Re: Looking for the information

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2161

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-08-27 19:05:16

It seems to me that the interaction between outline structure and data structuring argues that the two ought to be combned in a single application. Instead of reorganizing in Zoot, that would mean reserving Zoot for collecting and finding (broadly defined), and exporting the relevant records from Zoot to an outliner designed to manipulate topics AND data. NoteMap is apparently designed to manipulate topics only. CaseSoft makes a database application yoked to strong outlining functionalities: their foremost product, CaseMap. CaseMap has other capabilies many people would like in NoteMap, but I think if CaseSoft were to release a super-outliner, it would risk canibalizing its major market. After all, CaseMap shows CaseSoft has the _ability_ it put together an outliner with columns and powerful cross-referencing capabilities.

The only possible possible principled reason I see not to endow a single application with topic AND data manipulation abilities is if the functionalities themselves tended to be mutually exclusive. I’ve never seen GranView, but some see it as the ultimate in combining database and outliner functionality. Since you used GrandView with Zoot, perhaps you can indicate GrandView’s infirmities as compared with Zoot for data manipulation/structuring.
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I use them (outliner+Zoot) in a two-stage approach I learned about from Jim Fallows, when he was using Grandview and Agenda for the same purpose. Briefly, one begins to develop an outline for a project in the outliner (NoteMap, say)and, at the same time, sets up a series of folders in Zoot that mirror the main heading and subheadings of the outline. data is then hoovered into Zoot from whatever sources (web, notes, etc.)to provide material for developing the NoteMap outline.

Both the Zoot folder system and the outliner’s outline get modified in the light of developing ideas, so although it’s simple, there is a dynamic interplay.

Zoot is much better (IMHO) than Agenda was for these purposes, but I found Grandview a lot nimbler than NoteMap on my WIN98SE machine. On my new one, NoteMap is a lot quicker than it used to be.

As an aside, on my latest project I found myself having to use Word and its outliner rather than NoteMap, because I needed from the outset to use extensive footnotes. The great thing about Word is that you can make footnotes while outlining. This saves an enormous amount of work later. Before that, using NoteMap, I had attached footnotes to the Notes, using NotewMap’s “Comments” facility - only to find that if I moved a Note, doing so deleted the “Comment”. (The developers know about that one :-) ).

So - to cut a much too long story short - I’d see Zoot and NoteMap as complementary rather than competing packages for this particular task.

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