Thanks for all the incredible email about outliners! I've received hundreds of great stories this week after opening up outliners.com and releasing MORE and ThinkTank thru the web.

***Do you have a story?

Tell us how you use outliners. What's your favorite outliner? Do outliners have a future? If so, how would you like to see them evolve? In the past they were used for business planning, reporting, presentations, education. What will outliners of the future be used for?

***Groundrules

One caveat, we have the power to delete messages on this server. We will delete personal attacks or messages that are complaints about software vendors, especially Symantec, whose generosity made this site possible. We want to have a friendly discussion here, so there's no point posting complaints or attacks. Thanks for listening!

***With that out of the way

Let's make discuss.outliners.com a place worthy of its excellent name! This is a community site, so let's have a great community.

Thanks Dave!

And thank you for the public service you've performed by persuading Symantec to allow the release of More and the rest.

The subject of More has been something of a hot topic on the MacLaw mailing list. Some of the subscribers have never stopped using More 3.1.

I started using outline software with ThinkTank on an Apple //e. I read about it in Jerry Pournelle's column in Byte, probably in 1984. I liked it so much, I bought an Apple //c to use at work so I could run my office on ThinkTank.

I've just started playing around with More 3.0, it looks and runs fine on my PM6500/225 with OS 8.5.1.

I'm also a big user and proponent of another dead outliner, WebArranger (originally Arrange). One of the neat features about Arrange is the "grabber" which will copy text selections in any open application and dump them into a "clippings" topic when you next launch Arrange. I'm using it to develop an outline of the history of communications to parallel the growth of bandwidth (not just the electromagnetic kind) with the improvement in the human condition. I'm optimistic that the internet is the kind of quantum leap in communications which will lead to tremendous human progress. At least history seems to indicate it should.

The only downside to Arrange is an 8K limit to text in "notes" which is the fundamental unit of the application.

I'm going to look at using OneClick to automate portions of More 3.0 and perhaps WebArranger to enable some kind of communication between the two. If I find the time.

Anyway, again, thanks.
Dave Rogers

Very Thanks Dave!!!

I am a happy and enthusiast user of outliners.

I search for new forms of thinking and work and outliners helps me.

You know where could I find the manuals of ThinkTank and Agenda?

Greeting from Barcelona - Spain

Ramon Riera
ramon_riera@redestb.es

Lord am I happy to find others who love MORE the way that I do!!!! I have used it in my law practice for beaucoup years, actually starting with ThinkTank 128 back when most computing was painting animals on the cave wall to insure good hunting.

I am concerned about the onset of System 9. My computer guru tells me that while MORE runs fine on 8.6, System 9 has dispensed with some libraries in preparationn for the more radical changes planned for system 10. Has anyone heard anything about that? I would be willing to stay with 8.6 for a verrrrrrryy long time if the alternative was to lose MORE. Any news or thoughts - particularly if there might be some possability of an update or modification. I suspect that I will have a chance to test out the MORE/System 9 thing shortly and will report back on the results.

Angst

Hi Dave,

I must have demonstrated Think Tank to hundreds of poeple back when the personal computer was not necessarily a PC and I found that the reaction was either utter blankness or utter enthusiasm. To this day I have yet to find someone who is "halfway" interested in outliners.

For me, who clearly fall into the enthusiastic group, I have never ceased to look for a replacement outliner after the cascade of upgrades left me in the cold without my former tools. (I still have a copy of Grandview somewhere, but it's a hassle to get it to work with the proper character set on a modern PC.)

The best I found is probably Action Outline (http://www.greenparrots.com/ao.html but now that I've discovered this site, I'll go back to Think Tank with pleasure.

Thank you very much for the unexpected gift.

Ben

Boy! using ThinkTank really takes me back. I purchased my ThinkTank for the Apple \//e and all of my classes(high school math/computer) were done it. When I upgraded it fell by the wayside. Now in retirement I am planning a Computer/internet class for seniors and I needed an outliner. When I went looking on the web I found a couple but they all lacked at least 1 feature that I would consider necessary. In truth I was comparing them to my standart "TT".

Then I found this site. Was I a happy camper. Downloaded it and set it up. What a feeling when it came up and I remembered having to exchange the black and white settings so it would print without the ink running of the page!. I printed the quick reference card and was all ready to go and then NOTHING. I could not for the life of me remember how to start. I kept trying to remember the key combination that allowed you to enter a new heading. Then it dawned on me this was a PC not the old apple and it has more keys. Re-read the quide and finally was on my way.

My wife says I spend more time playing then using, but I am happy. One question for any experts out there. I remember being able to change how the headlines were numbered, and the style I liked was the Roman Numerals, to ordinal to letters but I cannot remember how to switch.

