WorkFlowy Single Pane Outliner

Posted by Foolness
Sep 5, 2012 at 08:38 PM

This is inaccurate.

I’m not a fan of workflowy myself but saying workflowy is purely an outliner would be akin to saying PersonalBrain and MindManager are the same.

In fact, workflowy’s weakest features are it’s in-line notes and outline. A dedicated forum like this should be much keen to the nuances of services like this.

Trying reorganizing Workflowy’s outline and you’ll be met with an annoying mouse click drag that belies the ease of the keyboards for the rest of the service. Trying creating sub-trees and you’ll be forced to play tab as a branch line is not a pure line but is a slave to the previous branch. The notes feature is also very confused. They did it well enough that now only the first line of a note is showing but they also annoyed many users who want full notes shown but if you allow that, mass note takers are punished because the notes eat up a whole lot of space.

Workflowy’s uniqueness lies in it being a foldable outliner, fast speed and pure text export mixed with it’s auto-detecting and auto-converting of text tags into clickable tags.

What this means is that while Checkvist can also be sub-clicked, Workflowy smoothly transitions into a sub-branch at a touch of a button in such a way that it’s more comparable to TiddlyWiki than Checkvist despite the initial similarity.

The text tag conversations is two fold. Someone mentioned a software on the Mac. Well that’s the thing. It’s only on a Mac. Fail to back up that software or switch to another OS then it’s not cross platform.

Workflowy on the other hand has a triple backup feature. The web service. The e-mail mentioning the history. Finally any basic text editor where you paste the entire outliner into a basic text editor/barebones Windows Notepad.

Since it’s basically a text editor on the web, the formatting is exactly as it looks as you typed it in the web service except when exporting in formatted form. It’s not an auto-export but by far it has one of the simplest ctrl + c export methods among free services including non-cloud services.

The other power is the quick search. The search is much much faster than even gmail making it one of the fastest web service for filtering. This means that setting aside a fancy calendar ui, typing March on the search, will outpace finding your appointment on either GCal, Coolendar or Gmail. It’s really all in the tags.

Is it better than dedicated to-do lists? No. But speed per speed, it scales better than something like RTM or Evernote who also rely on tagging systems to filter through dates, priorities, etc.

It’s really like combining a barebones plain txt editor with PersonalBrain and last I checked, PersonalBrain is not essentially a mind map software either.