“Xiipy Search – Desktop/OneNote Beta”

1. On February 18th, 2008 at 5:59 am Jim Doria Says:

   I tried this out. It seems to work OK, although it seems to “wrap around” OneNote rather than running as an add-in. When you run it, OneNote appears with the Xippy icon. Kinda weird.

   But more importantly, it seems to cast a very wide net and there's no way to tweak its results. It looked like it was doing a web search on EVERY word on the page. A lot of the results seemed irrelevant, especially the image results. (One such result on a medical-themed note page was a picture from Pulp Fiction?) I settle for even switching off image results, but I didn't see how this would work.

   So while Xippy might have some usefulness, it's probably more efficient to manually search for just the things you want to find out about than to sort through its long list of results. The Research features in OneNote make this easy enough. Maybe once they add the ability to filter search results or tweak the search parameters, this will be more useful. If they can figure out a way to make the search more discriminating, that would help too, although it seems like a tall order.

   Also saw a small performance hit on my machine. ON seemed to hang for a bit when Xippy started searching, but there was no perceivable slowdown after the results started returning. My PC is kind of old so this might not be as noticable on a newer machine.

2. On February 18th, 2008 at 8:59 am Jim Doria Says:

   I tried this out. It seems to work OK, although it seems to “wrap around” OneNote rather than running as an add-in. When you run it, OneNote appears with the Xippy icon. Kinda weird.

   But more importantly, it seems to cast a very wide net and there’s no way to tweak its results. It looked like it was doing a web search on EVERY word on the page. A lot of the results seemed irrelevant, especially the image results. (One such result on a medical-themed note page was a picture from Pulp Fiction?) I settle for even switching off image results, but I didn’t see how this would work.

   So while Xippy might have some usefulness, it’s probably more efficient to manually search for just the things you want to find out about than to sort through its long list of results. The Research features in OneNote make this easy enough. Maybe once they add the ability to filter search results or tweak the search parameters, this will be more useful. If they can figure out a way to make the search more discriminating, that would help too, although it seems like a tall order.

   Also saw a small performance hit on my machine. ON seemed to hang for a bit when Xippy started searching, but there was no perceivable slowdown after the results started returning. My PC is kind of old so this might not be as noticable on a newer machine.

3. On March 2nd, 2009 at 2:10 pm jv Says:

   If only Onenote to integrate to a LiveID and hang in the cloud, it would be very useful for people working on 2-3 computers and collaborating.

   I present two scenarios
   ONE:
   I have two computers, one I use at work under corporate governance and I use Onenote to keep track of my clippings and notes.
   I have another computer that I use at home and would share a few projects with the work computer.
   I create a share from Home and it works reasonably ok

   TOW:
   I have collaborators who would like access to a certain project to deposit their notes and relevant clipping.
   Now, how do I accomplish that using Onenote?