TAO Outliner (finally) updated

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Posted by Lucas
Apr 28, 2009 at 03:00 PM

I thought TAO (an unrefined but uniquely powerful outliner for Mac) was long since dead, but to my surprise it appears that it has finally been updated to run more smoothly on Leopard (along with some bug fixes). It’s always good to see an interesting outlining app come back to life.

Release notes:
http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13891/tao

New homepage:
http://d-lit.com/html_main.html

Detailed review of earlier version:
http://www.atpm.com/11.10/atpo.shtml

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 28, 2009 at 05:18 PM

Lucas,

Thank you for the heads up on this. I had recently trialed Tao and was very impressed with its power. I decided not to purchase a license because I thought it still had a few rough edges (especially with the user interface), and it had been a long while since the application was updated… like you, I thought it was dead.

Tao is truly the closest thing I’ve found to the old GrandView on any platform. It is not nearly as refined as OmniOutliner, but it is more powerful, and I think the inline text feature is stronger.

Thanks, again.

Steve Z.

Posted by Hugh
Apr 28, 2009 at 05:57 PM

Yes, thank you for this. TAO is as you say uniquely powerful (unlike OO it has clones, for example) but to some extent unrecognised, and I think this version is slightly more refined than the previous one.

It’s some while since I tried it, and I seem to remember from that experience a large and complex Style pane in which it was necessary to rummage to set up each column. That appears to have been broken up into separate palettes. But one thing hasn’t changed: go to Window > Customise Toolbar and see one of the most (initially) intimidating collections of icons in the whole of Macdom! In a way I suppose it’s a compliment by the developer to what he must believe is the willingness of his customers to get to grips with his software and their desire for ultimate outliner power.

It’s also interesting to note that he provides a means of using key-bindings that mimic those of More, which as I understand it is regarded as a classic like GrandView (though I may be wrong there - I wasn’t using outliners at the time).

I think this software it may be worth putting in the effort.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 28, 2009 at 08:38 PM

One cautionary note: On the old web site for Tao, the developer had listed a roadmap for future development, which is missing from the new site (or at least I didn’t find it). Makes me wonder if future plans have been scrapped.

Steve Z.

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