A Theory of Outliner Software Market Development
Started by Vincek
on 10/10/2011
Vincek
10/10/2011 3:42 pm
I am new, so let me just say thank you to all who have posted and have helped educate me on outline software options and functionality.
Mostly by default and lack of knowledge of alternatives, I have been a user of ActionOutline for several years. I considered using it to write a book and ran into many limitations, so I did some exploration to see what else is out there and found this forum.
Over the past few months I have also become a regular user of Evernote. Evernote is great for capturing information, but its lousy for manipulating that information into a hierarchical structure (that is inherently needed for a book).
Thus, what I have been hoping to find is a software organizer that has great integration with Evernote. No cigar... at least yet.
This has been an eye opener. There is no clear winner in outline organizer offerings. It is fragmented among dozens of confusingly similar and flawed offerings.
By my observation, Evernote has become a dominant player in a closely adjacent market. It has many powerful advantages -- 10 million users, a large pot of capital to expand, cross platform integration across desktops and mobile devices.
Why aren't there outliner programs that have figured out the value of integrating with Evernote, similar to what Curio has done with mindmapping software (for Mac only). Evernote has opened its API.
My theory is that whatever outliner software develops a decent integration with Evernote will be cream that rises to the top. I would be happy with crude outlining functionality if only it integrated with the powerful capturing capabilities of Evernote.
Mostly by default and lack of knowledge of alternatives, I have been a user of ActionOutline for several years. I considered using it to write a book and ran into many limitations, so I did some exploration to see what else is out there and found this forum.
Over the past few months I have also become a regular user of Evernote. Evernote is great for capturing information, but its lousy for manipulating that information into a hierarchical structure (that is inherently needed for a book).
Thus, what I have been hoping to find is a software organizer that has great integration with Evernote. No cigar... at least yet.
This has been an eye opener. There is no clear winner in outline organizer offerings. It is fragmented among dozens of confusingly similar and flawed offerings.
By my observation, Evernote has become a dominant player in a closely adjacent market. It has many powerful advantages -- 10 million users, a large pot of capital to expand, cross platform integration across desktops and mobile devices.
Why aren't there outliner programs that have figured out the value of integrating with Evernote, similar to what Curio has done with mindmapping software (for Mac only). Evernote has opened its API.
My theory is that whatever outliner software develops a decent integration with Evernote will be cream that rises to the top. I would be happy with crude outlining functionality if only it integrated with the powerful capturing capabilities of Evernote.
Stephen Zeoli
10/10/2011 6:15 pm
Vince,
Not to change the subject, but how do you like ActionOutline? I've always found its clean interface very appealing, but for whatever reason have not used it. It does not appear to have had much of an upgrade over the years. Is this why you're looking for a new solution?
Steve Z.
Not to change the subject, but how do you like ActionOutline? I've always found its clean interface very appealing, but for whatever reason have not used it. It does not appear to have had much of an upgrade over the years. Is this why you're looking for a new solution?
Steve Z.
Vincek
10/11/2011 3:46 am
Steve,
IMHO, ActionOutline is a very competent web 1.0 outlining program.
Plusses:
* Logical structure, easy to understand
* Many incremental improvements with upgraded editions over the years -- color coding, import graphics
* Stable
* Aesthetically pleasing
* Advanced text editor
Minuses:
* UI not always intuitive; takes a while to get the hang of it
* Minimal search -- only within one file and only see 1 item at a time
Suggested Improvements (but applicable to most programs in this class of software):
* Ability to search across files, notebooks, etc.
* Ability to use and search multiple tags
* Access across different web browsers and OSs
* Mobile/desktop integration
* Provide multiple views and options to reorganize data (not just hierarchical organization)
* Integrate (or at least import) data from Evernote
Vince
IMHO, ActionOutline is a very competent web 1.0 outlining program.
Plusses:
* Logical structure, easy to understand
* Many incremental improvements with upgraded editions over the years -- color coding, import graphics
* Stable
* Aesthetically pleasing
* Advanced text editor
Minuses:
* UI not always intuitive; takes a while to get the hang of it
* Minimal search -- only within one file and only see 1 item at a time
Suggested Improvements (but applicable to most programs in this class of software):
* Ability to search across files, notebooks, etc.
* Ability to use and search multiple tags
* Access across different web browsers and OSs
* Mobile/desktop integration
* Provide multiple views and options to reorganize data (not just hierarchical organization)
* Integrate (or at least import) data from Evernote
Vince
Alexander Deliyannis
10/11/2011 5:41 pm
Vincek wrote:
I'm not sure I would agree. As I've written elsewhere in this forum, IMHO Evernote's tagging capability more than makes up for the lack of structure in the notebooks themselves.
