Hello all

I am new to this forum and although I've tried, can't find an answer to meet my needs so perhaps I could ask you.

Having been seduced, then addicted to my iPad, my fully comfortable Windows world began to come apart as more and more of my workflows became fragmented across devices.

Two of my most favoured tools were ListPro and Microsoft Word in Outline mode, depending on whether I needed to emphasize Word's text functionality or ListPro's columns (oh, if only Word would do columns/tables in that mode). A wonderful thing, while I continued to use Windows PCs, tablets and smart phones, where both Word & ListPro were installed on all (although Word didn't have outlining on my phone) allowing me the ability to work in my favourite programs on any device.

After getting the iPad, then later iPhone, though I find myself like the donkey between two bales of hay, starving from his indecision. On the one hand, I have decades of Windows knowledge, skills and experience and comfort and efficiency in that, on the other hand I have my complete addiction to my shiny iDevices.

When Omni Outliner finally came out, I was excited with the anticipation of being able to work in a columned outliner again - the makers of ListPro do not seem interested in creating a version for the iPad, which would have been perfect for me. Unfortunately, Omni Outliner is only also available on the Mac, which basically puts anything I do into their walled garden with only rudimentary export (and loss of columnar data in the process).

So after this context, my question:

Does anyone find themselves in a similar situation? If so, do you have any suggestion for how I can return to living in the synergetic bliss of outliner and columns while enabling seamless working across devices (both iDevices and Windows PCs)?

Thanks

Bill

Hi there, other Bill! Yes, as a matter of fact, I can be of some help here. I also am a long-term afficionado of ListPro, and have long bewailed the fact that Ilium Software don't have any plans to transfer it to iPad. I too work in Windows all the time.

There is an answer. It's not seamless, but it does work, depending on what you do on your iPad. It's called List Master, and it's the closest thing to ListPro on iOS (and Android, as a matter of fact - I've just dumped my iPhone for a Galaxy Note, which has caused some trauma, but much less than I thought it might).

Transferring stuff seamlessly between the different platforms is challenging. I use a range of tools, but my favourite include a variety of text editors (the most flexible on the iPad are - to my mind - Nebulous Notes and Daedalus, because they allow you to access any Dropbox folder), a couple of storage management apps of which the most magical is ReaddleDocs (gives you full access to a vast array of different storage types, including Dropbox, Google, SugarSync and loads of others, and has its own built-in text editor), plus the recently launched Microsoft OneNote app - very basic compared to the desktop version, but it quickly grows on you, not least because you can transfer huge amounts of info, including pictures etc..

I've had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with MobileNoter, another OneNote app (that does a better job of showing OneNote pages as they should be); it's quite unstable, unfortunately, but does support tables. Microsoft's own app supports tables, provided they're created in the desktop version.

Columnar outliners in Windows is definitely an issue - the only one that's reasonably flexible for writers is UV-Outliner. I've played with MyInfo (which I like), but much prefer Smereka TreeProjects (which allows you to tile your windows all over the place - very useful). I'm also experimenting with Liquid Story Binder - very powerful, but also mildly annoying. None of them interacts well with the iPad. Reluctantly I've decided that the only way forward is to continue to use various text apps to transfer data between the platforms, then cobble the data together in various info management apps depending on how I'm using it.

But List Master is your friend if you yearn for ListPro. No, it's not elegant, no, it doesn't preserve rich text. But it does pretty much everything else that ListPro does, and can import/export CSV files that are ListPro-compatible.

Other useful tips include TiddlyNotes, a lovely interpretation of TiddlyWiki that will synchronise with a desktop-based TiddlyWiki if you can work out how to get the synchronisation utility to do its thing - Sabine, the German programmer, is extremely helpful. I'm also looking forward to the appearance of Scrivener on the iPad - it's in development, but not imminent. The developer recently posted a long blog entry on his efforts.

Oh, one final recommendation is Notebooks, another German iPad app that already has a Mac desktop client and will shortly have a Windows one, too. Because it's HTML-compatible it's a lot more flexible than many notebooks on the iPad. Try it out on the iPad - you'll probably enjoy it (although the Dropbox sync doesn't work too well - I use iCloud instead).

But there are still huge opportunities for programmers to build desktop-quality cross-platform apps for iOS: people have only just started to realise what can be done on iOS, and Apple's own apps show that iOS does actually offer a genuine desktop alternative if you can find the right tools.

