Re: Use for Outliners?

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 233

Posted by bernie
1999-08-26 07:04:06

Let’s start in the middle. No, a little before that.

FYI (soon to be called “ThinkTank”) is about to change my life. I’m designing games, trying to deal with all the interactions and permutations, and I’m doing this all on FYI. So there’s Use #1 for me.

Then I start using ThinkTank for everything. I have a single, humongous file, containing phone numbers and addresses, game ideas, article fragments, action items, collected quotes, miscellaneous pith…everything. This is Use #2, what Dave calls the “Status Center” approach.

Now, with suitable cuts and fades to indicate time shifting, I’m using MORE to facilitate meetings. It’s my electronic flipchart. We brainstorm, I make lists. We prioritize, I drag. We add comments, I add categories. This is Use #3.

And what’s especially important to the growth of technography is that I’m still, personally and professionally, engaged in Uses 1&2. And everything is feeding back into everything else. Every technique I develop to help me with designing games helps me with facilitating groups. Every reorganization of my Status Center helps me come up with new game ideas.

Ten years later, the outliner is still my way of life. I’m using Microsoft Word. And a PC.

I left the beloved Macintosh because I needed a ubiquitous platform, and for some perverted reason, there were way more PCs than Macs. And I left my heartfelt MORE. And now I don’t even use Netscape. But the outliner is still my personal killer app.

And so it goes.

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