Mar 08
Two weeks ago, Claude emailed me and asked
Could you possibly give me (maybe in a future post) an evaluation of Onfolio. I have downloaded the free offer several months ago but never installed it. I would like to know indication, contraindication, bugs if any and what you can and can’t do with this program.
I’ve been thinking about what to write, and have been hesitating. However, there’s a new post on DownloadSquad, talking about how Microsoft has just bought Onfolio.
The big M will be adding Onfolio onto its Windows Live Toolbar as a free offering. I’m sure that won’t go well with those who ponied up $99 for their copies of Onfolio, but hey, now the rest of the world can share the wealth of your ’seed funding’. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does with the Firefox integration of Onfolio, since nearly everything that is going into the Live strategy requires the proprietary Internet Explorer browser.
Enough is enough I said ;) I don’t have anything against Microsoft, but I figured this was a sign that I should just sit down and write this post. So, here are my two cents about Onfolio.
- Fortunately, I’m one of the lucky people that managed to get a free version of Onfolio way back in the summer, when they were offering free copies for whatever reason. That’s the only reason I actually used it so long, since I wasn’t about to spend $99 for it.
- Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very well executed program and it quite lovely to use, but I use it solely for entertainment purposes and can’t justify paying that much money for it.
- Just for entertainment you say? But why? It’s a great product for organizing your research. Here, I have to agree, if this was the only software I was using for my research. Unfortunately, Onfolio kept coming in second to my EverNote for research. I did force myself to use Onfolio for a few weeks, dutifully collecting things from the web, including pdfs of articles to read for research, etc. etc., but I found that I really wasn’t using it well. There were a couple of reasons for this.
- I organized Onfolio into several collections, say Home, Main, Research, etc. With the personal version (as opposed to Student or Professional), you can’t search across collections. So, to find something, I would have to first figure out where I would have put it.
- I found the search a tad slow, and a bit frustrating. Hard to figure out how to get back to the main category. Doable, but not intuitive.
- Anything that was put directly into Onfolio gets sucked into a collection file on my hard drive. These are not indexable/searchable by my Copernic Desktop Search. So, if I want to be able to find something both through CDS and Onfolio, I had to first save it to my hard drive, and then import it as a link into Onfolio. Too many steps. With that many steps, I could do the same thing and then bring a shortcut into EverNote, which is what I ended up doing.
- I thought about getting the Academic version, but I don’t use EndNote for my references. And figuring out how to port from EndNote to Bibtex just didn’t seem to be worth the effort, or the extra cash outlay. So, I stayed with the personal version.
- One of the biggest annoyances was the counter-intuitive ways of opening the documents that were linked in. If you double-click on a link, you end up getting a doc or pdf in “read-only” mode. You have to either right-click on it, or hit the proper icon to get it to open in edit mode. To me, this is counter-intuitive and I can’t count how many times I opened something, did something, and then lost the changes because I didn’t open in the right way.
On the plus side, Onfolio is really good at doing what it says it does. Unfortunately, I just didn’t find it as flexible as just using EverNote to capture snippets/clippings and then write notes (with formatting and including images) about them.
And I have to say that Onfolio’s tech support is excellent.
I realized that I wasn’t using Onfolio for research anymore when I realized that I hadn’t opened it, except for the RSS reader, in weeks! So, I finally killed all but one of my collections and imported the stuff back into my regular filing system. The one category I kept basically keeps a few links to web sites that offer good time-killing things. Again, for entertainment only.
So it turned out that I was using Onfolio solely as an RSS reader. And man, is it a good reader! You can organized into folders, use the space bar to move from story to story, send stuff to a reading list for future perusal, etc. etc. All within the confines of FireFox, with excellent integration. So, I could still access the EverNote clipper, etc.
Then, I read an interesting post by Merlin Mann on 43 folders about killing your RSS feeds. It struck a chord with me. I realized that I was a slave to my RSS feeds, salivating when I saw bold in the Onfolio pane. And I couldn’t just read one, I had to read them all! So I tried an experiment and turned off the automatic updating. I’m still experimenting with whether this makes me more productive, or just more likely to hit the refresh button. But it did highlight the fact that I had a very expensive piece of software all the time that I wasn’t using. After all, I don’t need to have Onfolio running all the time if I’m not letting it automatically update the feeds. So, I thought about replacing it with something more lightweight.
I haven’t quite decided to do so yet, just because it is just a darn good reader, that I didn’t have to pay alot for. I have looked at a few other options, such as BlogLines and Omeo. But I didn’t like them that much either. Right now I’m putting GreatNews through its paces. So far, it’s keeping up with me. Not as pretty as Onfolio, but lighter, and a bit more flexible, i.e., I can still see feeds that I’ve already read, if I want to. But, the jury is still out on who’s going to win.
As for whether or not you should use Onfolio, it really depends on what you want. If it’s going to be the only program you use to capture information from the internet, go right ahead. It will do that superbly. If you think you can incorporate both Onfolio and some other note-taking software, give it a whirl, even if just for a trial. If you want an amazing RSS reader, that too is a good use (although I wouldn’t pay $99 for an RSS reader). Hopefully this post helps :)
