Conspicuously missing from the "existing tools" section, and (as I read through the page) a troubling indicator of outcomes: index cards, well beyond "spread on a dessktop" scale.

Denis Diderot, Linnaeus, Dewey, John McFee, and numerous others have used this method.

Niklaus Luhmann's Zettelkasten (https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking...) and POIC -- pile of index cards (http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/ and https://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-p...) -- are two models that help impose a structure on chaos. Hypercard was an attemp to map index cards to computeers, and influenced both the World Wide Web and Wiki, though digitisation both adds to and subtracts from the original physical manifestation.

My own card collection is approaching 10,000 cards, at roughly 1,500 per box, and where a card can hold about 500 characters, roughly 100 words (some do, many have fewer).

(Having read, and viewed the demo.)

... what's incredibly frustrating for me is trying to convey the scale of information gathering for research, as well as types.

I'm working with my own thoughts, experiences, Web references, and published works (both books and papers, as well as other forms). The quantities I'm working with are typical of academic researchers and writers whom I admire, whose bibliographies and notes may run 100 pages or more (and are often a substantial part of a book's real value).

Some earlier descriptions:

PoIC: Pile of Index Cards
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a

Organising and planning research
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/fj5rzi8zmouyrmvg8yzzva

What I keep seeing are systems that work at toy levels (a handful of items, occasionally a few dozen, rarely hundreds of items). And nothing in Capstone's collateral communicates anything differently. My console file and email tools can (and do) work with thousands and tens of thousands of items, though providing sufficient context, both static and dynamic metadata, is a challenge.

Email does slightly better by way of (searchable) headers -- From, To, Date, and Subject, but cruicially; In-reply-to and References. These are elements email inherited from early-20th-century office communications filing systems, with the referrence chain actually predating most other fields. Where a message fits within a discussion stream is often far more important than what it says. "We kill people based on metadata" as former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden said (https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...).

(JoAnne Yates and James Beniger are among the few who've studied this field, a surprisingly interesting (to me) exploration of group communications and decisionmaking.)

A simple tool to view documents (in various formats; PDF, ePub, Mobi, djview, and sanitised, standardised HTML), look up metadata, and add this conveniently, would be a huge win. I suspect copyright concerns are a major hinderance.

For both thoughts and published works, context matters, though it's very poorly supported by existing tools, and is almost always tedious to add and verify. Dublin Core metadata is a good start (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core). My principle Android eDoc reader, Pocketbook Reader, lacks even an 'author" field, and requires multiple steps and clicks to edit, correct, or verify information. (I've ... tried reporting this -- it also lacks a useful issues-reporting mechanism.) Another tool, Pocket Reader (entirely different, now owned by Mozilla) has ben a hot mess for years, though there's been a recent update I need to explore. My observation that it gets worse the more you use it remains distressingly accurate (https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...).

(Reddit itself was something of a tool, though it's ultimately failed the test.)

What Capstone most lacks is a keyboard. I'm pecking this comment out with a stylus on an Android tablet for which I'd prchased a defective-from-the-start Logitech keyboard. Though compromised, operating near my 90 WPM typing speed, when needed is ten times faster than touch input (and increases screen space by a third to half). There is no available similar replacement keyboard -- the field apparently believes in constraining peripherals not only by mamufacturer and form factor, but to specific models and variants. A small bit of standardisation would go far.

See: Tablets and Keyboards
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/lqgtwy_rhsfbdh5cdxb1rq

Tablets are useful for their portability and consumption. After four years of constant use, and for almost wholly self-imposed limitations by vendors, litle else.

Capstone seems to follow this trend.