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What a good Outliner should have
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Posted by dan7000
Mar 7, 2010 at 04:05 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>
>An outliner, in my view, is
>primarily a thinking and writing tool. As such, it should facilitate the capture of
>your own thoughts and ideas, allow you to explore them with quick, easy
>re-organization tools. It should allow you to change the scope of the view of your
>information quickly, zooming in on details or zooming out to get the bigger
>picture.
>
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any good contenders for providing this functionality in Windows anymore. Stephen, I forget what you use for Outlining, but I’m thinking maybe you have switched to Mac. I used ADM for a long time, and have found no good replacement.
I wonder if the problem with Windows is similar to a problem I noticed regarding restaurants:
Yesterday my wife and I were talking about the problem that there are no sit-down restaurants open for breakfast in downtown San Francisco before 10 am on weekends. We concluded that maybe Starbucks is driving full-service restaurants out of the area: There is at least 1 Starbucks per block in downtown SF, and Starbucks provides most of what most people want before 10 am (coffee and donuts). Unfortunately, they don’t provide what we were looking for (omelettes and sit-down service). And because Starbucks is there, no full-service restaurant can make enough money to stay open before 8 am, because they can’t sell anything to the majority of people who just want coffee and donuts.
Perhaps in Windows, MS Word provides outliner functionality that’s analogous to Starbucks’s breakfast offerings. It’s just good enough to satisfy what the vast majority want in an outliner, and thus keeps more full-featured outliner offerings from succeeding in Windows. And as MS Word adds more outliner features, the problem will only get worse. (Just as, when Starbucks started offering oatmeal, the restaurant problem got worse).
I’m sure that business-school folks probably have a name for this phenomenon. Maybe they know the solution, too. It seems to me the only solutions would be increasing the market for full-featured outliners or decreasing the cost of entry. (For instance, in Houston, where it is far cheaper to open a restaurant than in SF, there are tons of Starbucks and also plenty of full-service breakfast restaurants). Maybe Mac has a lower cost of entry for some reason—or maybe Word has less of a foothold on Macs.
Posted by Lucas
Mar 7, 2010 at 07:21 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>
>Unfortunately, there don’t
>seem to be any good contenders for providing this functionality in Windows anymore.
>Stephen, I forget what you use for Outlining, but I’m thinking maybe you have switched
>to Mac. I used ADM for a long time, and have found no good replacement.
>
Indeed. I just recently started using ADM for the first time, and despite certain glaring issues, I’m hooked. I had never tried it before because it seemed so obscure and out of date, and various people on this forum had warned about its myriad problems, not the least of which was a seemingly unbalanced if manicly brilliant developer. But I came across it again through some focused web searches, and after reading more about “Doc View”, I decided it might have what I was looking for. Indeed, the combination of a good writing environment with powerful organizational features like hoist, “super-hoist”, cloning, and columns makes it unparalleled. At first the absence of an undo functioned seemed like a deal-breaker, but I’m finding I can work with it. Anyway, perhaps this should be a separate thread.
Posted by Lucas
Mar 7, 2010 at 07:25 PM
Lucas wrote:
>
> the combination of a good writing environment with
>powerful organizational features like hoist, “super-hoist”, cloning, and columns
>makes it unparalleled.
I should clarify that IQ is probably a close parallel. But the data-centric feel of IQ isn’t (yet) quite as inviting for one-pane outlining/writing of prose, although I may not have experimented enough with the formatting and display options.
Posted by Hugh
Mar 7, 2010 at 08:59 PM
dan7000 wrote:
Maybe Mac has a lower cost of entry for some
>reason—or maybe Word has less of a foothold on Macs.
I don’t have first-hand access to the facts, but my understanding dan is that you are correct on both counts.
Word does have appear to have less of a foothold on Macs, possibly because MS seems to have pushed less investment into recent products for the platform.
And as far as I know Apple’s developer tools, whilst not all that Mac developers would wish them to be, are less expensive than the equivalent tools for Windows, possibly in some cases free of charge. This appears to have fertilised the Mac small-developer seedbed disproportionately by comparison with Windows’.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Mar 7, 2010 at 10:52 PM
Interesting synchronicity here - I’ve just spent a half hour or so wistfully looking at ADM, wondering if I should revert to it, wondering if it is risky because I have lost my registration data and not sure how long it’ll keep working on this computer, wondering if I should try and get hold of Arne, the former partner of ADM who is reachable in Vancouver (Eric presumably still in China).
ADM, had it continued to develop, would be at the top of the heap today. Many of the features you’ve mentioned were suggested by users such as Jan, back in the time when Eric was open to hearing what people wanted. Many people spent hours and hours beta testing ADM, sending feedback and, to Eric’s credit, he was prompt at incorporating it.
In my own personal hurt over the way Eric responded to Jan, myself, and others, I both took shots at Eric and attempted to get meaningful response from Arne. After a while Arne no longer responded to communication. I suspect he too was left in the lurch by Eric.
In the windows world, with the possible exception of InfoQube, there is no outliner/PIMS/knowledge manager which comes close to what ADM was when Eric disengaged from the world prior to the Beijing Olympics.
Eric had a great vision for how ADM would plug into the information superhighway. While technology may have eclipsed that vision, there’s no doubt that as a result of it, he also had a perceptive vision for how ADM could evolve, and what would make it an effective tool.
Eric’s view of the world was encompassing. I came across some material on the problem solving methodology known as TRIZ today, quite by chance. My partner’s daughter is in engineering, and so I printed it out for her. The only reason I knew about TRIZ was because Eric, in what I recall was ADM 3, included information on TRIZ.
It was because of that I ended up looking at ADM today, before finding your references to it.
At one time, James Fallows, the National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and a great Zoot advocate, had written of the promise of ADM. I believe James may have actually met Eric in China. I don’t know if others had told James about ADM, but I had emailed him about the program. The upshot was a phone conversation with him, and the assurance he would download the program. He was true to his word.
If anyone has Arne’s address, please forward this note to him. Or to Eric, for that matter, if anyone is in contact with him.
And let them know at least a few people are lamenting still the loss of ADM development because no program has matched it. InfoQube is close, but its instructions (and right now the cost) are beyond me. UltraRecall is good, but its developers have not yet taken seriously the need for simple English, and explaining built-in quirks.
I’d love to know who has rights to the ADM code. Is it possible that arrangements could be made to again develop ADM, perhaps funded by a group of people who might commit to a monthly subscription? As it is now, ADM with some mods to take into account tech changes in the last few years, is market ready.
Daly
Lucas wrote:
>dan7000 wrote:
>>
>>Unfortunately, there don’t
>>seem to be any good contenders for
>providing this functionality in Windows anymore.
>>Stephen, I forget what you use
>for Outlining, but I’m thinking maybe you have switched
>>to Mac. I used ADM for a long
>time, and have found no good replacement.
>>
>
>Indeed. I just recently started using
>ADM for the first time, and despite certain glaring issues, I’m hooked. I had never
>tried it before because it seemed so obscure and out of date, and various people on this
>forum had warned about its myriad problems, not the least of which was a seemingly
>unbalanced if manicly brilliant developer. But I came across it again through some
>focused web searches, and after reading more about “Doc View”, I decided it might have
>what I was looking for. Indeed, the combination of a good writing environment with
>powerful organizational features like hoist, “super-hoist”, cloning, and columns
>makes it unparalleled. At first the absence of an undo functioned seemed like a
>deal-breaker, but I’m finding I can work with it. Anyway, perhaps this should be a
>separate thread.