Is InfoHandler an outliner (was Re: An Addi....)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2469

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-01-07 00:03:29

In the tree view of groups and topics, one can indeed drag categories from group to group. However, the groups from which you are moving a category, and the group to which you are moving it must be open groups for the drag’n drop feature to work. This ensures that you won’t inadvertantly change a group that you want to keep as is.—Daly

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I was trying to drag in the grid. It’s just a matter of moving categories from one box to another. It would seem you should be able to accomplish that with dragging.

This returns to a previous topic, when is it better or worse to have two different ways of accomplishing the same thing? It is worse when the two approaches produce less integration of functionality, as I say happens when a key word system is set up in tandem with a conventional outline, and the outline is not permitted to treat keywords as topics, or the keyword system cannot treat topics as keywords, or both. It is better when integration isn’t compromised and the different avenues don’t result in confusion (actually a variety of integration failure).

Dragging in the grid doesn’t confuse the user; it is so error free that I think conventional outliners should consider providing such a grid for organizing hierarchies, in addition to the tree.

Anyway, this is a minor criticism. I’m not really a critic of InfoHandler. I mean, I think I was actually the first person in this forum to jump on the IH bandwagon, and I still have great respect for the program, despite not using it and not really knowing it. Its the most rigorous implementation of facet analysis as applied to a pim. But one shouldn’t suppose the program without a) weaknesses; and b) domains in which it is inferior to other programs. It looks to me the program is weak on ergonomics. I mean, you don’t necessarily expect a guy who’s an expert in knowledge management to be the foremost implementer of elegant design. Or vice versa. But it’s an interesting and sometimes vexing question whether one or the other is the more important in a given application.

The distinction, Daly, that you want to resist is actually well-established in outliner discussion—which I admit doesn’t mean it is a critical distinction. It is the distinction between programs that only allow subordination to categories items and those that allow subordination to anything. Sometimes the latter are called “true outliners,” often boastfully. But although they are closer to the classic one-pane outliner in design, they aren’t necessarily better two-pane database outliners. (Let me call them quasi-outliners.) One way of working, after all, would be to work your categorical structure in, say, BrainStorm and implement it in the category tree (in say InfoHandler).

But what is a no go, in my opinion, is trying to combine an outliner and quasi-outliner in one application, which is what say ndxcards is doing, with ADM one remove away. That is, a hierarchical keyword system is a quasi-outliner, and combining a quasi-outliner with an outliner limits the ability of either one to integrate the domain.

Stephen R. Diamond

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