Surviving outlining fever (longish!)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2831

Posted by jackcrawford
2005-02-22 20:08:31

Like some others here, I’ve found myself afflicted by the dreaded disease Outlining Fever. The symptoms are obvious - the need to stay abreast of and trial every product on the market, purchase many which sit unused on the hard drive, participate in arcane discussions about the minutiae of applications both past and present, and finally pine after a perfect software solution to my own personal organisation inadequacies.

My guilt at the amount of time and money this requires has finally got to me and I’ve decided to “settle down” and stick with 2 or 3 applications and try and resist the temptation to keep searching for the Holy Grail that will never arrive.

The solution which works for me is a combination of Brainstorm (for unstructured brainstorming and simple project layouts) & Idea! (for data management). Everyone else of course will have their own particular solution for their specific needs.

Given the recent discussion here about what is essential in choosing particular products, I thought people may be interested in a brief list of reasons for the choices.

Brainstorm is very good at what it does. This is evidenced by 20 years of development (must be close to a record in the software industry). The company remains committed and is still developing and supporting the product.

Idea! has a very strong, and in some cases unique, feature set (esp at Pro level) with excellent Outlook integration which is essential for me. The company (which is more than a software developer) seems very committed to further development and is a player in the broader knowledge management industry. Idea! is still a little clunky but further refinements are in the pipeline. It may be too structured for some but data management is about structure for me.

I’ve obviously considered many others including -

UltraRecall is very mature for its age and has excellent functionality. Lack of integration with Outlook 2000 rules it out for me.

Notemap is elegant but ultimately is designed as part of a suite of software products for the US legal market. CaseSoft is in that business rather than the “outlining software business”.

I haven’t time to learn Zoot or ADM and find their UI unappealing (a consideration which I think is more important in PIMs than just about any other software category). With Zoot, I am also suspicious about a product yet to be 32 bit and which is almost totally reliant on the commitment and skills of an individual programmer. I saw this years ago with the BlueWave off-line reader. The product disintegrated when the designer became ill.

I like Inspiration and have my kids using it. The ability to toggle from outliner to map is very powerful. However, it is targeted at the education sector and doesn’t quite cut the mustard for business use. As others here have commented, it is quite fiddly if you want to customise maps.

I’ve used Treepad for many years but Henk seems to be taking it down another path not of interest to me.

I’ve tried various others too numerous to mention, but as I’ve commented here Outlook integration is essential for me and most don’t do it well.

So I’m going to try and stick with Brainstorm and Idea! supplemented with the usual office apps and a couple of project management tools.

I’m not sure how strong I’m going to be in resisting the latest and greatest outliner, but here goes!

Best wishes

Jack

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