Omni-Outliner 3

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2602

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-01-18 19:34:15

I tried the new Omni at the local Apple store.

1. There’s no separate mark and gather, only selection and drag, which is a half-decent substitute. Except, it doesn’t allow you to select discontiguously. Is that incredible, in this age, for the top outliner on the platform?

2. OK, so you select a couple of *contiguous* children in an outline. Mine was simple: a heading and three children. Select two, click move left. Nothing happens. Five to ten seconds later, the headings move into position.

3. Repeated 2 to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Didn’t seem to be.

For a writer’s outliner, I’d take NoteMap any day. And BrainStorm just blows it away. Even ADM performs better, with its list out of bounds errors and all.

I left the Mac on a pre-OS X machine. (Actually, Apple had promised that the model I had would be upgradeable, and then reneged.) For a platform that touts its integration of hardware and software, it was exceedingly crash prone, the most annoying manifestation being the circular cursor continuing to twirl without stop, locking up the machine so it could be liberated only by a forced restart. Well, OS X didn’t freeze, but it still has the circular cursor—a colorful one now—that *eventually* stops turning, even though most events at the system level are very fast.

The hardware I tried, a top of the line G5—the ones having that industrial-looking design—was very nice, but all that power wasted seems directed to getting Apple’s narcissistic ‘genie effect” when you start a program! The keyboard looks very nice, but when you type on it, you see it is nothing but a cheap membrane job, no better than the junk Dell provides standard.

Readers be warned: I’m not necessarily objective when commenting on Apple. Don’t let me start on the company’s latest assault on press freedom. If Apple were as big and powerful as Microsoft, we’d have real problems.

Still, I wouldn’t mind trying Hog Bay NoteBook, an outline-based program that seems to take outlining seriously..

Stephen Diamond

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