You need a different view on your outline - a corkboard with arrangeable index cards

Posted by moritz
Jan 3, 2011 at 12:19 AM

@Franz - I am getting fantastic benefits from the integration of WritingOutliner with Word 2010 as add-in.
If your concern is specifically about “borrowing” ideas from Scrivener, I would argue that the cork board metaphor was already in play a long time ago (e.g. Mindola SuperNotecard, ...) and some of the other elements (e.g. left tree pane) have resemblance with many tree based outliners; the working style enabled by WritingOutliner has some resemblance with WhizFolders or UltraRecall, ...
I am sure you see where I am going with this: It is very hard to come up with “innovations” in this field.
If anything, I would give Edwin credit for his contribution in attacking the very real and very painful “n tools” issue by keeping the project management component inside the writing environment. This is where time savings by avoiding the import/export ritual come into play for me. Also, without the artificial multi-app barriers, jumping between the big picture and granular changes is more conductive to my creative process, technology not slowing me down for once?

I would encourage you to take a peek at Edwin’s blog; you will find that he is looking at issues relevant to real world users with great insights and recommendations (e.g. a great example that shows that this product has legs and is not just a doomed “me too” experiment: http://writingoutliner.com/writing-software/blog/good-tutorial-for-writing-large-word-documents/ ).

I am using Scrivener on my Macs and I am big fan, however since my “serious” workflows are all PC centric, I never got around to using it for heavy lifting.
WritingOutliner, on the other hand, will be my main tool to develop the outlines for 3 75 minutes technical presentations that I have to deliver at a big conference in February. I am just now starting down that road, thanks to having discovered WO on this forum (KUDOS, all, for keeping this community alive and kicking!) and will report conclusive findings after I am done with that project.
Happy new year!