I have been a long time user of Infoselect and mostly satisfied but I have become increasingly concerned with its proprietary .wd2 file format. This is really unacceptable. My data are valuable and having them held hostage to a proprietary format is outrageous. Even Microsoft has had to change their proprietary format for Word and Excel documents.

For this reason I purchased AllMyNotes (AMN) hoping that it would be more open. But now I look at AMN's export formats and all I see is RTF, HTML, and TXT files. These formats cannot reliably represent all the data types in the ddb files.

What is needed is for Vladonai software to publish your ddb data file format openly and to keep updating your description of the format as you make changes to it. Otherwise, if I start using AMN, I will trade one closed format for another.

OPML export has been promised on this forum since 2011 but although it would be a good first step it does not really solve the problem. Depending on how you implement the OPML, it may not be possible to export my data to another program accurately.

Otherwise there really is not a strong enough reason for me to switch to AMN. Like many Infoselect users, I just use the basic features and it has proven to be a reliable program over decades of use. So I think that being open about your format would show a strong difference between you and Miclog, the developer of Infoselect, and would give me a reason to start using your program.

OPML format import/export will be added as time will allow, but do not expect that it will be used as primary storage format - OPML is not reliable for storing huge amounts of data in real-time, not optimized for high performance, and not secure at all. It can be used only to give you additional assurance that we will not lock your data (and we are doing our best to assure you - particularly, AllMyNotes doesn't stops working even after license expiration, we provide Free edition which is really 100% free and simply works no matter what). None one of our competitors are using public/open-source file format as well, particularly there is no such format which can match all demanded criterias.

From our end we'we invested huge amount of time to develop truly amazing file format, which is at the same time super-fast, reliable (even self-healing), scaleable (no limit on amount of stored data), safe (encrypted on low-level even when no password assigned), and has many other advantages, I bet nearly none of our competitors can say that they've something at least similar to our data storage format.

As a matter of fact, we have almost zero reports of data corruption/loses, even as result of disk/system failures. I can compare because in the beginning of our work, when data format was only in the early development stage and we had no self-healing feature, almost daily we've received questions how to restore data which was lost as result of accidental system crash. As f today, we have no report of this kind, everything works a charm :)