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Suggestions for development of cross-platform Linux Outliner Note-taking software
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Posted by Carrot
Sep 12, 2009 at 04:07 PM
Hello!
Thanks to everyone for your comments. Our group will meet soon to discuss some of them
I have read many glowing reports about Grandview or PCoutline. Is there a way to still run this software so I can test it? I had trouble learning much about it. Reading how it works is not the same as trying it.
What did these applications offer that EccoPro does not offer? Or, better yet, what did they offer that InfoQube does not offer?
No need to apologize for seeming to sound negative. You are being realistic and if we were smart, we’d probably not go ahead with this project.
We are not going to try to compete with Evernote. That’s impossible. Personally, I greatly dislike ‘cloud’ software and the idea of putting my data on someone else’s server. There appear to be many smaller developers out there apparently satisfied with their smallish base of customers.
We have are mainly interested in making something for Linux that will also operate on other operating systems. And it will be open source—a drawing point that tends to attract quite a bit of support. Unlike the big players, we’re not in it for the money.
I’ll greatly look forward to all suggestions and comments!
Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 12, 2009 at 10:14 PM
You can run Grandview and PCoutline in your favorite DOS emulator or virtual machine. Someone in this thread already posted a link to how to do this for Grandview. If you hunt around online, you can find both programs. IMHO only Grandview is worth looking at. PCoutline is primitive.
Grandview doesn’t offer much over what ECCO offers. It was one of the major inspirations for ECCO. The only things of significance that were in GV but not ECCO were a view that allowed you to collapse your outline into a linear text (similar to switching from outline view in Microsoft Word to one of the writing views) and macro programming.
Also, since you’re on Linux, you absolutely *MUST* take a look at “org-mode” for Emacs. Despite the innocuous name, org-mode is a serious piece of work. It has columnar and PIM features like ECCO and InfoQube along with a whole set of other features that you don’t find in those programs. In some sense it is close to a hybrid between Ecco and OneNote, but without the graphical emphasis of the latter. I can’t over-emphasize how good org-mode is (and how unfortunate that it’s trapped within Emacs).
I also reiterate the comments of some other posters about the importance of mobile access. For this reason, you should take a look at structured wiki software like TWiki (don’t confuse this with the simple “Tiddly Wiki”). The good structured wikis are essentially like OneNote but with better calendaring/PIM features and less good text editing features. Once you have a smartphone with a proper interface (and we all will within the next 2-3 years, if we don’t have them now), you become reluctant to use PIM software that can’t interact with your phone. I want to be able to snap a picture of something on the go and have it appear in my PIM system, and I want to be able to have all my travel documents that I stored on my computer available on my phone. As software, Evernote is quite primitive, but they do have this right.
—Chris
Carrot wrote:
>Hello!
>Thanks to everyone for your comments. Our group will meet soon to discuss some
>of them
>
>I have read many glowing reports about Grandview or PCoutline. Is there a way
>to still run this software so I can test it? I had trouble learning much about it.
>Reading how it works is not the same as trying it.
>
>What did these applications offer
>that EccoPro does not offer? Or, better yet, what did they offer that InfoQube does not
>offer?
>
>No need to apologize for seeming to sound negative. You are being realistic
>and if we were smart, we’d probably not go ahead with this project.
>We are not going to
>try to compete with Evernote. That’s impossible. Personally, I greatly dislike
>‘cloud’ software and the idea of putting my data on someone else’s server. There
>appear to be many smaller developers out there apparently satisfied with their
>smallish base of customers.
>
>We have are mainly interested in making something for
>Linux that will also operate on other operating systems. And it will be open source—a
>drawing point that tends to attract quite a bit of support. Unlike the big players,
>we’re not in it for the money.
>
>I’ll greatly look forward to all suggestions and
>comments!
>
>
>
>
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 12, 2009 at 11:55 PM
I have to disagree a little with what Chris says. Grandview had some important features that EccoPro never did. First, it had a full-blown word processor. You could compose a lengthy document as part of any single node of the outline. And it provided a variety of ways to view this content, which, in my mind, is far superior to anything else I’ve seen since. Create a node, press the F5 key (I think that’s the correct key), and you toggle into the word processing screen. The rest of the outline, including the node title, are gone and you can write focussing only on the content of that section. Hit F5 again and you’re back into the outline. Various commands allow you to view the entire text associated with each node “in line” or only the first line of the text, or no text at all. In this way you can toggle between the big picture and the minute details. I have yet to find any other outliner that does this—OminiOutliner has a pathetic version of inline text, but that’s it. And that’s no small feature, because it allows you to focus on a section at a time when you need to, but also allows you to see how one section flows into the next. And you didn’t have to be in the word processor to edit the text. You could edit it in any view, so create a new transition sentence from one section to the next, and be sure it works.
