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What a good Outliner should have
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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Mar 7, 2010 at 10:59 PM
Lucas, you say you recently started using ADM?
I’m curious to know how you went or will go about registering it? Is there still a way to do that?
My understanding (see my longer note from earlier today under this topic) is that ADM is no longer developed, and that one can no longer buy and register it.
Thanks.
Daly
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 8, 2010 at 04:28 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.
Dan,
I agree that Windows seems a wasteland of good outliners, at least as I’ve defined “outliner.” I live in both the Mac and Windows worlds: Mac for home/personal computing and Windows at work. The truth is, I’m not thrilled with any of the outliners available in either platform, though Mac certainly is a bit more robust with OmniOutliner and Tao, although Tao appears to be a bit of an orphan at this point.
In Windows, I think the best current outliner is Brainstorm, though it does require stretching your concept of what an outliner looks like. MaxThink is the most full-featured outliner, but it is way too quirky for me, I’m afraid. Inspiration is acceptable, and produces the best looking outlines. An overlooked option, I think, is SuperNoteCard from Mindola.
I’m not sure why so few developers want to produce outliners for Windows. Perhaps you are right about Word’s impact.
Steve Z.
Posted by Hugh
Mar 8, 2010 at 05:06 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>
>
>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.
Dan
Been cudgelling my memory since reading your very nice analogy, and I have a name long buried for at least half the phenomenon you describe: satisficing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing. That is what Microsoft is doing with its outliner, and Starbucks with its doughnuts.
H
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 12, 2010 at 04:42 AM
Even I’m missing ADM. I have a license for version 3; I redownloaded and tried to install, and got a raft of error messages, including the almost forgotten “access violation” that contributed to my previous discouragement:
Failed to set data for “
Access violation at address 0051E104 in module “ADM.exe’.
Exception ERegistryException in module ADM.exe at 00095806. Failed to set data for ‘D1’.
Access violation at address 709781F3.
———————————————
I’m running Windows 7, 64 bit, and I’m guessing ADM isn’t compatible with 64-bit architecture. If that’s the case ? someone more knowledgeable might confirm from the data above ? then this incompatibility will limit the current version’s longevity.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 12, 2010 at 04:44 AM
I should add: ADM didn’t install at all. The error messages appeared in succession.