It is from v.7 that I continue to take a close look to biblioscape as an academic tool for organizing and writing research papers. The program is great, and - if I understood correctly - it is mainly a one-man-work. This is faboulous. Yet, there are drawbacks (apart price!) in adopting it from a customer point of view. In random order:
a) high learning curve (I know that the new manual may help. Yet, still one needs to read and learn it)
b) fear of not been reliable (probably it is reliable, yet the fear persists and it is based on i) one-man-work and if he goes away....; ii) absence of one unique saved file, where is my work? iii) there are some bugs or small inconsistencies that reinforce the point)
c) lock-in effect against more standard applications (endnote, zotero, etc.)
d) high switch costs in terms of habit in doing writing, web search etc.
May I suggest the following point that it is used in some programs, like ultrarecall, and that is very well exploited in (the new add-in) writing outliner. Instead to make your full writing editor, why not give to biblioscape the possibility to run in a frame-window MS Word (or other somewhat popular writing editors: I would like Framemaker for instance, the old v.6 and 7 are very light of RAM and very fast). The easiest solution is to exploit (Ultrarecall and many other applications do this) Internet Explorer engine which can show the whole frame of MS Word documents. In fact I can open a MS Word file in biblioscape web mode, read and edit it. Yet the save and recover features are very difficult to be carried out. So,
1) Is it possible to substitute your word editor with MS Word frame, as use the latter instead? I know that there is the biblioscape add-in for Word, but here one could have MS Word as add-in editor to biblioscape!
2) Is it possible to run Maxthon, or other IE based browsers in biblioscape, instead of your web-mode: they are free, and they have much more features for browsing than the features that biblioscape as browser can offer?
This module philosophy could halve the a) - d) points above, and biblioscape could become an aggregator and organizer of knowledge, and the basic frame of very standard software. Thanks
Anthony
Using another program as
Using another program as inside a frame has disadvantages. If the end user doesn't have that program installed, the frame editor will not work. With our own editor, we can achieve better integration. We will not use Maxthon. We will try to have a better integrated browser. Thank you for your suggestions.
Thank you for listening. I
Thank you for listening. I can understand that there are disadvantages. Yet,
a) Word processor is a very personal thing: one does not switch it easily (the same may be said for the browser) for another one. One can do it if the latter is far far better.
b) a word processor (at least in my field: social sciences with maths) needs footnotes, an equation editor, styles with indent auto-numbers for many things (titles, subtitles, tables, figures, and equations), in biblioscape word processor there are no such things.
c) One may not be pleased, but MS Word (and increasingly Open Office) is one of the more popular standards -- if not the standard.
This is why, one resists to make a change.
Thanks again.
AQ
We do plan to have better
We do plan to have better Word integration. But Word cannot be included inside Biblioscape because there are lots of don't have Word. The new integration will be done inside Word.
I agree with science2002's
I agree with science2002's comments. Footnotes and equation editor are very important to make a dissertation in very fields of research. Probably an integration with the main word processors (like Word or Open Office) or add a resource inside biblioscape overcome such limitations.