Random notes on windows outliners

Posted by Derek Cornish
Jan 24, 2007 at 03:55 PM

Having played around with PocketThinker and Inspiration in connnection with some reviews I’ve been writing, I was surprised to find that I preferred PocketThinker, despite its occasional instability and restricted feature set.

My main problem with Inspiration is its lack of any easy means to join items. Grandview, for example, has a simple keyboard shortcut for this purpose, and PocketThinker, like NoteMap, allows items to be merged simply by using delete at the end of the first item’s line, or backspace at the beginning of the second item. Of course a problem of the latter method (for both PT and NoteMap) is that mistakes can get made. More importantly, any comments attached to the second item get lost when it is merged with the first one.

Another problem is that Inspiration’s default keyboard shortcuts are just so unintuitive and hard to remember: e.g., Ctrl-’ for moving an item up. PT just uses Shift-UpArrow. PT’s outlines are less structured and more fluid, too. I often gave up trying to move items around an Inspiration outline, flattened it manually, and started over again. No doubt this was a combination of lack of experience and lack of patience, but life is short. PocketThinker enabled me to work with it straight away. Although I prefer the logic of Grandview’s approach to outlining, I liked the ease, when using PT, with which parent items could be uncoupled from their children and moved around on their own, up or down, and promoted or demoted.

Having said all this, after this brief brush with Windows’ finest (I had already dismissed NoteMap), I will probably continue using Grandview for major projects. Grandview is logical, fully featured, almost state-of-the-art - apart from its lack of multiple undo (which it rarely requires) - and unbreakable.

As for Brainstorm, which is uncluttered, elegant and powerful - if only the aerial view was editable, so that one could opt to work in that view as well as Brainstorm’s more restricted ones. I take the point that hoisting provides focus (GV, after all, allows hoisting) but I am not convinced that not being able to work on the whole outline is anything but a crucial drawback.

Derek