Re: Idea Cruncher

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4903

Posted by jackcrawford
2006-01-04 21:23:42

What interested me, Steve, about Idea Cruncher was the concept which I haven’t seen before.

People here often talk about having to take 3 distinct actions:

- brainstorm ideas (e.g. using Brainstorm)

- refine and organise the material further (e.g using NoteMap)

- export to a word processor/project manager/mind mapper for final publication

Such a process is cumbersome, at best, and a waste of time, at worst.

Idea Cruncher seems to represent an attempt to combine the first 2 stages on a single screen. What attracted my attention initially wasn’t the outliner which is still rudimentary. It’s the second pane, the notes pane. This pane is dynamic and changes everytime you select an element in the outlining tree. This means that you can store notes for any entry in the tree and view them in sync with your position in the tree.

The third pane, the editing pane is deliberately static so you can build up solid drafts as you move down the tree and extract any notes of interest. There aren’t any extraction methods other than cut & paste at the moment

That’s the theory of course. I’m going to give it a workout with real-life data in the next couple of months and see how it performs.

It’s positioned as a to-do manager as well as a writing/project aid so will test that as well.

Does anyone know anything about the company/person behind Idea Cruncher? The website seems to be very new.

Jack

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