Becoming obsessed with the idea of a mac

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Dec 9, 2007 at 01:33 AM

Matty wrote:

>As for Maxthink… you
>can put me in the column of people who just don’t get it. For whatever reason I can’t get
>my head around the two-pane interface. For the kind of work it does I find brainstorm to
>be fantastically intuitive to use. BTW, the new update of brainstorm is nothing
>revolutionary, but they have added a couple of nice features. Especially welcome is
>the ability to mark 6 different locations to “throw” to.

I found that the key to becoming comfortable with the writing pane is to think about what it’s there for. Not a really obvious question. It doesn’t function as a pane in the 2-pane sense. You just input data there. So what’s the point? Why input data at a point other than your outline. That’s the question that I think confuses people, as it confused me. My operation of the program became smoother when I articulated the narrow purpose of the writing panel.

The writing panel allows you to see entire note entry you are working on, while having outline itself show only one line of each note. Why not expand only the note being worked on, while allowing editing in the main pane? Then the note you are working on might take the bulk of the space, and you couldn’t see the structure of the outline while working on the note.

I haven’t seen the new Brainstorm, but if I understand what you describe, Brainstorm seems to have implemented a version of binsort. That’s quite important.