In Control from Attain

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 524

Posted by rhudson317
2000-05-07 06:43:07

I’ve been using outliners since first trying Think Tank or its equiavlent on a Kaypro! When we got our first Macs, I used “MindWrite” for several years, used “More” for presentations, and then discovered “In Control.” Years later, it’s still the program I use every day the aging Duo I take with me everywhere.

Features? Outlining, of course. With an overlay of fields, like dates, assignments, notes, completion status, etc. And macros, so with a keystroke, you can bring up all the items flagged for a particular date, all the items relating to a particular person or project… The drawback I find is that it’s so good, it never lets me forget anything I noted I should do!

In style, it reminds one of Filemaker, which has always made me wonder if anyone’s ever implemented an outline algorithm in a Filemaker database? Of course, you can imitate the look of an outline in the Preview mode, but you can’t manipulate any of those lines without going back into the flat-file “browse” mode. Anyone heard of a Filemaker approach that creates true interactive outlining?

On a related note, what are the basic underlying algorithms for an outliner anyway? How does an outliner keep track of what’s on what levels, and manage drag-and-drop?

But now I’ve been dragged into Windows World… so what to do?

There appear to be no equivalents to In Control for Windows [in spite of the curious fact that the file management interface is heavily outline-based!] Of course, I write in the Word outline mode, but that’s primitive compared to In Control or its Mac cousins.

I’ve installed Basilisk II, the Mac emulator, on my Windows machine, which brings up In Control nicely. Curious thing, though, none of the date-based functions work. Matching (hoisting?) items works fine on text fields, but not on dates. Nor will the program sort dates correctly. Makes me wonder what routines In Control is using that aren’t available in the emulator???

If anyone’s interested in exploring In Control, please let me know. And if you have any tips on the emulation problem, please reply. Thanks - Richard

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