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Posted by Cassius
Sep 10, 2011 at 06:50 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Steve, just occurred to me - given the strengths of Grandview, and how good it looks so
>many years into a post-DOS world, I wonder if you have any thoughts on why no one has
>tried to make a Windows version or equivalent to
>Grandview?
Someone did. But the software had problems and development ceased.
-cassius
Posted by Cassius
Sep 10, 2011 at 07:00 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I agree with this list,
>but would add to it the following:
>
>VIEW META-TEXT INLINE. The “tree” part of the
>outline usually consists of the headings/topics, not the content associated with
>each. When you write two paragraphs about sub-sub-head X, where do you want to view
>that meta-text? If my outline is of an article or a report, I want to view that meta-text
>inline, as part of the tree, not in a separate window. Why? Because reports or articles
>(any written communication), the information is not read as a collection of
>individual index cards, but as a whole and the writing should flow properly. If you
>have to view the notes you’ve associated with each topic as individual blocks (as a
>two-pane outliner forces you to), you can’t as easily make your writing readable as a
>whole.
>
>My blog post about Grandview shows how that application did this better than
>any outliner I’ve ever used since:
———-
A single pane outliner can still have a “heading” problem: If one is, say, in a sub-sub-topic and it is lengthy, one may have to scroll up several pages to see the higher level topics. To help with this, in GrandView, I wrote a macro that reversed the order of the outline: Starting with a sub-sub topic, the higher level topic headlines appeared in reverse order so I could see “from whence I came.” In this sense, a two-pane outliner might be more useful.
-cassius
>
>—-
>http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 10, 2011 at 08:03 PM
@Daly,
I have no idea why no one has tried to create—or at least succeeded in creating—a Windows version of GrandView. Frankly, I don’t even think there is anything on the Mac that is as fully functional as GrandView, though there are some apps that come close. I have found this very perplexing and not a little frustrating.
@Alexander,
In GrandView you could toggle the meta-text on and off, so it was pretty easy to go back and forth from the aerial view to the text flow view.
Steve Z.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 10, 2011 at 08:57 PM
You can do this in Sense as well. Double clicking in any title in the Edit Workspace (the right—detail- pane) will expand/collapse the metatext, leaving just the title visible.
You can also completely hide the Content Browser (the left—navigation tree- pane) in essence turning it into a single pane outliner: http://www.silvaelm.co.uk/news.shtml
However, this expand/collapse the metatext in Sense only applies to the specific title’s metatext. It might be useful to have some kind of ‘expand/collapse all’ with a keyboard shortcut in the Edit Workspace (in dual pane view, you can do this more or less from the Content Browser by expanding/collapsing at the top of a hierarchy). I’m not sure whether this is something that Grandview could do.
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>In GrandView you could toggle the meta-text on and
>off, so it was pretty easy to go back and forth from the aerial view to the text flow
>view.
Posted by jimspoon
Sep 10, 2011 at 11:04 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I agree with this list,
>but would add to it the following:
>
>VIEW META-TEXT INLINE. The “tree” part of the
>outline usually consists of the headings/topics, not the content associated with
>each. When you write two paragraphs about sub-sub-head X, where do you want to view
>that meta-text? If my outline is of an article or a report, I want to view that meta-text
>inline, as part of the tree, not in a separate window. Why? Because reports or articles
>(any written communication), the information is not read as a collection of
>individual index cards, but as a whole and the writing should flow properly. If you
>have to view the notes you’ve associated with each topic as individual blocks (as a
>two-pane outliner forces you to), you can’t as easily make your writing readable as a
>whole.
>
>My blog post about Grandview shows how that application did this better than
>any outliner I’ve ever used since:
>
>—-
>http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/
>
>Steve Z.
That’s a really nice post about Grandview, and the comments are very interesting too. I’m going to have to reinstall Grandview just to refresh my memory about some of its features. I think the last time I tried, I got it running under DOSBox.
As I understand it, in Grandview you could attach a “document” to an outline item, and you could view that “document text” inline with your outline, or you could edit it in its own document editor window. So, there is a distinction between “outline text” and “document text”.
I used the MS Word outlines in between Grandview and Ecco Pro (in fact, I went from PC Outline to Grandview to MS Word to Ecco Pro), and MS Word made a similar distinction, I think. In Word you had 9 outline levels, and you could put in “body text” under any outline item.
Usually, instead of entering text as “document text” or “body text” (distinct from outline text), I would just make that text into an outline item at the next lower outline level. That way I could do everything with that text that I could do with any other outline item.
I also think that when I’m brainstorming, I would often find that text I initially entered as “document text” would better be made into an “outline item”. So long as I can easily split and move “document text” into outline items, then I’m ok with that feature.
jim