The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Any thoughts about Onfolio?

http://www.onfolio.com/

VP
Monday, March 15, 2004

While I'd normally be negative to message board spam regardless, this one pretty much writes itself -- so what we have here is a lame ass extension to bookmarks that basically lets you type in a description amongst each of your bookmarks. WOW! Sign me up! Where can I send my $29.95 US?

.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Heh I'm not related to this product, nor my friend who brought it to my attention. It looked interesting, and I was too lazy to type much.

But it's my bad for not reviewing the product before mentioning it here. Casual mention of a commercial product like this probably sets a bad precedence and invites abuse. My apologies to the community. Feel free to delete the thread Joel.

Thank you Symbol Man, for your wisdom and showing me the error of my ways. I'm sure the community will sleep peacefullly, knowing you are there to safeguard their well being.

Your enthusiasm for the product is most contagious. Have you ever considered a career in sales?

VP
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Oh so sorry, I forgot to add a smiley:

:_)

*oodles of huggles*

VP
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Is :_) really the new :-) or is everyone too lazy to lift their finger from the shift key?

www.MarkTAW.com
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Mark,

LOL, I never thought of it like that. I thought of it as a cheeky smile.

VP
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

http://www.furl.net seems to do a lot of the stuff Onfolio does but it's completely web based (which I see as an advantage) with bookmarklets to do stuff like adding new items and it's completely free. I only discovered it a few days ago, but it's a neat solution and they seem to have covered a lot of the stuff that I want like the ability to share certain links to other people that don't have an account.

R1ch
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

"I thought of it as a cheeky smile."

I thought it was a hockey player.

sgf
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Here is why we are all in trouble.

Robert Scoble "Onfolio is the most useful .NET client app that I've seen so far."
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/03/14.html#a7016

Mike
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

I like how onfolio has a "philanthropy" description in their about us section ("Our funding priorities include k-12 education in low-income communities, environmental protection, and academic research on major disease prevention and treatment") but all they give them is registration codes.

Ron
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Mike,

Thanks for the link. The "comments" link for that weblog entry was interesting to read.

VP
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Well I looked at the flash movie and I too got the impression that it was just something that I do already using Booby http://www.nauta.be/booby/ and I use a wiki. Granted ... I have my own web server to store this information. Using bookmarkelts makes a lot of saving info easier and the great thing is I can get to any of this information from any computer that is connected to the net.

Me
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Complete copy of Net Snippets, think this handy tool has been around for 3 years. Shocked that Allaire and Cheng present it as their own, what a thiefs!

Nickolas Strohm
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Contentsaver (www.macropool.com) is much better than Onfolio, IMO. It has a nice Office application, which Onfolio lacks.
I've been using ContentSaver for some months now and now can no longer live without it! Highly recommended! You can find a trial version at www.macropool.com.

Jim Gaddart
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Hi, I'm one of the Onfolio developers.

Using a webapp is definitely another approach to the problem, and would've been easier to build, and would've given us full access to the non-IE, non-Windows market. But for the kind of ease-of-use and accessibility we wanted to give users, you really have to have a real client. For example, with Onfolio you can drag a folder of captured items into Word and having them all appear inline, or drag the same collection onto the filesystem and having them all turn into files. You can copy something to the clipboard from any app and press Ctrl-Shift-F11 to capture right into Onfolio. You can't build these features with "just" a webapp. You also can't view your content offline with a webapp.

It is a limitation of Onfolio 1.0 that you can't view your collection from just anywhere (at least without explicitly using the Publisher to post it to a webserver). We're working on that.

Symbol Man, if you only use the product the way you use Favorites, it's not a very compelling story, I agree. But if you start saving snippets, local copies of web pages, and capturing images, and doing fulltext searches on those, perhaps you might find that worth some value to you... maybe even $29.95. If you want to publish or e-mail HTML reports based on that content, you might even find it worth $79.95. Clearly Nickolas thinks NetSnippets is a good deal at $79.95/$129.95; by comparison, Onfolio is a screaming bargain.

ContentSaver has taken a different tack with their full-app mode. We actually worked really hard not to need a full-app mode; it wasn't easy squeezing all that functionality into such a small space. There were many times when we considered how much easier a full-app mode would make things, but in the end we thought users wouldn't want that. So it's pretty surprising to me to now discover at least some people think of a full-app as an important feature... very interesting, thanks!

(BTW I'm trawling through way too many forums and blog threads this week to be able to check them all. So if you post something and want a reply from me, please ping me via e-mail. Thanks...)

Joe Cheng
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Geez, sorry for the huge post. The font on the thread page is a whole lot bigger than the font in the input box.

Joe Cheng
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

I've played with Onfolio a bit and it's a nice app. I don't think it's a new concept. Apps like this have been around for a while.

I'm a bit suprised they went all out with the report generation app rather than making capture more robust and easier to use.

Why do they insist on poping up modal dialogs for things that should happen in the background? I want to be able to drag a page or a snippet to one of the folders on their toolbar and be done. I can add extra info later if I really care. And why do I need to watch the progress bar. I want to get back to browsing - I'll sort the info later.

igor
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Igor,

In fact I think we expended far more calories on capture than on the publisher. Both are technically challenging problems but capture has the added difficulty of trying to make sense of a lot of DHTML craziness that web designers put into their webpages. You'd be surprised, for example, how many websites routinely use JavaScript to rewrite their DOMs. The publisher is exposed to some of those problems but my impression is it's much worse for capture. (I could be wrong, I didn't work on either of those features.)

We went back and forth on the modal vs. non-modal capture, and actually implemented it both ways before deciding to make it modal. The arguments for modal were that the user could never lose track of the context in which the capture is happening ("When did I pop up this capture dialog, I don't remember what content this is capturing..."). In hindsight I think you're right that we made the wrong choice, and it's not a bad bet that our next release will switch back to non-modal.

Also, capture without dialog is on the list of possible features, but I for one will be voting against it.

Joe Cheng
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

My comment regarding the publisher vs capture was based purely on user-visible features. I realize that capturing is quite challenging internally, especially when dealing with dynamic sites. The publisher had full blown editing with formatting. I guess, I'm mostly interested in capture, rather than generating fancy reports. So to me, the publisher appears to be lots of work for little value. I'm sure this is different for other users.

Out of curiousity - do you use a 3rd party user control for the editor or did you write your own?

On modal vs. modelss - I think that modeless capture is the way to go. If people are concerned about context just save a link to the original page (of course this may not be possible on a dynamic site). Also, even if you show the dialog for info about the captured text, there's no reason to show modal progress dialog. This should be part of the toolbar and not preventing me from doing other stuff. For me this was the feature that totally killed interest in your product - too painful to use.

igor
Thursday, March 18, 2004