Re: Going 3-dimensional

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 5061

Posted by stephenz
2006-01-16 16:39:24

> What features in Writer’s Blocks do you like that an outliner doesn’t provide, and what use do you find for those features?

Well, I’m still trying to figure that out. I was intrigued by the spreadsheet approach of Notebox Disorganizer, though that is not a fully developed program, nor are its cells integrated into a whole. But it put me in mind of Writer’s Blocks, which I had trialed a few years ago without actually “getting” it, so I decided to take another look at WB with a different frame of reference. Now I can see that there can be some visual power to arranging your writing into columns, though I’m still trying to get a sense of whether or not that would work for me. Yes, in fact you can achieve the same organizational effect by using an outliner (afterall, column headings are somewhat the same as tree-nodes), but visually it isn’t quite the same. The other thing about Writer’s Blocks that I think is a powerful concept (though I’m still investigation whether the implementation is workable) is that you can shoot your structured blocks of text into the built-in wordprocessor, where you can actually see your work as a full, holistic document, edit them and then re-import them back into blocks, should you want to. That is not possible in any of the two-pane outliners.

Essentially, I have been unhappy with all the two-pane outliners as writing instruments, and so I am curious to see if Writer’s Blocks’ concept will provide a creative environment that they don’t.

Steve Z.

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