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Re: Bins in ADM, was Re: Should Brainstorm
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 4483
Posted by srdiamond15
2005-10-30 13:14:58
<The question is if Notemap or Brainstorm would do a better job at this process? What I like about using ADM is that I have the sources and notes as part of the outline, and then I can write about them in the separate text window. I just made a test yesterday, haven’t really started working this way yet, but it looked promising, as if it would work. I tried to do the same thing in BrainStorm today, but somehow it didn’t give me the same overview, (probably because of the focused view). Actually, Notemap might do a good job as well. But somehow the interface in ADM seems more intuitive, it is easier to imagine the topics as bins that you could put stuff into, while in Notemap and Brainstorm they are more like text. And then the ability also to write text for each entry - that you have a distinction between topics in the outline and body text - though without being constraint to one line outline topics (like in e.g. TreePad).>
If you prefer two panes, then ADM is probably the way to go, provided you can cope with the absence of an undo command in its tree and provided the bugginess has improved considerably since the last version. BrainStorm is almost bug free, as is NoteMap (unless you count one significant design flaw a bug). NoteMap and BrainStorm have unlimited and practically unlimited undo commands respectively. The absence of an _any_undo in ADM’s tree proved to be not a non-starter but a non-continuer for me.
Between BrainStorm and NoteMap, I’d say BrainStorm is definitely the better choice for implementing the bin approach. NoteMap is more a “stage” two” outliner. If dragging to a text entry in BrainStorm seems non-intuitive or clumsy (you would have to hold down the shift key on a drag to a BrainStorm topic), here’s what I’d do:
In your model containing your research notes as a flat list, put that flat list at the second level, with a topic like “Raw notes.” Create your bin topics at the first level. Then split your model’s window into as many additional windows as you have bin topics. Promote “raw data” in the first window and promote each bin respectively in each of the other windows. Then each of these windows is a “bin,” into which you can drag each a topic.
This might not work well if you have a small screen; on my 19-inch lcd, there’s no problem with space. I don’t think hitting a key is really faster than dragging to a window. _Assigning_ keys to bins is no doubt faster than splitting the windows, particularly since you probably will have to resize them to make them large enough to split repetitively. For a BrainStorm WIBN, it might be easier to program a way to split windows multiply than to throw to multiple targets, since splitting is just doing the same thing over again.
Stephen R. Diamond