What a good Outliner should have

Posted by Hugh
Mar 7, 2010 at 12:20 PM

I’m with Cassius on the difference between an outliner and a PIM. It’s always seemed to me that, strictly speaking, an outliner is mainly used for outlining a structure before writing, and a PIM is mainly used for information storage, although of course there are lots of users who use both terms for both, and lots of applications that bridge the gap. Each to his own. However, on the strict definition, it seems to me that what the OP is talking about is storage not writing and therefore a PIM, or if you prefer, a “a personal database”.

Incidentally the interesting taxonomy from Wave could usefully include some more applications for the Macintosh, beyond Opal and Scrivener: (for example) TAO, which is probably one of the most comprehensively featured outliners (by the strict definition) on either platform, Tinderbox, OmniOutliner, and DEVONThink, Eaglefiler and Together, which some people claim to use for outlining, but fall more into the personal database category.