What a good Outliner should have

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 8, 2010 at 04:28 PM

dan7000 wrote:
>Unfortunately, there don’t
>seem to be any good contenders for providing this functionality in Windows anymore.
>Stephen, I forget what you use for Outlining, but I’m thinking maybe you have switched
>to Mac. I used ADM for a long time, and have found no good replacement.

Dan,

I agree that Windows seems a wasteland of good outliners, at least as I’ve defined “outliner.” I live in both the Mac and Windows worlds: Mac for home/personal computing and Windows at work. The truth is, I’m not thrilled with any of the outliners available in either platform, though Mac certainly is a bit more robust with OmniOutliner and Tao, although Tao appears to be a bit of an orphan at this point.

In Windows, I think the best current outliner is Brainstorm, though it does require stretching your concept of what an outliner looks like. MaxThink is the most full-featured outliner, but it is way too quirky for me, I’m afraid. Inspiration is acceptable, and produces the best looking outlines. An overlooked option, I think, is SuperNoteCard from Mindola.

I’m not sure why so few developers want to produce outliners for Windows. Perhaps you are right about Word’s impact.

Steve Z.