Of course, GV had hoisting, folding and any other outlining functions you can name, because it was a powerful outliner.
It also had a tagging method—called categories, but the same as tagging—which Ecco does not (although I imagine one could emulate such a function with all the handy tools Ecco does have. And it made accessing these functions much easier than Ecco. (I’m a big fan of Ecco, so I don’t say that lightly.)
I’d say it is well worth your effort to take a good long look at GV.
Steve Z.
Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 13, 2009 at 05:09 PM
You’re right… I’m not sure how I forgot about hoisting. It is absolutely necessary for serious outlining (I use it all the time in OmniOutliner), and GV did have it. (Though Ecco would be able to simulate hoisting if you could hide context parents in notepad views…) I believe GV also had mark and gather.
—Chris
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I have to disagree a little with what Chris says. Grandview had some important
>features that EccoPro never did. First, it had a full-blown word processor. You could
>compose a lengthy document as part of any single node of the outline. And it provided a
>variety of ways to view this content, which, in my mind, is far superior to anything
>else I’ve seen since. Create a node, press the F5 key (I think that’s the correct key),
>and you toggle into the word processing screen. The rest of the outline, including the
>node title, are gone and you can write focussing only on the content of that section.
>Hit F5 again and you’re back into the outline. Various commands allow you to view the
>entire text associated with each node “in line” or only the first line of the text, or no
>text at all. In this way you can toggle between the big picture and the minute details. I
>have yet to find any other outliner that does this—OminiOutliner has a pathetic
>version of inline text, but that’s it. And that’s no small feature, because it allows
>you to focus on a section at a time when you need to, but also allows you to see how one
>section flows into the next. And you didn’t have to be in the word processor to edit the
>text. You could edit it in any view, so create a new transition sentence from one
>section to the next, and be sure it works.
>
>Of course, GV had hoisting, folding and any
>other outlining functions you can name, because it was a powerful outliner.
>
>It also
>had a tagging method—called categories, but the same as tagging—which Ecco does
>not (although I imagine one could emulate such a function with all the handy tools Ecco
>does have. And it made accessing these functions much easier than Ecco. (I’m a big fan
>of Ecco, so I don’t say that lightly.)
>
>I’d say it is well worth your effort to take a
>good long look at GV.
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Derek Cornish
Sep 15, 2009 at 01:16 AM
Steve,
I couldn’t agree more about GV as an exemplar of genuine outlining. The problem - especially in Windows - is that there are all too many limited look-alike note-making programs (misleadingly calling themselves “outliners”), made from the same bolted together components, but few examples of really good single-pane outliners, let alone full-scale writing environments like GV’s.
Note-making and single-pane outlining lie at the core of non-fiction and fiction writing, yet there is nothing readily available in Windows to illustrate what can be achieved in terms of the outlining component:
Inspiration - limited and clunky
Notemap - elegant but limited and buggy
PocketThinker - promising but no longer around
Word - limited outlining, and embedded within an unappealing word-processor
Brainstorm - a good start but needs its aerial view to be directly editable
Maxthink for Windows - awkward to use
Ecco - pretty, but limited
OneNote - clunky
InfoQube; and Zoot 6 - yet to be explored properly.
Of course these are just my personal views based on my purchases over the years. And what it all boils down to is that in the end I have always had to go back to GV in order to get any decent work done. As many of us have commented, it certainly would be nice to have a Treeview/Keynote/MyInfo type of note-taking program that provided a GV-style fully-featured single-pane outliner as an option for its right-hand editing pane (with further options for plain text, rtf, and html editing as required). But as always the “easy” part is the note-taking program; the hard part is the single-pane outlining component - which is why it is rarely attempted, and never done properly.
Given the apparently limited market for such “writing environments” on the Windows platform, maybe the only route is the open source one. But I have seen little evidence of promising developments in that sector either.
Derek