Vertical vs horizontal organizers

Posted by Dellu
Apr 19, 2018 at 05:55 PM

Franz Grieser wrote:
>I’d say that’s one of the reasons why most of the tools we discuss here
>allow you to look at the big picture and to zoom in on details. Any
>2-pane outliner gives you both a horizontal+vertical view and a detail
>view. The same is true of word processors such as Word, OpenOffice
>Writer, Textmaker (with the navigation pane opened) or Scrivener.

Yes, to a certain extent. I specially agree with the Scrivener’s because the Corkboard offers a great summary of the notes. But, for the rest of the outliners, I don’t find the Title sufficient to know about the contents of the note; specially if the note is written long time ago. Hiding the detail is the major weakness of the vertical system (including the outliners). Scrivener’s Corkboard and Tinderbox’s $Text in the map give a better glimpse. Still, what the outliners miss is the intricate relationships between the core ideas (notes). The outliners support only hierarchical relations; just like regular mind mapping tools. I find the maps in Tinderbox and Scapple much more continent to see the bigger picture. Spacial proximity on the maps could represent the correlation of the ideas without even drawing a single hyperlink. That is exactly the advantage of horizontal organization. Spacial proximity contains a valuable meaning. Hierarchy itself could be spatially represented.

But, I agree that 300 page book might be harder to map on a plane space. The maps inside Tinderbox and Scapple could also be unwieldy with that much information.