Re: Yearning

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 1916

Posted by zeoli
2004-05-15 15:40:29

Holy Smokes! I go away for a couple of days and this site lights up like a Christmas tree. How exciting!

Some thoughts: As has been mentioned or alluded to already, there are really two aspects of outlining we are discussing. A. As a data storage and retreival tool; and B. As a writing composition tool/thought processor. GrandView, in my opinion, was unique in that it did both these tasks fairly well, though it was really as a writing compostion tool and thought processor that it remains unmatched. It was easy to write AND edit your text in GV—as easy as any word processor. Plus you could move your topics around almost effortlessly. The fact that each topic could contain a document “beneath” it (what I will call sub text, because I forget what, if anything, GV called it), which could be viewed as part of the outline or hidden from view, made GV very flexible. For instance, you could outline every thought, doing all the composition within the topic headings, or you could outline major topics, then just compose sub text within those topics. And with one keystroke you could be in a full-screened word processing window focussed only on the sub text for any specific topic was extremely useful. (Am I making my meaning clear? Probably not.) This is what NoteMap lacks. All your writing is in a topic. On top of that, GrandView allowed you to catalog your topics with columns, so you could set priorities, add due dates, create categories. This increased its functionality to a genuine PIM and even a project manager. Hot links to other outlines was also a plus.

So nothing does what GrandView did, as far as I can tell. Certainly ADM does not do this. ADM is an information organizer, and a good one. But it does not provide an enhanced environment for composing writing… at least not for me. Right now, the best writing outliner in Windows is NoteMap, but as mentioned above, it is still a far cry from GrandView.

Anyway, I think this is the crux of the debate: are we talking about an information organizer or are we talking about a composition tool? How you answer that question will impact entirely what outliners you will find most useful.

Steve Z.

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