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: 2724

Posted by chris
2005-02-13 13:40:18

Yes, I think viewing in an ordinary outline is pretty close to what I want - but I don’t want to manually split the item into its parts; I want it to automatically be done. Thinking about it further, I guess this is already possible in both Ecco and BrainStorm; in Ecco, it depends some on how the item is pasted. Both require demoting the body of the message after pasting to get the effect I’m after.

I’ve tried several times to build an effective action manager in BrainStorm, which I like for its quick operation and “auto-hoisting.” It’s ideal for brainstorming and writing, but I can never quite get a handle on trying to manage actions with it. I think BrainStorm with columns and date awareness would be my ideal outliner.

One suggestion that would enhance my use of BrainStorm at this point:

1. “Collect” feature: this would be similar to what happens with the current “Write” function with a search string entered, but the result would be added to the model, perhaps with a heading of “Collect for term ‘[@computer]’ 2/13/2005” - and then the children would be a list of actions tagged with [@computer] and of course namesaked to their other locations in the model. This would allow building action lists on command as well as saving other types of searches within the model. I haven’t suggested this to the developer yet, but I plan to.

I suppose Ecco comes the closest to what I want at this point, although it requires more up-front planning/database design to really come up with an effective system. The column and outline features are often at odds; if you want to do a lot of sorting on column values you must reduce the amount of outlining you do. An option to toggle the display of “context parents” in Ecco would have made it really hard to beat.

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