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How *should* mark and gather work?
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 2930
Posted by srdiamond15
2005-03-09 18:44:33
Consider this hierarchy
I. Knowledge management
A. Textual outliners
1. BrainStorm
2. ADM
3. Graphic outliners
B. PIMs
C. Outliners
Problem: to use mark and gather to put textual outliners and graphic outliners as children of Outliners, with BrainStorm and ADM as its children, while moving Graphic outliners out of the textual outliners category, and make it a sibling of textual outliners. Simply put, to organize this correctly.
In Visual Mind, I select Textual Outliners and I select Graphic Outliners (even though it is currently a child of Textual Outliners) and move them to child position under Outliners. BrainStorm and ADM, being unselected, remain children of textual outliners and become grandchildren of outliners. Graphic outliners, having been separately selected, is moved to the position of the drag, becoming a child of Outliners. I submit that this is how it should work. (I’m curious, Alex, if MindGenius and FreeMind do it this way, as they aren’t now on my computer.)
In Notemap, if I try this, Graphic Outliners, despite having been selected independently, remains a child of Textual Outliners. All the children of a moved topic remain its children. The same is true of Inspiration. In BrainStorm, it isn’t possible to select at more than a single level. If you split the screen, only the focused part functions. So in BrainStorm the issue doesn’t arise, but the result is the same—children must be moved with their parent.
This difference in logic has nothing to do with graphic outliners versus textual outliners as such. Visual Mind uses a different logic, that could in principle be used by a textual outliner. (And perhaps was by More—I’m not sure—anyone know? How does Grandview handle this, Steve?) Visual’s Mind’s logic is stronger, in the logical sense of allowing more distinctions, and in practice it seems to me more powerful and more ergonomic.
Other opinions?
Stephen R. Diamond