More v Inspiration: the bake-off

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 263

Posted by n.lowe
1999-08-27 12:15:05

>If the follwing request has not yet been responded to in some way,
>would anyone here be willing to take a stab at defining the top 10
>“must-have” and “nice-having” features of MORE, with brief sentence
>description of what the feature is (like cloning), and when it’s useful
>to use it.
> >And likewise, that kind of feature summary for Inspiration?

OK, I’ll bite. Both have such stunning features that it would be foolish to
declare a winner, though I think More’s outline view (the one area of
direct comparison) has the edge over Inspiration’s.

A. More:

1. Bullet chart view. Two keystrokes (command-I, spacebar) to go from an imported
plain-text outline to an instant full-colour slideshow!! (PowerPoint has this, but not
the next feature, which is More’s single killer feature as a presentation tool.)

2. Automatic generation of hierarchical slideshows to any depth from an outline.
Subheads with their own sub-subheads automatically become the titles of new charts,
at the logical position in the slideshow sequence. Simply brilliant, and makes all other
presentation packages look crippled.

3. Search, Mark, Gather.

- Search. More has extremely powerful find options: GREP expressions, pattern
replace, and best of all the ability to Mark found headlines for further operations.

- Mark. More allows manual or Search-based marking of headlines so you can pick
them out visually or Gather them automatically.

- Gather. Killer feature that allows you to collect Marked headlines in a single place
- either moved from their original place, duplicated in the new location, or
dynamically cloned (so you can work on them in the new location and they’ll
automatically update in the old). Yesterday I downloaded a 2000-item
bibliography off the web and in a few minutes had it categorised by subject using
search, mark, and gather.

4. Cloning. Others have given fascinating accounts of the power of this in everyday life:
fishing all references to something you’re working on today out of a huge document,
and creating a collection of dynamic copies you can edit all in one place without
affecting the document structure. Use in conjunction with search, mark, and gather to
create a unique fusion of outline and database.

5. Rules, layouts, and libraries. Beautifully designed system for stylesheeting whole
documents and copying outline, tree, or slideshow designs between documents, or
storing them as libraries of ready-made templates. Switch slide designs, outline
formats, or tree layouts in a single mouse choice.

6. Blending. Really nice feature for eyecatching but completely unfussy coloured
backgrounds. Lots of options for 2-colour blend patterns, with elegant interface.
Nothing like this in Inspiration.

7. Good word-processing tools. Perfectly possible to live in More as your main WP.

8. Smart quotes. (Amazingly still missing in Inspiration.)

9. Customisable colour palette. (Bizarrely dropped in Inspiration 5.)

10. Faster than Inspiration at most things, especially importing. Much smaller document
sizes, unless you have lots of pasted graphics.

11. Graphics can go anywhere in outlines.

12. XTND and XML converters (stunning work from Brad here - I think this is the first
time ever that it’s been possible to export both speaker’s notes and comments…)

13. Free! (I still can’t get over this. I’ve previously bought three copies on eBay, not one
of which ever arrived. Thank you, Dave and Brad and Symantec…)

The conspicuous absentee from the above is More’s tree view, which is the main area
where Inspiration is in a different league altogether - just as Inspiration has nothing
even in competition with More’s bullet chart view.

B. Inspiration

1. Killer Diagram mode, featuring:

- complete graphical outlining in Diagram view; outline view updates automatically

- multiple links, allowing hyperoutlining on top of basic outline structure

- full draw palette, so you can draw other stuff on your chart.

- keyboard-based graphics. Command-arrowkey, for example, instantly draws a
new box exactly like the last one, in the direction of the arrow key, linked to the
previous box by an outward arrow, and with the cursor ready to type in. Or just
click anywhere and type, and a new object will appear with your text in it.

2. Ability to change Home headline. Outline automatically rebuilds itself. (It does still
insist on having a Home headline, though, which many other good outliners don’t.)

3. Excellent keyboard shortcuts, including things like New Subtopic strangely missing in
More.

4. Child documents. You can have an entire outline/chart as a subdocument of an object in
another document, allowing very large and complex meta-hierarchies beyond the
individual outline. The freeware DesignerDraw, which I used to use before I could
afford Inspiration, has this feature as well (but doesn’t have an outline mode).

5. Ability to convert headlines into comments (or Notes Text, as Inspiration calls them)
without the palaver of cutting and pasting (or those strange little windows with their
annoying little behaviours).

6. Cross-platform, with common file format. Your colleagues from the Other Side will
never suspect a thing.

7. Adequate import (text, RTF, More) and excellent export (including More, PowerPoint,
and HTML) features. More import especially fast and impressive.

8. Mature and stable in both 68k and PPC Mac versions.

9. Alive and well-supported by nice, independent one-product company.

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