Re: ndxCards v. 1.92 Re: Lessons from the World of Clip Mana

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2720

Posted by chris
2005-02-13 02:03:57

I think there definitely is a difference between one-pane and two-pane outlining. I also agree that one-pane outlining, where each paragraph is its own element in the outline, is better for writing (in my opinion).

I also believe the idea of the card, or note, or item details, or whatever you want to call it, is generally better for managing snippets of information (the free-form database). I think the difference is that in this kind of situation, the topic text serves literally as a title, and the card represents the content; and that generally you do not need to see an entire page of reference material in the topic outline - unlike writing, when you do want to see the content within the outline.

I believe there is something to merging the two ideas together. Ideally units of information could be scaled at will: pages/cards/topics are individual items but are also made up of other individual items called paragraphs. For example, let’s say you want to store email messages for reference in your information manager. Most messages will do just fine being stored as a single object with the subject as the topic caption and the message as the card/page content. But let’s say an email message comes in and someone has listed out 12 things they want you to do. It would be nice to make the scale more granular on command, so that now each paragraph/line of the message becomes its own item - while still also viewable within the context of the original content (perhaps a sort of “granularity zoom”). Unfortunately, I’ve never really seen this. At best, you would need to do some manual splitting in any current outliner.

Stephen, I think ADM will already function in the way that you are referring to, however. You can hide the text card completely, use doc view and then the functionality is pretty much similar to other one-pane outliners, i.e., the topics can hold content (not just the title of a card) and are visible with all the surrounding topics.

Anyway, a lot of things I’ve tried suggest that it really may be better to use a one-pane outliner (that does columns and dates) for brainstorming, writing and action management while using another, more storage-oriented app for creating reference databases. But it really would be nice to see and relate (e.g. search) among all brainstorming, reference material, actions, etc. in one location. Oh well, I’ve started my anti-CRIMP meds now and just need to get a bunch of work done rather than pining for info nirvana.

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