Comments on: Ecco Pro — back from the dead, again

By: Greg Newell

Greg Newell — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:49:12 +0000

Good programs don’t die, the people using them do. Then the program dies. It’s a slow painful death. Ecco is still one of the most valuable programs on my computer.

By: YSWT

YSWT — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:18:36 +0000

As the author/creator of the (free) “default.ect” template fix, note to the unwary– don’t pay compusol any money for it. (Nor for the EccoPro install, also available for free.)

If anyone can’t find free, just ask in the ecco_pro forum.

By: Friedhelm Dohmann

Friedhelm Dohmann — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:37:38 +0000

If you have a problem installing EccoPro in the latest operating systems, or the Palm HotSync and the Vista/Windows 7 EccoPro “Help” problem, CompuSol created a brand-new 32-bit installation package and a 64-bit EccoPro installation for Vista and Windows 7 available at http://www.compusol.org/ecco/. The zipped packages have fully automated Windows installations which will create a desktop icon and also allow you to ad or remove your EccoPro program. Both packages will install all necessary registry entries including the Palm conduits, the for Vista and Windows 7 necessary MS Help programs plus the “default.ect” template fix.

By: Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Ecco in the cloud with Amazon

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:17:32 +0000

[...] readers here know of my dependence on and infatuation with an ancient application called Ecco Pro. It’s the outliner I have used to run my life and [...]

By: Pierre

Pierre — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:19:10 +0000

The ideal information management app must be an excellent outliner with multiple parents support (when required), an excellent linker (i.e. like the web), an excellent tagger, an excellent editor supporting rich text editing in the outline AND in a second rich text window, support flat and tree-structured display with or without a data grid, usable as a flexible database supporting calculations and reporting and an have excellent search engine. Plus it needs to have a customizable UI, support drag-drop and have links to all other major apps.

Only if you have all these features can you adequately organize all kinds of information, not just a specific kind.
Yes Ecco is/was an excellent outliner+data grid, but had no item to item linker, and forced structured tree representation, which may or may not suit the specific information or the way a particular person wants to work/organize its information. It had rich text outlines and customizable UI but for the rest, the above features were not great or not there at all. If Ecco-Ext is an amazing effort to bring a second life to Ecco, even with Ecco-Ext, most of the above features are missing.

SQLNotes development started 4 years ago and is now in beta tests. It takes the best of Ecco, and improves upon it, taking the concept much further. It has ALL of the above features.

The current beta available at http://www.sqlnotes.net is very stable. You are all welcomed to download a free copy.

By: Chet

Chet — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:07:22 +0000

(Sorry, premature post)

That said, I was a user of Ecco back in the day, and I’m not sure that OO can truly replace it across the board. That’s not to say people aren’t trying; OO is being used as a platform for a variety of things, including implementations of David Allen’s GTD cult. It doesn’t have built-in PIM functions, though; it’s just a powerful outliner with scripting support.

By: Chet

Chet — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:06:02 +0000

“Outliner + grid” aptly describes one way of working with OmniOutliner, which is a great program from the Omni Group. It’s Mac-only, but I’ve seen people make platform switches for sillier reasons.

By: Scott Rosenberg

Scott Rosenberg — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:47:45 +0000

Thanks for the tip on sqlnotes — looks interesting, I’ll check it out.

One of those program names that doesn’t exactly reach out beyond the geek crowd, though :-)

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:25:07 +0000

The thing that would be quite easy to copy from Ecco was the combination of an outline pane with a spreadsheet-type grid. There is a programme trying to do just that, called sqlnotes.

What would be harder — and I think this is where Chandler came unstuck — is to fill in the missing bits of Ecco’s functionality, which are, essentially Email and other message hoarding. When the program was first released, keeping contact records was really a matter of writing down what people told you on the phone. Things are more complicated now. Most of my contacts with anyone today are electronic, and to keep up the usefulness and intuitive simplicity of Ecco there, it would have to handle email. That isn’t trivial.

Curiously, Eco’s calendaring and workgroup functions still seem entirely fine to me. In any case, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch at all to synch Ecco’s Calendar with Google’s. There are apis at both ends. It is sad that this is what Chandler ended up doing.

By: Ehud

Ehud — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 07:39:16 +0000

That’s the irony!
If this was clear from the Ecco story (as well as others), it’s ironic that people attempted the Chandler project…