Impact of outliners
Posted by tansey
on 8/16/1999
tansey
8/16/1999 5:28 pm
I first started using outliners with ThinkTank and for me it was one of the programs that changed personal computers from a toy to a tool. As things evolved I continued to use outliners and review most of the products on the market for a computer magazine. In the end I still have More on my current Mac, and I either use that or Frontier's outliner when need to bump up my thinking productivity. It was a sad day for me when outliners "failed" in the marketplace. Too bad we couldn't remember the the things we first learned about organizing our thoughts in grammar school with a paper and pencil outline to refining an leveraging them with a computer outliner. These programs may be antiques, but they are mighty valuable to the few who continue to use them.
dave
8/16/1999 5:31 pm
Frank, thanks for posting this message. It's the kind of thing I was looking for when I started discuss.outliners.com.
When MORE 3.0 was first re-released, I got a hundred multi-page emails, long stories about how people used these products. It was my hope that people would share their stories here.
When MORE 3.0 was first re-released, I got a hundred multi-page emails, long stories about how people used these products. It was my hope that people would share their stories here.
nubuckaroo
8/16/1999 7:29 pm
Well, of course there's a whole discussion devoted to it at the other Discuss site, but technography would likely be impossible without an outliner.
I recently had the pleasure of hosting Bernie DeKoven at my command for a technography workshop, and I was very impressed with his use of the outliner in Word to facilitate communication.
If you're not familiar with the subject of technography, it's probably too difficult to explain it all here, but there is a great deal of material elsewhere in Userland and a Bernie's site at www.technography.com.
I had been using Word's outliner in a somewhat unsophisticated way in our attempts to practice technography at meetings. Watching Bernie do it was an education in its own right. MS really needs to look at some of the wierd behavior of the outliner, it is often a distraction. But it is very powerful when you can embed tables, hyperlinks, graphics and send the outline to a PowerPoint presentation in a few mouse clicks (I know, More had it first). It is even more powerful as a collaborative tool over the internet.
Certainly, at the individual level, using an outliner gives us greater control over the information we choose to manage and I've used them since ThinkTank. But I'm almost convinced that it's an individual preference. Some people "get" outliners, most don't. In that context, I think their relative lack of success in the marketplace is understandable.
But in the collaborative environment, they become essential. Managing and presenting the thoughts and ideas of a group of people in a meaningful way is challenging (impossible?) without the structural tools an outliner provides. I think as technography becomes better known as a discipline, we may see renewed interest in outliner applications.
Dave Rogers
I recently had the pleasure of hosting Bernie DeKoven at my command for a technography workshop, and I was very impressed with his use of the outliner in Word to facilitate communication.
If you're not familiar with the subject of technography, it's probably too difficult to explain it all here, but there is a great deal of material elsewhere in Userland and a Bernie's site at www.technography.com.
I had been using Word's outliner in a somewhat unsophisticated way in our attempts to practice technography at meetings. Watching Bernie do it was an education in its own right. MS really needs to look at some of the wierd behavior of the outliner, it is often a distraction. But it is very powerful when you can embed tables, hyperlinks, graphics and send the outline to a PowerPoint presentation in a few mouse clicks (I know, More had it first). It is even more powerful as a collaborative tool over the internet.
Certainly, at the individual level, using an outliner gives us greater control over the information we choose to manage and I've used them since ThinkTank. But I'm almost convinced that it's an individual preference. Some people "get" outliners, most don't. In that context, I think their relative lack of success in the marketplace is understandable.
But in the collaborative environment, they become essential. Managing and presenting the thoughts and ideas of a group of people in a meaningful way is challenging (impossible?) without the structural tools an outliner provides. I think as technography becomes better known as a discipline, we may see renewed interest in outliner applications.
Dave Rogers