Best writing software...

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 26, 2007 at 10:22 PM

Stephen,

You are right that SNC’s outlining function is not as powerful as ndxCards, but I did want to correct one thing you mention. You can nest “card decks” within card decks, so you can create a hierarchy with more than two levels. You can’t, however, make a note card the parent of any other element.

Steve Z.

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>SuperNoteCard’s outlining is far less powerful than ndxcards, at least it seems on
>casual inspection of SuperNotecard. There appear to be only two levels of hierarchy,
>which is probably fine for fiction. Or maybe not; I have never written any fiction
>since grade school.
> >A writing environment is probably the most subjective of
>software choices .I could never live with SuperNoteCard, because of the paltry
>outlining. To me a writing environment means first a powerful outliner. I collect
>information in OneNote; outline and brainstorm in MindGenius; link topics to the
>information in OneNote with MindGenius attach function and OneNote’s paragraph
>hyperlinks—that is, creating the attachments in MindGenius. Then I do a first
>draft, using the “Notes” sections in MG, hoisted to the last topical node in each
>branch. (I have up to four topical levels, followed by sometimes many levels of
>associative notes. Then I export to Word, where I turn topical words into
>full-sentence headings and do extensive revisions to the body text.
> >I don’t agree
>that Windows has no powerful outliners, but the difference is partly semantic. I
>don’t know how much of it is just semantic. I think BrainStorm is more powerful than
>anything I’ve seen produced for the Macintosh. For one thing, nothing else that I know
>of has BrainStorm’s order mark and gather (my jargon, not BrainStorm’s). To me this is
>a rare example of inventing a core outlining function.
> >(Brainstorm’s weakness in
>development, it seems to me, is a somewhat rigid insistence on working within the
>present core infrastructure. An example is the insistence is plain text, although I
>consider that choice defensible, even correct, for other reasons. What I think
>BrainStorm really needs is some mechanism for quickly creating a structure of
>multiple windows, a deficiency that seems incompletely answered by saving a set of
>multiple windows, although maybe I haven’t gotten the hang of how to deploy that
>feature effectively.)
> >
> >
>tshare wrote:
>>ndxCards is worth mentioning. It seems
>amazingly flexible.