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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Sep 18, 2011 at 10:27 PM
Alexander,
Outline4D looks interesting.
I just downloaded demo - and can’t believe my eyes - the trial period is for five days - 5 days, for a complex program.
That’s nuts, and means no matter how good I’ll probably not buy it just because I won’t have time to do a proper trial.
Daly
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>There’s an (apparently) new Windows entrant, Outline4D
>http://www.screenplay.com/p-77-outline-4d.aspx , which can display metatext
>inline, among many other views. Outline4D also has a timeline view, so I’m
>cross-posting it in a relevant thread.
>
>It seems to be an evolved version of an
>earlier Write Brothers’ program (they seem to specialise in tools for writing movie
>scripts) which provided the same vertical-outline / horizontal-timeline view. I
>don’t remember the name of that software, but I had surely written about it here at the
>time—several years ago. I recall that its price tag was quite higher—probably
>double- than Outline4D.
>
>Outline4D does not seem to provide a trial version, but
>there are plenty of screenshots in the above website, as well as several videos here
>http://www.learnoutline4d.com/
Posted by jimspoon
Sep 21, 2011 at 04:57 AM
I used to think outlining (“physical” ordering of information items in a tree structure) to be an inferior method of organizing the items. Rather, I’ve thought that the definitive or ideal organization was the relational database model of tables, fields, values. In outlines, items are ordered arbitrarily according to a scheme that need not be thoroughly thought out. But now I think that the physical ordering of items is good. The database model depends on our skill in querying that database; and we may not be sure that we’ve retrieved all the items that we wanted, or that they are arranged in the way we want them. When we put items in an outline, however, we can be always retrieve those items, arranged just the way we placed them. Both methods can be employed in an outliner/PIM, though.
In this sense, I guess UR does have the essential feature of an outline - hierarchical arrangement of info items - even though the the tree is a tree of item titles, and not a tree of the items (e.g. text paragraphs) themselves. (The item content being placed in the “child items” grid pane and the editor pane.)
just thinking out loud.
jim
Posted by JBfrom
Sep 21, 2011 at 06:59 AM
Agree 100% jim
Posted by dan7000
Sep 21, 2011 at 05:31 PM
As far as outliners with in-line text for authors, I have used Writing Outliner pretty extensively and, more recently, have used the Word 2010 built-in outliner.
Writing Outliner does not really provide in-line editing. It’s more like a 2-pane outliner for word with a great contextual search function. You can compile your outline into one big word file with inline text, but the compiled file does not have any outliner features.
I really like the Word 2010 outliner. In the left pane is an outline of items - no in-line text. In the right pane is your document where you can view, edit, or collapse items, sub-items, all in-line. In either pane you can drag items to other locations in the outline—and sub-items and text move with the parent item, as expected. That’s about it for the functionality, though: no hoisting or other advanced outlining features. Of course, the best part is the support for rich text formatting, hyperlinks, and embedded objects—in item titles as well as the body text—this is something almost every other outliner struggles with.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 21, 2011 at 05:48 PM
jimspoon wrote:
>In outlines, items are ordered arbitrarily according to a
>scheme that need not be thoroughly thought out. But now I think that the physical
>ordering of items is good. The database model depends on our skill in querying that
>database; and we may not be sure that we’ve retrieved all the items that we wanted, or
>that they are arranged in the way we want them. When we put items in an outline, however,
>we can be always retrieve those items, arranged just the way we placed them.
I think that the relational database as the underlying model of data is unbeatable in its flexibility. Thereon, however, I find it quite useless in representing information in any meaningful way. That’s where the outlines, mind maps, concept maps etc. come into being, because they provide the ‘big picture’, in terms of structure and associations.
A typical example is the entering of goals, objectives, principles, talents and the like in a database. They have never helped me plan my future; it is the overview of their interconnections that provides a perspective to my life.
UltraRecall has an underlying relational database, which we will never need to see, in the same way that we will never need to look at the strings of 0s and 1s that underlie any computer image.