Tags can be organised in a hierarchy of, apparently, limitless depth; ergo, a tag outline can be created. One can drag and drop information items to tags on the tree, as if they were folders. Having more than one tag per item is equivalent to cloning items within separate folders (even though the paradigm is turned on its head).
What Evernote is surely not good at, within the process of writing a book, is the kind of text editing provided by a classic one pane outliner, or a modern solution like Infoqube or Sense, i.e. being able to see the forest and the trees at the same time. But I have serious doubts that Evernote's API is so flexible as to allow an external application to provide this kind of view/edit pane.
Evernote is great for capturing
information, but its lousy for manipulating that information into a hierarchical
I'm not sure I would agree. As I've written elsewhere in this forum, IMHO Evernote's tagging capability more than makes up for the lack of structure in the notebooks themselves.
Tags can be organised in a hierarchy of, apparently, limitless depth; ergo, a tag outline can be created. One can drag and drop information items to tags on the tree, as if they were folders. Having more than one tag per item is equivalent to cloning items within separate folders (even though the paradigm is turned on its head).
What Evernote is surely not good at, within the process of writing a book, is the kind of text editing provided by a classic one pane outliner, or a modern solution like Infoqube or Sense, i.e. being able to see the forest and the trees at the same time. But I have serious doubts that Evernote's API is so flexible as to allow an external application to provide this kind of view/edit pane.
Thomas
10/11/2011 11:12 pm
It has many powerful advantages?10 million users, a large pot of capital to expand, cross platform integration across desktops and mobile devices.
10 millions is just a number of users who at least once logged in, you need to look at the number of active and paying users, which they indicated was above 400.000. That includes all the platforms together, ie. they don't say how many are on Windows or Linux or Mac (unless we take for granted that the developer who would take on such task, would be able to produce a multi-platform program, though these are usually harder to make and less attractively looking as a product that only has one native platform). Then you take the risk of investing a lot of effort into something that depends on the current business strategy of the CEO or on the plans of investment companies (to sell to strategic investor). Because tomorrow CEO might decide they have to close a part of API, or implement one of your killer features directly in the program, or they will sell the company to Google and close the business because all the Google wanted was some technology the company owned or the talented employees and not the program itself.
Sorry if I sounded too sceptical about the business side, that's nothing agains the idea on the whole. Outliners are, in my humble observation, a tiny market where most businesses are hobby operations on the side of developer's main job, ie. "no big money" involved.
Vincek
10/12/2011 1:35 am
Alexander, Your post really piqued my thinking... thanks. I read your other posts on the forum about how Evernote tags can be used to provide hierarchical structure. I was not aware that Evernote had the ability for multiple levels of nesting; I had been presuming that the nesting feature allowed for only 2 levels.
For example, I tried creating and nesting 4 levels of tags -- animal, dog, corgi, welsh. If I understand your suggestion, I can tag an note with CORGI and then view it through the tag structure on the bottom of the left column of Evernote. Yes? I can scroll up/down through the different levels of tags and see the various notes with a specific tag.
This takes me a lot further than I realized I could go with Evernote in the organizing phase. This gives me some sense of hierarchy, but not the whole forest.
While I can see the theoretical potential of using Evernote for initial organizing, I am still not sure how practical this will be for my purpose of writing a book. I will have to play around with it, and I welcome your suggestions. I would love to see examples if you or anyone else can provide.
While better integration between Evernote and outlining programs is desirable, I can not afford to sit around and wait for this to happen. Perhaps this will be available for my next book.
So your suggestions of Infoqube and Sense got me to take another look at other software options for organizing/writing that have been suggested on this forum. I probably lean toward Scrivener for Windows at the moment, and I thank you for helping me lift my blinders.
Thomas, I understand your skepticism about Evernote. Of course I cannot disagree with the risks you mention...they are all real. My best defense is to pick a platform that allows for data portability (i.e., I can pick up my data and take it to another platform), and Evernote seems to grasp the importance of this feature for customer loyalty.
Consider the end-game market for data capture platforms (or whatever you want to call Evernote). There are a lot of indirect network effects in this market -- good apps attract more users, more users attracts more developers, and so on. Thus the market likely only will support a few competing platforms/apps (probably similar to smartphone market where Apple OS and Android have clear lead in both # of users and # of apps).
Yes, outliner software is not a huge market. In the long run, probably makes more sense to think of outliner software programs as apps that will plug into data capture platforms, rather than stand alone programs as they are today. With 400K paying customers, Evernote has a huge lead. With $50 million in investment, they have potential to extend the lead. Could they lose this lead? sure...anything is possible. There is risk in picking any software app or platform, and part of my thinking certainly is to minimize that risk... but there is unavoidable risk in ANY selection.
Thanks again for all who have posted on this forum. Studying your posts has helped me learn a lot and clarify my thinking about my next steps.
