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OmniOutliner Position on Cloning Confusing
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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 7, 2010 at 05:43 AM
I have read the OmniOutliner forum threads on the possibility of having cloning in a future version of OO. The developer makes a case for the difficulty of introducing cloning, based on a number of factors, the most convincing of which relates to what happens to column data that is calculated when the item is cloned elsewhere, with different context. Nonetheless, posters have held out ECCO as an example from the last century which had managed to figure ways around that problem.
But what puzzled me greatly was the tone of the developer - first, back in 2008, he asks for input on this topic. And though there is quite a response pro and con, he sides with those who want the simpler approach, and see no need for cloning. In fact, it is said that those who want cloning are but a narrow segment of the market (perhaps true), and that for others it may even be a difficult concept to understand.
Bottom line, reading almost 80 posts in one cloning thread, it sounds like the developer really didn’t want to do cloning in the first place, but felt it necessary to go through the motions of putting it out there. Perhaps I am being unfair, but I was left with the sense of a developer who doesn’t really see much need to further develop what may be the best of the Mac outliners. It kind of had a passive/aggressive feel to it.
Does anyone else have a perspective on this issue as it relates to OO, and a sense of whether this program will has a hope of any significant future innovation? I’m left with a feeling that in some ways InControl, back in the mid-90s, was a more comprehensive outliner than anything I have seen so far in my first 24 hours back on the Mac. (I am not including DevonThink as an outliner.)
Daly
Daly
Posted by JasonE
Aug 7, 2010 at 07:02 AM
Vote with your feet.
Give your money to things that you believe in.
You have freedom of associate regarding who you do business with.
JasonE
Posted by JasonE
Aug 7, 2010 at 07:03 AM
>You have
>freedom of associate regarding who you do business with.
association even
Posted by Hugh
Aug 7, 2010 at 09:47 AM
Daly
I think you have gone back to the Mac at perhaps not the most opportune moment.
You may know this already, but the Mac developer community probably has for the size of the market a disproportionate number of one-man or two-man bands (thanks partly to Apple’s provision of development tools). It is generally seen as one of the Mac world’s strengths, but currently one could regard it as a weakness.
For the last six months or so, most if not all of those developers have faced very loud demands from some of their customers that they develop for the iPad. Ironically, those demands have been especially vocal from customers of developers whose OS X applications have been most successful; the insistence and stridency of some of them have to be read to be believed. This has been coupled with a fear that may or may not be realistic that Apple itself will end its desktop and laptop development in favour of phones and tablets (FWIW I’m sure it won’t, though it may rein back in the medium term).
As Steve Z. indicates in another thread, this has faced those developers with an acute business dilemma.
Do they simply ignore the iPad market, at least for the time being, even though it may grow to be much bigger than the one they currently serve? Some appear to have chosen this route. Do they add functionality to their applications so that they can “talk” to other developers’ iPad apps? Some have chosen this route. Do they buy up/hire in iPad/iPhone development skills (the iPad operating system is very different from the Mac OS X system) even if the cost threatens their businesses? Several small developers are being urged to take this step, by customers who can have no understanding of the practicalities; as some of the developers have pointed out, if they had the spare resources they’d already be developing for a much bigger market - Windows.
Or do they halt or slow down down OS X development whilst they concentrate on the iPad and iPhone?
This last route has been the one taken by the Omni Group, developers of OmniOutliner. They were frank enough to explain what they were planning to do when Apple announced the iPad, and what it would involve for very long-expected features such as cloning on OmniOutliner, and I think together with the brisk can-do style that is something of a hallmark of Omni’s announcements, their original statement and others since have come over as unresponsive if not arrogant. However, to be fair to Omni Group, when I and someone else pointed out that cloning (for example) had been been asked for by customers and discussed by Omni since 2006, our posts on their forum were completely overwhelmed by many, many other posts acclaiming the decision to develop for the iPad.
So Mac OS X OmniOutliner development, including cloning and perhaps tagging: certainly delayed and postponed. And probably development of some other well-rated Mac applications by other developers, too.
More widely, what the launch of the iPad may mean for the long-term business of developing for Mac laptops and desktops, which has given Mac users several fine and distinctive pieces of software and Apple computers one of their market advantages, I can’t tell.
H
Posted by Hugh
Aug 7, 2010 at 09:54 AM
I should have added that Omni Group isn’t a one-man or two-man band, but somewhat bigger. But it’s evidently still subject to resource-constraints that prevent it from racing ahead with developing for both the iPad and desktops and laptops at high speed simultaneously.
Thus the the problems fundamentally aren’t technical. As you say, ECCO showed this fifteen (?) years ago.
H