Re: PocketThinker - MS-Outlook outliner

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2976

Posted by tamaral
2005-03-15 19:53:58

I explored PocketThinker only superficially, but, to be honest, didn’t like it much. Not surprising, as I’ve been rejecting trial versions of other outliners for months. It would seem that, for each user of outliners, there’s always a certain set of features they will consider absolutely essential. In each case, an application that fulfilled just those features would probably be rather light and simple, but it usually doesn’t exist…

In the case of PocketThinker, at once I didn’t like the fact that it’s not really graphically integrated into Outlook’s interface, but rather opens as a separate window. Then - like with many other programs - one has to do something to start editing a node and something else to stop editing it. I much prefer something that works simply like a text editor with added structure. Finally, when one marks a node as done, all its children are equally marked as done and you can’t cleanly undo that (that is, unmark the parent and only the children that were not previously marked). And I didn’t try it further.

Still, this made me think that Outlook, if provided with a truly integrated, powerful outliner (and I’d go for a single-pane one), would be quite close to a modern version of Ecco. A modern suite comprising a mail-client, a calendar, and an outliner could be rather powerful. On the one hand, it would address all the daily, personal task management: the e-mail client for received messages marked to read or reply, as well as draft messages waiting to be finished and sent; the calendar for scheduled events and appointments; and the outliner for other, not so tightly scheduled tasks. On the other hand, such an Ecco-like suite could address a good part of every day’s writing tasks: the e-mail client for communication with others; and the outliner for “communication with one-self”, that is, structured note-taking (preferably supporting attributes, filtering, etc.).

Unfortunately, after many years using Outlook and now Thunderbird, guess I would hardly cope with Ecco’s old e-mail client…

Telmo

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