Something is really strange about the software market today. At least for those who participate in this discussion, the emergence of outlining programs in the late 80s was a kind of seminal moment in PC evolution. For me, it opened up a whole new stage for thinking and writing. Ten years later, there is no equivalent product available.

On the Windows platform today, we don't have a program that does outlining efficiently and consistently. Word for Windows does a poor job of it and I don't know about other word processors. The rest of the market has veered in the direction of PIMs and info databases (even among shareware) or using outlining suborindated to other functions like presentations (PowerPoint, Inspiration). I've been looking at other options, but there does not seem to be an outline-based writing tool. (Sorry, Dave, I downloaded Frontier 5 and tried out the outlining features and it did not strike me as what I wanted, at least not with all the overhead.)

I have found myself in the position of having to pull out my GrandView disks and reinstalling the program because there doesn't seem to be any program that performs its role better. In any case, there is no way of taking advantage of the Windows graphic interface and other features like formatting and fonts. It really makes me envious of the Apple users. Maybe I'll just have to switch over to an iMac and start using MORE.

By all means get an iMac, or better yet, an iBook, and switch to MORE. I switched from using PCs to Macs in 1992, primarily because of MORE 3.1. The outliner as a generic category is a fundamentally superior approach to dealing with capturing thoughts and structuring text. However, MORE 3.1, goes further by extending outlining into a tool that is useful for creating and maintaing DOCUMENTS of arbitrary format and complexity (due to its heirarchical rule-based formatting). In addition, MORE is not only the most advanced outliner product, but has a user interface that integrates better than other outliners both with the PROCESS of capturing structured textual information and with the MacOS for productive document work flow (pre-AppleScript and pre-HTML).

I discovered the power of the outlining paradigm with the Brown Bag Outliner (PC Outline) in about 1985, then switched to Grandview when it came out. In 1992, the combination of MORE 3.1 and the PowerBook 170 created the first portable solution that could replace a desktop system for (textual) document creation, rather than being a front-end adjunct to the desktop. The uniformity and attention to detail in the MORE 3 user interface also allowed me to take meeting notes, while participating in the technical content of the meeting, with results that could be printed, in rough but usable form for all participants not just the author, at meeting adjournment. To date, no other tool comes close in this area, so MORE 3.1 (now on a PBG3) remains my primary tool for notes and short document creation, as well as maintaining hundreds of documents from the past 7 years.