Oh, and if you're frustrated by OmniOutliner (which I do like, but also find somewhat limited), you ought to experiment with the two HTML export options, which do preserve columns quite well; I've just produced a lengthy set of minutes using OmniOutliner, with minimal tidying required on the desktop. Of course a web page isn't quite the same thing as an outline!

You might think about using Numbers as an outliner tool - it works much better than you might think, and can be exported to Excel (although the results are, well, variable!). I love Numbers (and its lovely search function)! And if you hate Excel (which, as a writer, I do), I can thoroughly recommend LibreOffice, the spreadsheet component of which supports rich-text writing in cells much better than Excel does.

Cheers,
One of the Other Bills

Thanks Bill for this very helpful post.

I have gone ahead and purchased/downloaded ListMaster. I'm looking forward to playing with it a bit, but from what little I've seen so far, am impressed with the spreadsheet-like feel of it and the ease with which ii appears to export csv files.. something that'll come in handy not just for import to ListPro, but also spreadsheets.

I've not yet figured how to use outlining on it, but even if it doesn't support that it appears to be a useful tool in my kit - especially both as a universal app and its Dropbox support.

Thanks also for your wealth of tips on syncing and note takers. It seems that you also enjoy experimenting with the capabilities of different apps.

I certainly agree with you on the huge opportunities that exist for developers to exploit for the benefit of a huge population of Windows users who, nevertheless are seduced by Apple's mobile iDevices - a market that I believe that the developers of Listpro (ilium) are ignoring at their considerable peril.

I hadn't thought of Numbers as an outlining tool. I didn't know it had that capability.

Thanks again Bill

Cheers

OutlinerBill wrote:

the makers of ListPro do not seem interested in creating a
version for the iPad, which would have been perfect for me.

My understanding of the iOS pecularities is rather limited, but I was under the impression that just about anything that runs on the iPhone could run on the iPad --and that gave the iPad an advantageous starting point when it was launched. I now assume that I was wrong and that ListPro for iPhone http://www.iliumsoft.com/listpro/iphone does not work on the iPad. This makes me feel less jealous as an Android user!

Yo' welcome, Other Bill,

And Alexander: yes, ListPro does run on iPad, but it's horrible. It's also horrible on the iPhone, in fact, but on the iPad it's particularly horrible because it makes no effort to use the screen space - all you've got is a magnified iPhone app.

The app I'm having most fun playing with at the moment is Notebooks (by Alfons Schmidt) and a very interesting - but rather unstable - app by an ex-Microsoft team called Tapos?. The advantage of Tapos? is that it shows two pages side by side, and can also split in half to show a web browser (or another Tapos? "book", or a number of other things) in a split-screen view. It's a very nice attempt to achieve multi-window working on the iPad.

Mind you, it doesn't synchronise with anything - Alfons is promising a Windows Desktop app for Notebooks, which will be brilliant, and even Circus Pony Notebooks (which can also show two pages at a time) has a Mac client.

As I said before, there are serious opportunities here for Windows-iOS interaction, going well beyond the ridiculous hype associated with the mere possibility that Microsoft might, eventually, if the wind is in the North-East, the cock crows thrice and the cat walks widdershins round the graveyard, produce a version of Office for the iPad.
Yeah, right! Like I bet that's at the top of Steve Balmer's to-do list... ("must give Apple more traction in the enterprise...")

Sorry, for mystic reasons my acute-accented 'e' at the end of Tapose was turned into a question mark on uploading.

The ex-Microsoft team produce something called "Tapose" (with an accent on the 'e'). Here it is...

http://tapose.com/

Cheers,
The Other Other Bill

Alexander - I've just discovered that List Master is also available for Android. And as a newbie Android user myself (nice, shiny Galaxy Note - magic!) I'm finding a lot of synergies with iOS. Currently my favourites are probably Dropbox, OneNote and a couple of very nice text editors that I'm still familiarising myself with. But there's an increasing amount of cross-platform stuff (Wunderlist for task management, for example - available on almost every platform you can think of!).

Hi Bill

Thanks again for your suggestions. As I mentioned, I did purchase, and am playing with List Master, but I'm having a little difficulty finding the outlining part of the 'Columned Outliner' in either this app, or Apple's Numbers app on my iPad.

Could you please point me to where I can learn how to do outlining in either of these two apps?

Cheers

Bill

Hi Alexander

I agree with Bill, the Listpro for the iPhone is ok for what it does, but the Windows version for the desktop, where you can create and see your collapsible outline on the left side of your display, and the columns spreading out to the right, is how Omni Outliner has been implemented, taking full advantage of the iPad's screen real estate.

