurpassed. (If one user adds a new outline entry under some existing item, everyone else viewing that item will see it change -- almost instantly. Similarly, new folders and notepads are (if public) visible to others immediately.)

Nothing in the information I've seen about Zoot suggests that you can have multiple users manipulating the same Zoot data files at one time. I don't think TreePad does that either.

Can you tell that I'm pretty firmly in the Ecco camp?

Good luck.

J. Merrill / Analytical Software Corp 11/8/2002

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