Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

In WhizFolders, we avoided using any other RTF or HTML editor control from other companies. We decided to use Microsoft RichEdit control as the note editor in spite of the fact that it is quite complex to use, especially for OLE stuff like displaying pictures. Why did we go to all that trouble? The idea is that we want you to easily exchange RTF text with Microsoft Word, Wordpad and other RTF editors. Unless you can exchange text easily, it is difficult to work with many software tools. And, using Windows effectively means being able to use many tools together, isn’t it?

There’s more. WhizFolders now uses the latest unicode-enabled RichEdit. This means even more RTF compatibility. For example, the tables copied from Microsoft Word now display very well in your WhizFolders Deluxe notes.

Using the RichEdit also means being able to insert OLE objects. Try inserting a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet by Insert Object in a WhizFolders note. You will be delighted. Moreover, we have made our own little innovations in RichEdit–easy hyperlinks that can be typed, nested lists and so on. We will continue to use newer RichEdit controls as they are released by Microsoft.

We think no one uses RichEdit as well as we do:)

Theoretically, WhizFolders has the following constraints or limits. But you should also look at the practical tips given.

1. The file size of a document should stay under 2 GB.
2. A topic can be as large as a GB but it is not practical as it slows down the browsing (clicking on a topic to see it). Each person has a different perception of what is slow. You will find your own limit. When browsing the list becomes irritating, it is time to break the topic into several. In fact, the whole design of WhizFolders encourages breaking of information into pieces for easier management and reviewing. You can always join many (or all) pieces to make a large document to paste in a word processor.
3. WhizFolders uses a very smart virtual listing technology to list the topics. The whole tree list is loaded without loading the text of names themselves. The names are obtained from the file and displayed dynamically as you scroll the list. Hence, the number of topics do not matter much. There is no limit as such on the number of parents, children, etc.
4. The virtual scheme doesn’t put too much strain on memory too. The only objects in memory are the topic name pointers as above and the topic contents for only those topics which are being viewed or edited.
5. There is no limit on number of topics but if the list is too large, it might slow down certain operations like adding a new topic where it has to resolve a unique internal name for it. You have to find your own limit depending on how the speed of operations affects you. We have even seen cases having more than 5000 topics in one file.