Having played around with PocketThinker and Inspiration in connnection with some reviews I've been writing, I was surprised to find that I preferred PocketThinker, despite its occasional instability and restricted feature set.

My main problem with Inspiration is its lack of any easy means to join items. Grandview, for example, has a simple keyboard shortcut for this purpose, and PocketThinker, like NoteMap, allows items to be merged simply by using delete at the end of the first item's line, or backspace at the beginning of the second item. Of course a problem of the latter method (for both PT and NoteMap) is that mistakes can get made. More importantly, any comments attached to the second item get lost when it is merged with the first one.

Another problem is that Inspiration's default keyboard shortcuts are just so unintuitive and hard to remember: e.g., Ctrl-' for moving an item up. PT just uses Shift-UpArrow. PT's outlines are less structured and more fluid, too. I often gave up trying to move items around an Inspiration outline, flattened it manually, and started over again. No doubt this was a combination of lack of experience and lack of patience, but life is short. PocketThinker enabled me to work with it straight away. Although I prefer the logic of Grandview's approach to outlining, I liked the ease, when using PT, with which parent items could be uncoupled from their children and moved around on their own, up or down, and promoted or demoted.

Having said all this, after this brief brush with Windows' finest (I had already dismissed NoteMap), I will probably continue using Grandview for major projects. Grandview is logical, fully featured, almost state-of-the-art - apart from its lack of multiple undo (which it rarely requires) - and unbreakable.

As for Brainstorm, which is uncluttered, elegant and powerful - if only the aerial view was editable, so that one could opt to work in that view as well as Brainstorm's more restricted ones. I take the point that hoisting provides focus (GV, after all, allows hoisting) but I am not convinced that not being able to work on the whole outline is anything but a crucial drawback.

Derek

Derek Cornish wrote:

As for Brainstorm, which is uncluttered,
elegant and powerful - if only the aerial view was editable, so that one could opt to
work in that view as well as Brainstorm's more restricted ones.

FWIW the last I heard they were working on this for the next version.

Tom S.

Derek,

I completely agree with you about the awkwardness of Inspirations outlining functions. This is especially accute after having been weaned on GrandView, which is so thoughtfully implemented.

I'll have to give PocketThinker another look.

Steve Z.

Steve -

I certainly prefer PT to Inspiration. It's worth a look - but, of course, rather a toy so far, compared with GV.

Derek

Tom -

I hope so. It would make all the difference.

Derek

I would hardly consider experience with Notemap, Inspiration, PT and Brainstorm to constitute "a brief brush with windows finest" if you're referring to the world of Windows outliners in general. All of them are clumsy and slow to use from my perspective. I use ADM, but I'm sure there are others out there that you should try before concluding you've seen "windows' finest."

Having said that, the consensus about Grandview makes me wish that I had a Mac so I could try it out!

Actually, Grandview is a DOS application.

Woah. I can't really imagine the strengths of any DOS application outweighing the drawbacks inherent in DOS (no rich text cut and paste, nonstandard mouse and keyboard operation, no internal viewing of Word files or web pages, dismal print support ...)