This is the most frustrating piece of software that I know. It’s 90% right, which is what makes it harder to bear. The company that made it went made, and never put the ffort into keeping it up to date that they should have done. Nor was it ever mcuh cop as an Outliner: as Rupert once said, the only outlinish thing about the program was that the enter key didn’t work. But none of that really mattered.
What ecco did was not to help you organise your thoughts — not mine, at any rate — but to allow their proper complexity to emerge and be understood. It was a wonderful program for journalism, containing all sorts of information and the links between it, in ways that made it easy to find and understand. To have all the conversation you had had with any contact logged and filed according to the stories it illuminated was wonderful. So was the ability to tag every contact with their multiple categories: need a lesbian theologian interested in computers?
It never really recovered from Windows 2000. The “shooter” — the bit that let you quickly send information form other programs to be copied in Ecco — more or less stopped working then. But it is still the nearest approach to an intelligent dustbin there has ever been, and as such quite marvellous.
Shooter works jes’fine here on W2K. I think Arabesque, which originally made the program, did a pretty good job given that it was a small company — the big problem, the periodic corruption of the data files, got fixed by Netmanage, which bought and then abandoned it under pressure from the arrival on the scene of Microsoft with Outlook.
But could we please not talk of it as if it were dead? It’s not being developed any more, but lots of us still use it. Like you know, you’re not growing any more, but we don’t talk of you as dead.
argh
I agree I’m not dead, but I wish I weren’t still growing. Bloat is a constant problem. As software, I’m past my best.