Again, with respect to NoteMap

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Posted by Cassius
May 15, 2009 at 12:23 AM

I WAS an enthusiastic user at first, but now I must strongly recommend against it.

1. Development has ceased. Even the simplest of bugs has not been fixed.

2. After you have entered about a screen-full of material, weird things can happen, including PERMANENT LOSS OF MATERIAL. I started using MoteMap to write a book, much as I had done years before with GrandView. It was not long before I started having problems, such as displaying subtopics. Then several paragraphs of material disappeared, never to be recovered.

All this was with the latest version.

-cassius

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
May 15, 2009 at 03:31 AM

I wouldn’t recommend _buying_ it, but the problems you mention aren’t necessarily a bar to using it. (I must grant, you were right previously and now when you say all development has stopped. This was tacitly confirmed by a sales representative when I e-mailed them about correcting the “screen full bug.”)

If one is never tempted to write screen length notes or to rely on the Comment function for anything nontrivial, the program works well. Anyone who has spent money on the program shouldn’t feel unable to use it, unless he really is. Other than the problems mentioned (which are serious), I find the program is completely stable. In design it’s probably the best conventional outliner ever made, but it is only a conventional outliner. Nor does it incorporate the big advances of Brainstorm and Maxthink. (And maybe Grandview, for all I know.)

You know, it isn’t like there’s a plethora of wonderful programs to choose from. In desperation I recently tried Inspiration 8 again. I was struck by how a program that’s been around so long has so few outlining usability enhancements, like a toolbar. Particularly vexing is the inability to customize shortcuts, which intensifies the discomfort from lack of other enhancements. That isn’t why I put it away again, which instead was due to its simple incompetence at using the selected screen font..

Cassius wrote:
>I WAS an enthusiastic user at first, but now I must strongly recommend against it.
> >1.
>Development has ceased. Even the simplest of bugs has not been fixed.
> >2. After you
>have entered about a screen-full of material, weird things can happen, including
>PERMANENT LOSS OF MATERIAL. I started using MoteMap to write a book, much as I had done
>years before with GrandView. It was not long before I started having problems, such as
>displaying subtopics. Then several paragraphs of material disappeared, never to be
>recovered.
> >All this was with the latest version.
> >-cassius

Posted by Cassius
May 15, 2009 at 04:20 AM

GrandView wasn’t the easiest to learn, but it was powerful. In addition to all the outlining features you might want or need, it had the equivalent of Ecco’s columns and a calendar/planner—all linked together. It was not WISYWIG and did not have graphic capability, but you could export its files to Harvard Chart & Freelance Chart. Also, you could write keyboard macros and reassign almost any 2-key combination.

It was marvelous, but the author moved on and Symantec let it die (as it does with many programs it buys).

STEVE ZEOLI or anyone: Are there any current MAC outliners as good as GV?

P.S. When I was looking at PIMS, my final choice was between GV and MaxThink.

Posted by Hugh
May 15, 2009 at 08:36 AM

Cassius wrote:
>GrandView wasn’t the easiest to learn, but it was powerful. In addition to all the
>outlining features you might want or need, it had the equivalent of Ecco’s columns and
>a calendar/planner—all linked together. It was not WISYWIG and did not have graphic
>capability, but you could export its files to Harvard Chart & Freelance Chart. Also,
>you could write keyboard macros and reassign almost any 2-key combination.
> >It was
>marvelous, but the author moved on and Symantec let it die (as it does with many
>programs it buys).
> >STEVE ZEOLI or anyone: Are there any current MAC outliners as
>good as GV?
> >P.S. When I was looking at PIMS, my final choice was between GV and
>MaxThink.

I think this thread pretty much answers your question: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/1113/0/tao-outliner-finally-updated

The website(s) aren’t very helpful. You really have to download TAO and play with it for a while to understand its power. (It shouldn’t be confused with a very different Windows product of the same name.)

Otherwise, OmniOutliner is ubiquitous and much more user-friendly but less potent. Maybe the next step-upgrade (which is expected to introduce clones) will raise its game to rival TAO’s. Tinderbox is powerful, but non-traditional and sui generis, as has been discussed here recently. Opal is simpler than some of these and useful.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 15, 2009 at 10:26 AM

Cassius,

Hugh and the thread he links to pretty well sum things up with respect to outliners in the Mac domain. I never did buy TAO because the rough edges just seemed too annoying to me. This morning I fired up my trial copy again to see if I could add any more to the commentary and TAO unexpectedly quit on me. While there is a lot of power here, it is wrapped in what I find to be a frustrating package… essentially, it is an unfinished product in my view and, like NoteMap, may never be complete.

OmniOutliner, as Hugh noted, is common in the Mac world and does what it does well. It remains supported and developed. It has custom columns and inline text. To my view, however, it doesn’t come close to GrandView in that it does not have the Calendar or Category functions, the inline text is not nearly as powerful. I don’t find the keyboard shortcuts as intuitive… if, in fact, they exist. In other words, what I’m saying is that when I use OO, I am always conscious of the program, which deflects some of my thinking from the writing/planning. This never happened in GV, which I found intuitive from the start—odd for a DOS application.* In this regard, then, you won’t find any outliner on a Mac that is as easy to use as NoteMap. (I am excluding applications like Opal from this statement, as Opal is more of a hierarchical list builder… at which it functions very highly, but it is not a substitute for GV.) Though NM doesn’t have all the power of GV, it is fairly intuitive and a decent writing environment, if my memory serves me well.

It should be noted that we are talking exclusively about single-pane outliners here and not the more common two- or three-pane applications that use a hierarchy as part of their organization structure.

Steve Z.

*In the spirit of full-disclosure, I have to acknowledge that the problem may be more related to me and my mind than the applications themselves. When I learned GV, I was a lot younger and had not yet created any pre-conceived notions of what an “intuitive” outliner would be. Nevertheless, I did find GV easy to learn due to common sense keyboard shortcuts… like Alt-D to create a Daughter entry, Alt-S to create a Sister entry, Alt-A to create a Aunt entry… Use the shift key with one of the directional arrows to move the entry, etc… And a host of other thoughtful features.

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