The place of Inspiration in the scheme of things

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 5191

Posted by srdiamond15
2006-02-08 02:23:09

I got Inspiration 8 trial installed with the help of Inspiration Software’s excellent technical support. As a software company, Inspiration seems to me among the best.

(Regarding the “business version” of Inspiration—educational users get a better price on a lot of software. I wouldn’t begrudge Inspiration the right to fleece its corporate customers, merely because the bulk of Inspiration Software’s business is non-corporate. . .)

I would switch to Inspiration as my main outliner and graphical outliner, were it not from one limitation. For me, the inability in the graphical outliner to restructure linkages by simply by restructuring the relationship between objects—the need in Inspiration to actually operate on the linking relations rather than by actually relating objects—adds an unnecessary layer of opacity and is fatal to the purpose of the tool.

I made a suggestion to Inspiration to augment its ways of creating links to include dragging a symbol to another symbol. Since they have added various means to create links, it seems a small matter to create one more. Not on account of my suggestion, but I expect they will do this, at least by version 9. (I’m unrealistically hoping for 8.5.) It goes with the idea that a mature product that has withstood severe economic tests will end up doing exactly what it should.

Stephen R. Diamond

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