Best software for emergent order

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 6, 2007 at 05:40 AM

This process is nothing other than brainstorming, broadly construed and extended in time—the core function of a true outliner. To me, asking for the best program for your purpose tantamount to asking for the most powerful outliner.

I think it’s BrainStorm. (And for those who conclude that the Mac has more advanced outlining than Windows, I would challenge someone to supply a Mac outliner more powerful than BrainStorm. Off course, we may disagree on identifying the core outliner functions.)

Randall Shinn wrote:
>I own Ultra Recall, Zoot, WhizFolders, and MyInfo, and I have found them all useful for
>different kinds of tasks, depending on what kind of information structure I need. (I
>have yet to try OneNote.)
> >Right now I am trying to decide which program is most useful
>for collecting information on a kind of random basis (notes, web clippings,
>thoughts, ideas, etc.) and then giving it some kind of order later on as the collection
>of information grows larger. This tends to be information that I might use for
>creative writing such as materials and ideas for projects. (I’m not talking about
>day-to-day working information or record-keeping.)
> >So far I find Zoot the easiest
>program to throw information into without much idea of what I’ll do with it, and then
>days, weeks, or months later do some sorting out. Essentially I’m concerned with
>developing an emergent structure from information from the bottom-up. Trying to
>create much of a top-down structure early in the process would be too restrictive for
>my purposes.
> >I’m curious what program others have found most useful for this sort of
>task.
> >Randall Shinn