HELP!! Michael Delehanty

This group is a dream come true! My first outliner was ThinkTank, I think) on a KayPro, circa 1983. I found it an incredible way to organize stuff: project planning, to-do lists, and I started collecting restaurant reviews and outlining them by neighborhood. I used it with a ramdisk box that plugged into the printer port (a whole meg!), which made everything run remarkably fast for its day.

Then PC-Outline arrived. I got it bundled with WordStar 4.0 or 5.0 for DOS, perhaps around 1990. It seemed clunky and counter-intuitive at first, but I persevered and eventually moved everything over. I got a little Gateway Handbook and put a lot of outlines on it. Very handy.

Then progress in outliners seemed to die. MS Word had outline capability but it took forever to load and I couldn't find a way to move stuff over, so just I stuck with PCO. However I'm pushing harder for a replacement now because not being able to do stuff with a mouse just seems too restrictive, especially jumping back and forth between windows.

The outline concept needs to be extended more to spreadsheets. There's inevitably the same need for summary vs. detail once they're over a certain size.

Likewise with database reports. I've constantly done detail and summary versions of the same report. I'd love to give users a file version that they could expand/contract and then print.

Undoubtedly outlines can be combined with hypertext, DDE/OLE, CPM/PERT, what else?

- Dave

Dear fellow Outliners

I stumbled across this site by accident, and was excited to find out that there was a forum for fans of Outlining software.

I am currently investigating work applications and uses of such software, and would also be interested to know how many of you use outlining software for mindmapping.

I look forward to hearing from you by email.

Thanks for listening.

Karen Reyes.

I still use Word Perfect DOS 6 just so I can use the outlining feature. I've never tried Think Tank, but I will. Anyone else know Word Perfect's outliner? Any comments?

I just loaded More 3.1. Hopefully I can get it to work on my Mac OS 8.6. As a programmer/analyst, I used to love to use more and Mac Draw as design tools. Somehow they stopped working when I got a new mac. My only wish was that they could be integrated so the items on my outliner could be attached to objects on the diagram and that I could go down a level in my diagram like expanding an item on more.

Wau, what a long and interesting thread!
I have never used any "real" outliner, just Word outline view quite heavily; now I have downloaded a small and free Skwyrul Pro.
But let's leave windows for a while. I Bought an old Toshiba T1000 laptop micro (1987) for my "travelling mate". I dream of a small outliner for it(*) which could output plain text or HTML-formatted (why not rtf also) files to revise with Word or put straight to web. The file transfer could take place via floppy disks.

I have a FreEmacs editor in it now, and maybe I could prgram it to keep an index file of the text files... (does not seem easy).

(*) machine restrictions: Processor 286, DOS 2.11, 512 kB memory, only (DD) floppydisk...

Thanks
Esa

Hi,

I am grad student at the TC dept in the Univ of WA. I am writing a paper on outliners and other software like 'inspiration' that help in various radically different methods of representaion of information.

I was hoping that some of you can give me some ideas on topics like smart outliner, outliner that is interactive and online,an outliner that represents hierarchies visually etc.

I am interested in any idea that is thought provoking.

Thank you for your time.
Anusha

Long story short. A long time ago (1993) I used Macs and had an outliner I loved called "In Control" that was a normal outliner function with columns that allowed multiple ways to view data. I used it for basic project management.

I need something like it. My word processor does not do the job, nor a regular spreadsheet.

PLEASE HELP!!

Larry Morrissey
morrila@aol.com

My question is not strictly linked to the world of outliners...
... does somebody remember BlackMagic ?

It was a wonderful program (DOS) that, with HTML not yet widespread, allowed to create big Hypertexts.
The amazement was that you were able to create your big structure without using any external editor. You could READ the hypertext, and/if you wanted, you could WRITE to it, creating pages, hyperlinks, inserting images (even imagemaps!!!) JUST WITH A COUPLE OF KEYSTROKES.
I never was able since then to find another program that let me create my own writings in this "stream of consciousness" style: you always had to leave the <reading> program to enter into the <editing> program... just not what I wanted.

It possibly exists something like this in the outliners world?
My main problem is that I even lack the words to describe the program I need, but I hope I've given you the main idea.

Thanks


Alessandro

Dave, I don't know how you managed to get Symantec to allow this, but thanks.

I tried upgrading my version of MORE 3.0 about a week after they pulled it and they wouldn't sell me a copy. Years later, I was looking again and stumbled across this site and have been here a few times since then.

I first came across MORE 1.0 when trying to figure out how to create the division brackets for a massive basketball tournament. I created the data entry forms in Hypercard, then split up the teams by age (I think there were 40 brackets with 16, or 32 teams in each bracket.) Then I wrote the brackets out to the MORE file format, which I reverse engineered. Essentially, I wrote out the file header (which I copied from a blankfile,) then wrote out eat team as a list element, then wrote out the foot (again, copied from a blank file.) I opened up the files went to tree view and printed them out. It was a bit more complicated than that, but you get the gist. Anyway, it worked like a charm and have been using MORE on and off ever since. Good to see its still around, and still works in Classic.

