Re: Inspiration (was: Semantic nets vs. outlines - TheBrain)

< 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: 588

Posted by n.lowe
2000-05-26 06:07:58

>But Nick, I must ask, why do you think ver 4.1 is preferable?

Good question, and other long-term users will doubtless have quite different feelings about what’s important in the various changes to the Inspiration feature set. (Some of this duplicates a rant I posted to the Nisus list in February, so Geoff Heard and others may feel a haunting sense of deja vu and urge to switch channels…) But here, for what it’s worth, is my own mixture of feelings.

Inspiration’s problem for some years has been that they got the product pretty much right quite early on in its development, and there hasn’t been that much obvious room for improvement to what’s already a mature, well-designed program. (One radical enhancement would have been the addition of a MORE-style presentations mode, especially now that AppleWorks has introduced this in direct competition to the tyranny of the crummy PowerPoint. It can’t be that difficult to do, given that MORE managed it in a few hundred K of code.)

For my money, the advantages of 4.1 over later versions are as follows:

1. 4.1 had pretty much the feature set of 6 in a much more compact package (only 930K of code for the 68K Mac version, as against v5’s 1351K and v6’s 3256K, with RAM requirements inflating similarly). By most present-day standards this level of bloat is actually pretty modest, but for those of us still living out of a Duo 280c running System 7.1 the bloat-to-feature-gain ratio in more recent versions is modest at best.

2. The version 5 redesign was considerably more prodigal of screen space, in a program where screen real estate is often at a premium. The version 4 palette was compact and unobtrusive, if a bit old-fashioned-looking, and its replacement in 5 ate up more screen for no improvement in functionality. Version 5 also added oversized toolbars that may be quite helpful to new users (though why do the buttons have to be quite so huge?), but simply duplicate existing menu commands, and experienced users know the keyboard shortcuts for all the button functions anyway, so the first thing they do is turn the toolbar permanently off.

3. Version 5 did add a few welcome features, notably GIF export for HTML (very nicely implemented), more symbol-resizing options, and the ability to split notes text. But for day-to-day use these gains were offset by the loss of some far more useful version 4 features, perhaps dropped simply for cross-platform consistency:

- the editable colour palette (now finally restored in 6, presumably after howls of protest from users)

- the Color All Parts shortcut, enabling you to recolour line, fill, and text in a single operation

- no need to Set New Look manually each time (with a keyboard shortcut that doesn’t exist on my keyboard!) - the last symbol or link selected is automatically the style of the next one you create

- simpler implementation of Preferences settings - no faffing around with folders of template documents

- fishbone diagram support - not terribly well implemented, admittedly, but it’s always seemed strange to me that a freeware package like Designer Draw permits links to links, while a full-featured professional product like Inspiration doesn’t.

The changes in version 6 seem mainly to have concentrated on the diagram mode, presumably because that’s what most people buy it for. I haven’t noticed any improvements to the outline mode. The heavily-sold new web features look like clumsy window-dressing to me; it’s hard to see most users having a need for them.

The two best new features in 6 are effectively overdue fixes: the return, in improved form, of the customisable colour palette inexplicably dropped in version 5; and the new Webbed Arrange option, which does what the old Cluster option should have but didn’t (organise a diagram radially rather than in tree form). Cluster itself is still there, as useless as ever. Astonishingly, though, there’s still no smart-quotes option, and the potentially-excellent HTML export option is still crippled in vital ways: text formatting like italics still isn’t exported, and everything comes out with STRONG tags around it that have to be stripped unless you like seeing all your text in bold. I still really like it as a way of creating *structured* web pages, with embedded graphics, in MORE and double-exporting. But one distinctly retrograde step here is that in v6 the HTML export now defaults to JPEG rather than GIFs for its graphics - presumably for licensing reasons, though GIF support is otherwise built in. Infuriatingly, there’s no way to change this other than reinstalling version 5 - and as with previous upgrades, the file format has changed so that the only way to open a version 6 outline with graphics in 5 is to go via, erm, MORE (still supported! yay!).

It’s true that v6 does come with a lot more stuff. The symbol libraries have certainly been radically expanded, with much more garish images, including photographs and animated GIFS, for which some may have better uses than I. It’s now possible to edit the symbols on palettes, with an interesting popup menu interface for editing the colours of an image one by one. Unfortunately it all looks rather chaotic and cliparty; it’s now easier than ever to do really ugly, eye-hurting, badly-designed diagrams. The many supplied templates are geared heavily towards the school market, again presumably because that’s now the core of the actual customer base, though this surprises me. They’re interesting to leaf through, but not terribly imaginative showcases for the power and flexibility of the program; most are variations on four or five basic models (tree diagram, step-numbered spine-and-rib outline, flowchart, web).

The most significant change may be the one from which we started: that the Mac & Windows versions now ship on the same CD. In the old days, if you actually wanted to run this admirably cross-platform application cross-platform, you had to pay for it twice; and because the Windows version wouldn’t read Mac files from anything but the current Mac version, you had to download a Mac demo and pre-convert all your old files to a format the Windows version could open.

I do want to stress that all the above gripes about recent versions are extremely minor compared with the overall power, elegance, and maturity of the product. Inspiration is still an absolutely wonderful program, from a lovely little company, and I’d have no hesitation recommending the current version to anyone interested in expanding their use of outlining techniques in new and super-empowering directions. Just be warned that it will, over time, completely transform the way you work in unpredictably liberating ways, as you discover more and more of what you can do with it. I’ve a book out next week (http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/Scripts/webbook.asp?isbn=0521771765, if anyone’s bothered) that couldn’t have been done without it, and indeed lapses into Inspiration diagrams at half-a-dozen points where words fail. I’m sure I’m far from alone.

Back to archived message list