For example, I tried creating and nesting 4 levels of tags -- animal, dog, corgi, welsh. If I understand your suggestion, I can tag an note with CORGI and then view it through the tag structure on the bottom of the left column of Evernote. Yes? I can scroll up/down through the different levels of tags and see the various notes with a specific tag.
This takes me a lot further than I realized I could go with Evernote in the organizing phase. This gives me some sense of hierarchy, but not the whole forest.
While I can see the theoretical potential of using Evernote for initial organizing, I am still not sure how practical this will be for my purpose of writing a book. I will have to play around with it, and I welcome your suggestions. I would love to see examples if you or anyone else can provide.
While better integration between Evernote and outlining programs is desirable, I can not afford to sit around and wait for this to happen. Perhaps this will be available for my next book.
So your suggestions of Infoqube and Sense got me to take another look at other software options for organizing/writing that have been suggested on this forum. I probably lean toward Scrivener for Windows at the moment, and I thank you for helping me lift my blinders.
Thomas, I understand your skepticism about Evernote. Of course I cannot disagree with the risks you mention...they are all real. My best defense is to pick a platform that allows for data portability (i.e., I can pick up my data and take it to another platform), and Evernote seems to grasp the importance of this feature for customer loyalty.
Consider the end-game market for data capture platforms (or whatever you want to call Evernote). There are a lot of indirect network effects in this market -- good apps attract more users, more users attracts more developers, and so on. Thus the market likely only will support a few competing platforms/apps (probably similar to smartphone market where Apple OS and Android have clear lead in both # of users and # of apps).
Yes, outliner software is not a huge market. In the long run, probably makes more sense to think of outliner software programs as apps that will plug into data capture platforms, rather than stand alone programs as they are today. With 400K paying customers, Evernote has a huge lead. With $50 million in investment, they have potential to extend the lead. Could they lose this lead? sure...anything is possible. There is risk in picking any software app or platform, and part of my thinking certainly is to minimize that risk... but there is unavoidable risk in ANY selection.
Thanks again for all who have posted on this forum. Studying your posts has helped me learn a lot and clarify my thinking about my next steps.
Alexander Deliyannis
10/12/2011 8:33 pm
Vincek wrote:
I definitely agree; Evernote is meant to store notes as discrete items, but is not very useful for processing them further into a coherent whole; a house is clearly not an organised collection of bricks.
I think the best that one can do is use Evernote for reference, and export notes in an organised way to another program which is stronger in textual manipulation. In this respect Evernote is quite flexible; you can select as many notes, consecutive or not, and export them as separate .html files or a single aggregated one. These can then be imported to a great variety of programs including Word.
In this respect, any program that can monitor a directory and automatically import new files to its database (Zoot and UltraRecall comes to mind off the top of my head, but they are also not ideal for writing) represents a possible 'companion' to Evernote.
While I can see the
theoretical potential of using Evernote for initial organizing, I am still not sure
how practical this will be for my purpose of writing a book. I will have to play around
with it, and I welcome your suggestions. I would love to see examples if you or anyone
else can provide.
I definitely agree; Evernote is meant to store notes as discrete items, but is not very useful for processing them further into a coherent whole; a house is clearly not an organised collection of bricks.
I think the best that one can do is use Evernote for reference, and export notes in an organised way to another program which is stronger in textual manipulation. In this respect Evernote is quite flexible; you can select as many notes, consecutive or not, and export them as separate .html files or a single aggregated one. These can then be imported to a great variety of programs including Word.
In this respect, any program that can monitor a directory and automatically import new files to its database (Zoot and UltraRecall comes to mind off the top of my head, but they are also not ideal for writing) represents a possible 'companion' to Evernote.
Vincek
10/13/2011 6:00 pm
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
I think the best that one can do is use Evernote for reference,
and export notes in an organised way to another program which is stronger in textual
manipulation. In this respect Evernote is quite flexible; you can select as many
notes, consecutive or not, and export them as separate .html files or a single
aggregated one. These can then be imported to a great variety of programs including
Word.
In this respect, any program that can monitor a directory and automatically
import new files to its database (Zoot and UltraRecall comes to mind off the top of my
head, but they are also not ideal for writing) represents a possible 'companion' to
Evernote.
Absolutely correct. And I would add that the program should be able import MULTIPLE html files simultaneously.
ActionOutline does not have ANY import capabilities. Adios AO.
Agree that UltraRecall and Zoot look like possibilities, but I really would like an app customized for researching and writing a complex book.
In playing with Scrivener for Windows, it does have the capability to import multiple html files from Evernote simultaneously. The more I learn about this program the more it looks like the solution I need. Really appreciate your help in getting me pointed in the right direction.