Re: Outliners + PIMs + Arrange +WebArranger

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 644

Posted by nubuckaroo
2000-06-28 17:55:37

Wow, it’s been a long time. Pre-Time’s Shadow I think. I still read all the posts, but I seldom have anything to say here.

Laszlo sent me an e-mail based on my comments on Arrange in this forum and we’ve exchanged a number of e-mails as a result. I’m grateful to him because his question prompted me to fix my Arrange problem so I don’t have to log onto my PB Duo 280 to save files. Disk images are trÈs cool. Must be all that ginkgo I’ve been taking.

I think WebArranger (nÈe Arrange) has a great deal in common with Frontier, except Arrange hides the learning curve.

The only deficit Arrange has as an outliner is the lack of a keyboard-activated way to create a note. I just finished entering over 230 quotations from Zen and the Art of Making a Living into my home document and I had to go to the mouse for each new note. On a Powerbook that’s not much of a problem. Other than that, it’s a superb outliner.

As a research tool, it’s unsurpassed.

As an organizer, all it lacks is scripting support so I can access the data from other applications. I could, if I wanted to make the effort, dig into the native file formats and extract what I wanted but I’d have to write all the routines to parse the data. I don’t have that kind of time. So I use Palm Desktop to get to organizer type data I need to share.

It also lacks calculated fields, but if it were scriptable I could offload that to Applescript for much of what I would want to do.

Put Arrange on a Newton-sized Mac with scriptability and I’d be in heaven.

I think Frontier could replicate all the functionality of Arrange and it would bring the scripting ability with it. Someone just needs to graft a dumbed-down version of MacBird onto it as a front-end, do the calendar templates (like that hasn’t been done already!) and we’re rockin’.

I’ve got the 5.0.x version of Frontier expressly to attempt to do something like this, but it’s one of those projects that may perpetually remain at the periphery of my attention.

I’ve tried Inspiration and it just isn’t making it for me. I feel like I’m in a pediatric clinic while I’m using it. Arrange is a little funky in it’s interface, but it’s an honest-to-God serious tool. I’m sticking with it until something comes along better.

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