I'm looking for a nice basic outliner that will run on the Mac, Wintel (I *have* to use it at work!) and the Palm, with real conduits for syncing between the 3 platforms. BrainForest runs on all 3, but doesn't really sync between them; it's a lot of work to transfer the files, and you have to keep track of which version is most recent.

Any ideas?

There's a nice ASCII text based outliner for the Palm called TreeDA; if I could easily work with similar programs on the Mac and PC sides that would set outline levels by number of spaces preceding each item, I'd be OK with that.

Thanks in advance.

I am quite impressed with Notemap; nice clean interface not too may bells & whistles(I'm still using ThinkTank!).

Has anyone seen anything better? (Please - not PC Outline).

Please advise.

Tx.

Looking for outliner programmer. Would like to collaborate. Interested?

Hi all. I have a mundane question, I am afraid. I have downloaded More 3.1 to my ibook and just love the program, it is Exactly what I have been looking for to use for some of my writing projects -- my problem is I can't figure out how to unstuff or install the dictionary file. The program installer asks me for the Utilities disk, and I am rather stumped, as the Utilities is part of the download but I don't know how to get the installer to recognize it.

More is wonderful w/o a spellchecker, of course, and it is easy enough to copy/paste into Wordperfect to edit, but the retentive part of me sure would like to have the spell check up and working, and for that I need the dictionary. Can anyone help me?

Thank you!!

Peter Walpole
pdwalpole@hotmail.com

Hey -- has anyone else tried NoteTaker 2003 from Aquaminds of OS X? I downloaded a seven day trial last night -- $69.95 for a license -- anyway, it seems very strong, very full featured, and what is best for me (everyone has their own specific feature they need or long for) it handles long text entries in an outline, paragraphs with tabs, like MORE does. A very attractive application, and quite robust for 1.0. Check it out.

Peter Walpole

I notice that OPML is oriented to the style of outline that consists of just headings (with optional attributes). However, a number of outliners (including the one I wrote on top of the Vim editor (see http://bike-nomad.com/vim/vimoutliner.html have allowed headings to have attached text blocks. I use this format to write text with interspersed headings. Whenever I want, I just extract the text and not the headings (or possibly include some of the headings).

What's your feeling about this style of outlining?

What's the proper way to represent this in OPML (presumably I could stick the text block in as an attribute...)? Is there a standard representation for this?

Hi! I hope I have posted this in the right place... Given the "New Golden Age" of outliners for Mac OS it would be useful to post a simple comparative table of features for: OmniOutliner, NoteTaker, NoteBook, TinderBox???, MyMind, NovaMind, and MORE 3.1. I have started such a table in Excel and Dave might be able to post a PDF file to the website. This would be useful to refer people when they ask the question: "Which Mac outliner"

Would anyone be able to help me with this? I don't think it would be a big investment of time. I just need to get the most important features. Email me at edurbrow@earthlink.net.

I've been looking at the screenshots and feature description for OmniOutliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/ This is a multi-column outliner, and one of its features that I really like is the way you can create summary checkboxes. I.e., whether the checkbox in a parent node is checked depends on the state of the checkboxes in the child nodes. This is perfect for maintaining a todo list or project list!

Unfortunately, I don't use a Mac. Does anyone know of a Windows-based outliner with similar functionality?

Reading the posts here gives me that great buzz that you get when you find a community of people thinking about the same things you are (cognitive consonance, maybe?).

I'm using GrandView 2.0 (after originally using MORE and ThinkTank/Ready), and have 100MB+ of highly distilled .GV files dating back to '92 which have underlain most of my creative thinking over that period. I found outliners.com while looking for some way of living on after the DOS compatibility box disappears from Windows. Noting the heavy preponderance of Mac mavens here, I can only plead for forgiveness for having fallen from grace long ago, and ask for help anyhow...

In my dreams, I find some Windows work-alike app that will import my GV files (or .RDY or tab-indented export files), will finally allow me to beat the old DOS memory limits (I'd kill for a 1MB .GV file, let alone being able to unite all of my files long enough to efficiently find and eliminate redundancies), and give me more info on screen at once. My existing info is a serious restraint - I'm not really interested in the Next Insanely Great Thing if it means I lose access to earlier files, or have to spend months massaging them to get them into a new format.

Is there hope for me?

I am looking for a multiuser outliner. I really appreciate if you could help me.

Thanks


Alejandro

I'm using GrandView 2.0.

Does anyone know the maximum file sizes for Grandview?

Can i compress the file ?