Re: Is outlining the best free form database organization?

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 1901

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-05-14 12:48:40

*I’ve used (and paid for) ADM, because there’s a great idea lurking back there somewhere. I’ve been completely unable to integrate it into my working life, maybe because it’s high-concept and I’m not. I agree the interface is gaudy and a bit cheap-looking; that can be fixed.

Presumably when a developer markets a complex program, it has some idea regarding why it chooses a particular feature set. Many developers seem reluctant to communicate that vision. One rarely finds “best practices” documented, maybe because the developer fears that doing so will discourage users who want to deploy the program differently.

ADM badly needs documentation of best practices and probably a user group, like InfoHandler’s, to discover how to use the program. The program comes with a few templates for to dos, contacts and the like, which are ridiculously simple and fail utterly to justify the progam’s power.

The program allows you to “mass register” documents with outline headings, but what for? The program needs examples of how this mass registration facilitates actual work, what views are useful to display for what purpose, what are the best procedures for extracting material from the registered documents to incorporate into the outline. Not that its terribly hard to figure out, but why reinvent what the developer presumably had in mind? Anything that makes the program easier to begin use will speed its adoption. Small uncertainties can become immense barriers to adopting or adapting it.

Back to archived message list