docFreak About Rembrand and docFreak

My name is Rembrand and I'm the developer of docFreak. I live in the Netherlands in a small village at the country side. It is near the sea and a national park. Away from the bigger cities (like Antwerp, Rotterdam and The Haque) the nature and peace here is lovely. It gives inspiration to things I never would have had in the bigger cities. Because here at the country side you see many "Macgyvers". They fix and build as much as they can by themselves. I like that so much, I realized that it is actually the way I think too. I'am self employed and as such (in day to day life) I support on ad-hoc basis my customers. They suddenly have an IT problem, they call me and I solve. Due to te nature of my work, there is not always time to plan and study the problem(s) at forehand. Because my work specializes around 4 different areas (Systems, Storage, backup/restore/DR and software development) I'm confronted with many technical details for various situations/events). Practically, I need to read and write technical manuals (for my customers) to make things work. Different customers spread accross 4 different areas of expertise demands that I keep track of what I did (and when) for each customer. It means that I have to create some sort or form of documentation that encapsulates all. All..... what is all? The documentation I normally produce contains: Overview, Old setup/Current setup, reasons of setup, configuration details, build logs/action taken to realise/solve things, system offers, delivered system components, delivered software licenses, system configurations, images and photos of the new running setup as well as emails and or other correspondence about the project/work I deliver. You already understand that this kind of documentation is not limited to a few Word documents. It will contain Word, Pdf, Powerpoint, Viso, Excel, text, zip, image, photo and other binary files. This kind of documentation can be made with Microsoft Office or its open source counter part Libre Office but it is cumbersome and a very boaring task using those office suites. Without the ability to connect, relate, group, store together, hyperlink, search and find everything instantly (that what I need), I was fed up with it. The main reason that tipped me over to do something about it, was a project meeting with a big telco customer in the Netherlands. Emails, documentation, ToDos, presentations, MS-Project, Word, Excel, Pdfs..... all came by during that meeting. However it took the presenter time and time again to search, start, stop, switch and glue all together by speech. Even though the presenter had everything grouped inside a single folder, the amount of office files and related correspondence came over as a mess. Such a big important project and what an amateurish ollection of data. The presenter could not have done better, he just had not the means/tools to handle this. At that very same moment, the idea started for a superior tool to create documentation. I jotted down in some sort of a notepad (there was no docFreak yet) what I saw myself using in the near future: A desktop tool to make the best documentation you can think of..... quick and easy with as little manual intervention as possible: - that can be used instead of Word but also work with Word - that can be used instead of Pdf but also work with Pdf - that can be used instead of a Wiki but also can be placed insite a Wiki - that allows hyperlinking - that allows pop-up notes Later on I added the following to the list of ideas: - can work with most used office file types - stores everything (including office or any other type of file) inside a portable container file - should have a spell checker like you see in WhatsApp - shows everything as an object inside a tree as an outliner - allows hyperlinking of all objects to each other - allows grouping of objects inside the tree - allows moving and copying objects inside the tree - allows shortcuts to objects inside the tree - allows objects to be tagged with keywords - allows encryption on single or multiple objects - allows secure sharing of single or multiple tree parts to other users of that same tool - should be able to store and play multi media files like audio and video - must be small and scalable to allow very small and huge container files - should be super fast - allows hyperlink with drag and drop - allows imports of files with drag and drop - allows tabbed editing - allows the container file to be portable and compatible between Android, Linux, iOS, macOS and Windows - allows the tool to be started multiple times - allows multiple instances of the tool to be started at the same time - allows standalone mode (one object per instance) - allows to start with a standard set of built-in help topics inside the tree - allows to start without any standard set of help (with a completely empty tree) - should be able to make parts of screenshots easily to store and save them I have to confess, I'm very proud that all mentioned ideas on the list have been realized insde a tool that I made. docFreak From now on your your documentation is more then just text and some images. You too should use docFreak! Would do you good ;-) Download docFreak (no registration needed).