Outlines of outlines

Posted by Derek Cornish
Oct 3, 2006 at 05:42 PM

Well said, Hugh. I simply can’t understand why it is so difficult to find such software, but probably the silence here explains the reason.

I was interested to hear about your embedding of Word’s outliner inside Ultra Recall. As I remember, clicking on a Word file in UR’s tree opens Word plus the file in a separate window, and this can be re-sized to fit the UR display. It looks very neat; sometimes the illusion of complete integration is almost as good as the real thing :-).

Zoot also allows linked files to be opened externally in this way (via “Insert file” or “file link”), and one can similarly “scale” down the Word window to fit the editor pane. But there is little real interaction between Word and Zoot. Does UR offer something more for Word and Brainstorm than this? I imagine there would be no problem also using NoteMap in this way.

But integration via file linking and launching is a poor second to having a rich-text editor with outlining facilities built into the editing pane of a two-pane notetaker. This would enable outlines and their contents to be treated just like other text notes. If this were to be combined with the data-organization, manipulation and searching capabilities of a program like Zoot it would integrate outlining into the whole creative process. I won’t hold my breath waiting for this to happen, however.

Incidentally, I’ve been fiddling around with the desktop version of PocketThinker, a single-pane outliner, over the weekend (http://www.pocketthinker.com/). It is a lot like NoteMap - including having the NoteMap bug which deletes one or other attached “comments” when one merges neighbouring items. It’s more spartan than NoteMap in terms of features. But at $20 for the desktop and PPC versions together, however, it is a pretty good deal. Also, the developer seems active and there is a forum.

I managed to export a complex Grandview file to it and was surprised at how well it took the import, aside from a small glitch with spacing. PT’s native file-type is .opml. It’s import-export features are good (it imports to and exports from Word’s outline view) and it provides some integration with Outlook. It’s good to see people like PocketThinker and Bonsai still developing single-pane outliners.