(another take on) Mind mappers vs outliners

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3008

Posted by sub
2005-03-21 14:01:48

[Steve C.: Managers, for the most part, like to see pretty presentations with not much detail. I liken these presentations to medieval manuscripts which the monks beautifully illuminated so that their royal, but illiterate, patrons had something to show off to their fellow royalty.]

Following Derek’s suggestion I read Tufte’s excellent diatribe against Powerpoint; in fact, I bought the printed version. I quote from there: “PP slides projected up on the wall are very low resolution -compared to paper, 35mm slides, and the immensely greater capacities of the human eye-brain system.”

I think this goes for software generated mind maps as well, compared to their hand-drawn counterparts; it’s the reason that, while I’ve maintained their use for presentations, I have turned back to outliners for information management.

I found myself using up most of my screen area for a navigation diagram and only having the bottom area available for writing—the actual work I wanted to focus on.

Contrast this with a two-pane outliner, whose navigation pane only requires the leftmost column while the main area is reserved for the job at hand.

No Holy Grail here then, is there?

alx

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