Re: Ergonomics of Appearance

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2689

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-02-03 14:27:21

Steve,

This point about the market for information managers ties in with your previous one about the improvements to adm, the tie-in being that none relate to outlining as such. Essentially they make the meta-data features more user friendly and add many additional formatting features to the text card, the official name of which was changed to “page.” Unfortunately your pet feature concerning text editing commands (e.g. triple click to select paragraph) isn’t among the changes.

Your rationale for increasing data management capability in an outliner, based on the demands of the market, could be a good justification, but I don’t think it is the developer’s rationale, based on the absence of any improvement in outlining for some time. The real emphasis has shifted to data management. Or maybe it was there all along.

I argued early on when I became a beta tester that the most critical feature that the outliner needed was an undo function, preferably infinite, hopefully several levels, but definitely at least one. Now we have infinite undo in the “page,” but still have none in the outliner. I said it had been a BLUNDER to omit the undo for as long as adm has, and if it is to be a serious outliner, this should be given the highest priority. The developer agreed with ALL the premises, but tacitly it seems disputed the conclusion.

I don’t think the problem is so much with the market as with the representativeness of the beta testers who have a lot of influence on direction of the product, and with me as the single exception, are far more interested in data management than in outlining. I would wonder why they ALL don’t use IH for that purpose like Daly. As far as I can tell, they tend to have masses of data derived from the internet—concerning WHAT I haven’t the slightest. But I think Daly’s probably right that IH is the best thing going for that purpose; Idea! for those with a somewhat different sense of ergonomics, although still having the distinctive German feel. For myself, my data management needs are much more modest.

Stephen R. Diamond

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