Re: The place of Inspiration in the scheme of things

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 5194

Posted by stephenz
2006-02-08 09:13:35

For me, there are a couple of major limitations to Inspiration. First of all, working the outline is not exactly optimized for ease of use. For instance, the keyboard shortcuts for adding topics and subtopics are Ctrl-G and Ctrl-K respectively. This is hardly intuitive. I remember one outliner which used A, S, D for adding a parent topic (Aunt), a topic at the same level (Sister), and subtopic (Daughter). This nifty pnemonic made it easy to remember which key did what, and demonstrated much more consideration for the end user.

The same lack of thought about the end user goes for the diagram function in Inspiration. Two examples will illustrate my point: First, I have yet to uncover how to set a universal default style for the text boxes and links. You can set them on a diagram-level basis, but when you start a new diagram, you have to do it all over again. Second example is how the diagram needs constant tending as you make changes in the outline. For instance, if you’ve been a model, carefully arranged the diagram the way you want it, but then have to change the outline, you need to re-arrange your diagram all over again.

I suspect these drawbacks reflect the market that Inspiration is focused on (unless someone tells me that these have been remedied in the new version). The education market is probably not as concerned with time-saving features as the business market would be, and this is why I doubt Inspiration will ever evolve into a really solid business tool. It has its uses now, but will likely never become an essential program for me, I’m afraid.

Steve Z.

Back to archived message list