Back to ConnectedText

Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 4, 2013 at 08:37 PM

Okay, I’ve now downloaded the very latest version of ConnectedText (fired by criticism of the latter in another thread) and have been sniffing at it with interest.

First of all, it is, of course, a full outliner. In fact, it allows you to maintain multiple outlines - as many as you like per project, as well as a ‘project outline’ - oh, and folding inside notes, as well, which means you can use it as a one-pane, two-pane or three-pane outliner with sub-outliner. That’s pretty powerful!

It also has extensive support for user-defined structures (topics, categories, plus the mindmap-like Navigator), and if that’s not enough, a table of contents pane as well. Not to mention revisions, history, and various other goodies I haven’t had time to glance at. Oh, and a capable (if not perfect) search engine. In short, it amply fulfills all the criteria required to be classified as an outliner.

However: with respect to earlier criticism of the markup approach - yes, I can see what you mean. Precisely because CT is capable of managing very length and complex notes, it would be nice to have a pure WYSIWYG option - editing a markup language in a lengthy note can become quite tedious. In fact, given the success of Notebooks in supporting simple text, Markdown and HTML-based rich text simultaneously (in Windows, MacOS and iOS), I can’t see any very good reason why notes shouldn’t be managed in a WYSIWYG interface. It would add another interpretative layer between user and app, but any potential slowdown would be offset by a hugely enhanced UX. Ideally, advanced users would be able to switch off this option and revert to the markup language if they wished to.

Just some more thoughts on an application that has already been extensively discussed here and elsewhere. But I must say, I’m much more impressed by this latest version of CT than I have been by previous versions.