Two Pane Outliner Shootout

Posted by nathanb
May 30, 2018 at 03:24 AM

>Paul J. Miller wrote:
>For a long time now I have been looking for the perfect note taking
>program, I have been spending lots of money getting licenses for
>programs which I thought were promising and passing of the results to
>the readers of my blog in the form of reviews which other people may or
>may not find informative.
>

Mr Miller, your blog posts of software reviews have been my most favorite CRIMP resource. I have read most of your reviews more than once as I wrestle with the same questions. The time you’ve taken to do those in-depth reviews and explain your findings is very much appreciated. I was going to add that I always found it amusing that the one review I disagreed with was about OneNote. You weren’t a fan of the ‘infinite canvas’ concept and described it…”

>it is a sort of hybrid between a word processor and a desktop publishing program. It ends up being not as good as either of them.

Whereas I have grown so fond of that particular feature that it makes trying out other software difficult for me. I have long been a fan of Microsoft’s Tablet PC concept, and even though only like 10% of my notes involve ‘digital ink’ over the years, OneNote is unique in its ability to integrate a hodgepodge of digital ink, tables, attachments, rich text, shapes, etc on an ‘borderless 2d canvas’. You can re-arrange all those different things effortlessly. It’s interface is….soft and fluid…and yes, dumb. It shines only if you think of it as a digital canvas, not a database. There are lots of programs that allow you to ink and a few that allow you arrange stuff on a big 2d board instead of limiting you to word processor space. But none of these let you ink with a pen, then paste in a screenshot, then collapse some text into an outline with embedded micro-tables then draw shapes with a mouse then attach a pdf and an email….all on the same page with absolutely no friction. It’s the same as it was in 2007 and that in-the-page fluidity still feels revolutionary. But it ends there, your recent description is spot-on…..

>the user interface is superbly designed to help the new user and to make the operation of the program obvious. But the program itself sucks, many of its capabilities are superficial and gimmicky. They are included just so that the advertising department can tick the box saying it has that capability. If you use OneNote for any serious work then you come up against its limitations very quickly. It is a typical product of Microsoft ‘focus groups’ which tend to make things so they are easy for the new user and difficult or impossible for the power user.

It’s absolutely demoralizing for users like me, who fell in love with the fluid power of desktop OneNote 2007, to watch Microsoft peddle a LESS CAPABLE offering aimed at the lowest-common-denominator user in 2018. So I want out, I’m actively seeking a new daily driver. It just feels like a step back to limit myself to hard grids, and note types, and a word processor interface after years of not having those constraints. The even greater challenge is the change in paradigm from a few pages of information to structured nodes. That’s the part that most people get wrong in comparing OneNote to Evernote or most any other system. With Evernote/Rightnote/Myinfo/ConnectedText etc, notes are more granular. Each ‘page’ is generally a single idea, single attachment, single ITEM etc with discrete metadata and the structure comes from where that note as a NODE is within the database. OneNote should never be used that way where a page only contains a single ITEM. For example, I can contain all my ideas, activity log, references file attachments, sketches, etc about any topic (car maintenance, life insurance etc) within a single page and frequently do. That’s not more powerful than how you’d lay out the data in MyInfo but it is a very different way of thinking about how to structure your notes. I’m having trouble forcing myself out of the OneNote Way, my brain says its for the best but old habits die hard!