Celtx -- Anyone aware of this program?
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Posted by Dr Andus
May 12, 2013 at 12:36 PM
Gary Carson wrote:
Outliner 4D is basically a combination of a traditional outliner with an
>index card view. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t work that well in
>practice. The outliner’s OK, but the index card view is unreadable
>because the program tries to cram everything together to fit onto the
>screen. What you end up with are a lot of very thin vertical lines of
>text that only contain the first few words of a scene description. It’s
>almost impossible to read vertical text. You can expand the index card
>view, zooming in on particular cards, but there’s no way to get a
>universal overview of the entire outline. That’s a deal-killer as far as
>I’m concerned and it boggles my mind that the designers would make such
>a goofy design decision.
Yes, I’m also starting to think that it was the design decision to lay out the outline horizontally, rather than vertically, which is crippling the Timeline view in O4D. If you could rotate the view by 90 degrees counterclockwise (i.e. present the outline horizontally, as is standard), then the whole sorry business of having to read vertical lines would disappear.
What other software are out there that could lay out an outline in table form whereby the hierarchy moves from left to right (the sub-tasks stay within the overall rows of the parent tasks)? Off the bat I can think of TreeSheets. The main principle is the same, i.e. that the parent is a box, and all children are boxes within their parents’ boxes. Nevertheless TreeSheets doesn’t quite present the sub-tasks in a horizontal view.