Re: One- and two-pane outliners versus hypertext

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 5302

Posted by szeoli
2006-02-18 16:00:20

Manfred,

I am in complete agreement about two-pane outliners being poor substitutes for a hearty one-pane outliner. (Unfortunately, as you point out, the PC world has a dearth of one-pane outliners.) For me the biggest drawback of two-pane outliners for structuring a set of information brought together for a single purpose is that the content of each note is too isolated from its context. In a one-pane outliner, such as GrandView, you can view the content of each note contiguously, which, I believe, is essential when evaluating ideas and thoughts that flow from one to the other… as good writing and strong arguments should. In a two-pane outliner, the information in each node is treated as an individual entity.

I presume you have looked at NoteMap from CaseSoft. In my opinion it is the best one-pane outliner for Windows, though it has many weaknesses. I’ve been intrigued by TKoutline for some time, but have been concerned about getting too attached to it because the pace of development seems very slow, and recently appears to have come to a halt. As it is, it feels like an unfinished application. I take it, however, that you do not feel that way.

Steve Z.

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