Re: "MORE 3.1" for Mac OSX?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1825

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-02-01 22:51:55

I, like you, have loved my a MORE. OmniOuliner was recommended as an alternative in OS X recently in this discussion. I downloaded it, and it had much to recommend, however, I used the “clone” command a good deal, keeping references and quotes I put in under several major headings. (I use the ouliner like a simple database for quotes and teaching resources in text). I couldn’t find that “Clone” was a feature of OmniOutliner. Nor could I find the ability of the heading to create a word processor page for free-form prose under a heading like in MORE. These were disappointments. I love those two features from MORE. Has anyone found them on any product more updated?

There isn’t an outliner that has the full More 3.1 feature set. The only only outliner that does anywhere is ADM 2. On the Mac CircusPonies Notebook has proclaimed it has the full feature set, but they proclaim falsely.

But I think with a little work you can come pretty close with a craftily configured MacWord template. Word has come a long way since Word 5 or so, when most people were wringing hands over its outliner, but I think a lot of those people should take a second look.

Two new features should make Word’s outliner a lot more effective, even though features are not peculiar to outlining and, unfortunately, weren’t designed with outlining in view. They are 1) discontiguous text selection; and 2) hypertext link-creating capabilities.

Discontiguous selection wasn’t Microsoft’s contribution; Nisus had it long before, and I think MindWrite had it way back. MindWrite died young, and Nisus had only the most primitive built-in outlining capabilities. But MindWrite did show how important discontiguous text selection could be for outlining, because it simulates and in some way improves upon mark and gather.

Hypertext links are new to Word. I haven’t worked much with either cloning in More 3.1 or hypertext in Word, but Word allows the powerful move of linking to text within a single document. You might look at whether you can conveniently make hypertext in Word create clones in Word outlines.

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