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[GentleGiant]

Originally Posted by barsoomcore

As a cautionary tale, let me warn everyone away from organizing apps that use proprietary formats.

I've used a couple and I've got burned twice. Propietary binary formats are bad for this kind of work. If something goes wrong and your program is hosed, all your data is lost.

Let me say that again:

ALL YOUR DATA IS LOST

If you haven't experienced this, you don't know what pain is. I will never, never use a program that stores information in any sort of binary format ever again.

Plain text is best -- you can have HTML or XML or whatever. RTF is not bad. Anything more complicated than that and forget about it.

Don't find out the hard way. Your campaign data is precious and you need constant access to it. Consider what might happen if that neat little program suddenly went kablooie and the company that made it went bankrupt three weeks ago. Tears, tears of hot blood I tell you.

Tears of hot blood.

Okay, I'm still bitter.

A question for barsoomcore. How does a program go "kablooie" or become "hosed" and thus become beyond repair?
If you have a program installed, let's take GSNotes as an example since it uses a proprietary format, and say a virus infects the program and screws up some of the program files. What do you do? I remove the virus, remove the entire program and re-install it. I always keep the installation files separate from my running programs (usually backed up on a CD). That way I can always re-install any programs if necessary (also handy if you have to re-install your OS). It doesn't matter if the original owners/makers of a given program goes bye-bye, you still have all you need to re-install the program again.
Since the actual information files are separate files (.gso in this case) they shouldn't be affected by any problems with the program proper. So no data is lost.
Of course, you can lose the .gso files themselves e.g. due to bad sectors on your harddrive, but neither plain text nor html files are exempt from such happenstances either.
Granted, if a program ONLY uses plain text or html, then you have the option of opening those files up in other programs, but most of the programs mentioned in this thread can export to .txt or .html files.

On to the rest of you guys (gals?).
It would be really nifty if those of you who have organized your campaign(s) using various programs could put up some screen shots of various pages/trees/configurations/templates/etc. that you use. That would make it easier to gain a better insight into how the various programs can be used when organizing a campaign. Some have already done so, but it would be nifty if more different programs were represented or even the same programs if someone has done it differently than what has already been shown.
What say you? Anyone willing to share?