Re: MORE & Corkboard

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 319

Posted by n.lowe
1999-09-12 03:44:32

In response to Nick Page’s original query about exporting from later versions of
Corkboard/Three by Five, 2.0 (not the last version, but the only one I have) would only export to
Final Draft and RTF - not even a plain text option. But the RTF export was a lot better than the RTF
import (which left weird negative number strings at the front of all headlines), and I’ve managed to
get 3x5 files with graphics through the magic portal of RTF into Word, Inspiration, More, and even
HTML, though sometimes it’s necessary to chain and tweak to get where you want to end up. (To
arrive at HTML I went 3x5=>RTF=>Word=>Inspiration=>More=>Inspiration=>HTML - I could have
skipped the detour via More, but its outline view is nicer to work in with embedded graphics than
Inspiration’s.)

I have both warm and cool feelings about Three by Five, which I wrestled with for some years
before abandoning it entirely for Inspiration. For me it was a so-nearly-great program that never
seemed quite finished, and was at least as frustrating in actual use as it was at times genuinely
liberating. It had a brilliant metaphor drawn from a well-established tradition of real-world, old-
technology quasi-outlining (index cards pinned to a corkboard, an old screenwriters’ technique for
building stories from ideas), and it implemented it with an intelligent sense of what an electronic
simulation could do to enhance the basic technique: resizable cards, zoom views with a
magnification window, tree diagrams like More’s (but with much more structure and layout
control), the ability to collapse a card to its headline as well as a tree to its parent, dynamically
updated outline view, and so on. So far as I know it’s the only program to have properly
implemented this kind of model, where every headline in the hierarchy has multi-line body text
attached, in a graphical view - More and Inspiration require a separate window and only let you see
one headline’s body text at a time. But it was hard to work with large outlines even on a big screen,
there were a lot of things that didn’t quite work as they should, and import/export options were
very limited. Interested to hear some of it’s survived into Final Draft, though - anyone using this
and know more? Not much gleaning from their website.

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