Re: An Addition to the List

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2451

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-01-05 18:54:12

Daly:

SD: Why don’t you describe the procedure for moving categories from any place in the hierarchy of categories to any other, when they are selected in any combination.
In IH one selects the menu option to move categories in a group to any other group, The option provides a list of the categories. One highlight a single category or, by holding the control key, any combination of categories, and then drags then to the name of the desired group, which is shown in an adjacent box.
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The point I was making you made at the end of your post: “IH limits you to selecting categories from one group at a time for movement to another group.

What I was saying is it can’t be faster to use IH’s method than multiple selection in an outline—mark and gather or a surrogate—because IH only lets you select “children” of a single category group. There is, I must admit, a comparable limitation in MyInfo3, but it is easier to work around such a limitation in an outline. For example, you could clone every document under a flat topic. (Note to Alex: this would give you the index function of Hyperclip, I think.)
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Daly:
I think I may have contributed to confusion here by saying in a post that IH has a hierarchial keyword system. I think I was mistaken; a hierarchial keword system would be one based on an outline.
<Deletion>
Where you talk about organization by outline or keywords, I think the point is that we are discussing how keywords are formulated—whether in a hierarchial outline (whether it is a work-around or not), or by a single flat list (ADM), or a series of grouped lists (as with IH).

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I don’t get the difference. A series of grouped lists is a hierarchical outline. Some outliners have a single topic at the topic, but to me that’s not the most logical approach to outlining. It violates the rule we all learned in junior high school that there should always be at least two topics at any given level in a completed outline (not that its exactly a big deal, which is why it isn’t a basis for a significant distinction). The single topic is used by ADM and NoteMap, not by MyInfo, Ultra Recall, or Idea!

So if that’s not the difference, what is? I’m not sure, but you seem to imply that IH limits you to two levels of depth. I wasn’t able to quickly figure out whether that’s true, but if it is, it is a limitaton, not a virtue, because the underlining facet analytic model contemplates deep hierarchies of key words.

In fooling around with my crippled copy of IH, I think I found what I don’t like about it. Correct me if I am wrong about this, but the drag and drop and right click support seems too limited. One of the ways I learn a program like this is by trying to do drag things around and right clicking on things. Too often nothing happens. For instance, to reorganize categories into a category group, why not drag the categories to the appropriate group?

Stephen R. Diamond

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