Suggestion: Site that shows the different capabilities of the many advanced outliners

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Posted by Foolness
Aug 30, 2011 at 03:11 AM

I think the recent situation with Cyborganize, kind of showed the necessity of why there should be more demo pages. Not demo apps but demo pages comparing how each outliner would show how each item would be presented. Hopefully someone can do that.

Zoho Notebook for example could have easily taught people how OneNote works. Some of it isn’t really advanced but some stuff I think are still out there.

Among the features of these outliners that I still don’t get are:

1) Universal hotkeys

2) Finding out if a smartphone app service is worth it before I buy a phone or a pad. (assuming I don’t have one)

3. Organizing and specific templates (This is already confusing enough with selections in Google Docs and Spreadsheets but outliners like BrainStorm and heavy categories like Ultra Recall and bibliographic programs are just hard to catch up on.)

4. Math and formula (I think if you’re a math idiot and don’t know any advanced math or don’t know how to work a spreadsheet, many programs don’t have that ease in tutorial. You almost have to treat the two things as separate subjects. What’s worse is that even those that combine the two, don’t really go into details. It’s very much like Latex and it’s format. You have to know both and you have to be the guy that wants the outliner not necessarily the guy who might need it just to get it)

5. Pricing - It’s not just the confusing price fluctuations with many different outliners. It’s the feature themselves. Outside of the free vs. priced software, there’s zero feature comparison of how one of a kind or rare a certain heavily priced software is. What’s worse, those that often provide one, treat users as if basic outliner features are the ones that confuse people about the many different outliners.

6. Sluggishness to Ease transition - The only idea of this that I have really been exposed to is Inbox Zero for e-mail programs. There are very few programs that have a management visualization gridlock in which a program specifically shows how to bypass that. It almost demands that power users not only have a test file but have time to initiate a test period.

7. Let’s Play videos - Outliners with specific data are practically more complex than videogames themselves yet at least videogames have slowly gone into areas where it’s not always the generic walkthrough. Outliners often pop out generic stuff in their screenshots. Stuff that don’t require solving or organizing. They are either pre-input or when someone has perfectly inserted the data into the program already. There’s rarely messed up data with videos showing how many more steps people have to do in order to do something in this outliner vs. that outliner on this messed up data full of things that would even break a mindmapper.

8. Outliner verification techniques - Features sometimes are good enough for testing but how many testers really knew the “full” capability of tagging or the “best” web clipper or the “best” search archiver or the “best” elements of a tree list until they tried out different software? It would be more convenient if everyone had a place where the maximum current representation of a feature is layed out. No more flipping around with Ultra Recall’s feature just to nail down what makes it great. No more wondering which one has the best math feature. No more second guessing how badly an icon is placed or how wonky a set of shortcuts are. No more wondering what templates are. No more scratching the head of the best implemented execution of a feature ever need to be.

Posted by Foolness
Aug 30, 2011 at 03:32 AM

On second thought: I should probably replace the origins of the topic. It definitely originated with Cyborganize but for the sake of not coming off as either advertising or attacking the subject, I think the inspiration of the thread came from my feeling that outliners seem to be dead.

Not a lot of new software being posted anymore. Tons of smartphone apps. Tons of people who like Evernote even though it was blasted before. OneNote’s silence ever since it’s first release.

Then I scratched my head for a bit and realized…wait a minute…Noteliner, Treesheets, Brainstorm, Pigeonhole ...even a basic synced outliner like ResophNotes isn’t over done. There’s tons of outliners are there. We barely have a Linux OneNote clone that’s truly a clone!

The frustration just built up so much that I said, one way or another, I have to get rid of this topic in a forum somewhere. I can’t make a site but gosh darn it, is it me or are outliners still so hard to compare and why is it always in tables or outlines or in paragraphs? Can’t we get away from the starting point of a basic outliner? Everyone who goes to elementary, pretty much know the basic concept of an outline. That’s never been the problem of outliners but damn… how many times does the loop have to be re-walked and re-tested? Basic programs like RemembertheMilk and Evernote have blogs where someone can pretend they are modifying the basic concept but all these unique programs and you can’t even get past being introduced to the surface.

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