Listpro for the iPhone will run on the iPad (as most, if not all, iPhone apps will) but it's just a 2X zoomed reproduction of its 1 column display.



Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

OutlinerBill wrote:
>the makers of ListPro do not seem interested in creating a

>version for the iPad, which would have been perfect for me.

My understanding of
the iOS pecularities is rather limited, but I was under the impression that just about
anything that runs on the iPhone could run on the iPad --and that gave the iPad an
advantageous starting point when it was launched. I now assume that I was wrong and
that ListPro for iPhone http://www.iliumsoft.com/listpro/iphone does not work on
the iPad. This makes me feel less jealous as an Android user!

@ Bill (Mad about Dana)

Thanks for the tip on ListMaster for Android; I may try it out. Do I understand correctly that it only provides 2-level hierarchies?

For editors: Jota Text editor is my own favourite; it has the kind of minimal interface that doesn't get in the way, like TextRoom and WriteMonkey in Windows.

That said, after a while of switching from one platform to the other, sometimes twice or more per day, I really don't want to spend time importing/exporting. The seamless synchronisation provided by the SimpleNotes service is my own preferred solution. I use Andronotes on the Android; as an editor it's not perfect, but I don't often write prose on the Android.

If you haven't tried it out already, do take a look at Airdroid http://airdroid.com/

Hi folks, sorry, been a bit busy. On List Master - you can embed lists to more or less any level, I believe, but it doesn't have a conventional outliner "tree". But each list can contain other lists (containing a completely different set of columns). It's actually surprisingly powerful, albeit a little confusing.

On Numbers - perhaps I erred in calling it an "outliner" as such - it isn't. But it does allow you to create interlinked tables on any one of a large number of tabs, so you can effectively use it as a rather powerful info/data management engine. It's the closest thing to OneNote for the Mac, in my view, because the tabs function as "pages", and the many different kind of media you can store on each tab (page) - plus the fact that each page effectively functions as a giant whiteboard - give it enormous flexibility. The fact you can also put tables (complex spreadsheets, even) on each page - and then link them together by various means, including cell references/ranges - makes it even more sophisticated than OneNote in many respects. Okay, so it hasn't got quite the same powerful search function, but within each workbook (as Excel calls them) the search options are quite powerful enough.

Oh, and for those who like to synchronise Android with Windows (easily); avoid nasty SimpleNote (okay, not nasty, but if you've got Dropbox, why bother?). Use something like EMA Personal Wiki instead (free on Google Play and for Windows), or use Epistle to create Markdown documents and then use MarkdownPad or Gonzo or WriteMonkey to edit the files on Windows after synching through Dropbox.

I'm still looking for something really convincing that would allow me to synchronise stuff between Windows, Android and an iPad - although I've got a variety of Markdown apps on all three, in truth it irks me to resort to such crudity (sorry, Markdown lovers - so okay, I like Markdown too, but it's not as good as whatever they're using in TiddlyWiki). So I tend to use OneNote (which has reasonably competent clients on both Android and iPad), or sometimes Evernote. And for task management I find, rather to my own surprise, that I've resurrected Wunderlist, which does a very good job of synchronising between all the various platforms I use. I'm even toying with resurrecting Outlook, which I haven't used for nearly 10 years, but that's the CRIMPer in me looking for an excuse... Resist, Bill, I tell myself, try one of the other impressive alternatives instead (mainly German, funnily enough - like Pimero, which is also cross-platform, or eM Client, which you can get standalone or as part of the awesome SoftMaker Office 2012 suite).

I have a lot of sympathy for whoever was writing about the good ole' Psion 5mx the other day - I have two of them (actually, they're OEMed Ericssons, built by Psion towards the end of the 5's lifetime). Amazing machines, even now, and with some impressive software. Mind you, I still have an old NEC MobileNote Pro (Windows CE) and the machine my handle is based on, the AlphaSmart Dana running PalmOS 3.0 (I believe). Occasionally I dig out one or the other of these fine old machines and weep gently into my tea. But times have moved on, and I wouldn't exchange today's thrillingly interlinked environment for those oldies, even if I could. Yes, it's flawed - no, not all the solutions exist (yet!), but there's so much excitement out there, especially for us CRIMPers!

MadaboutDana wrote:

I have a lot of sympathy for whoever was
writing about the good ole' Psion 5mx the other day - I have two of them (actually,
they're OEMed Ericssons, built by Psion towards the end of the 5's lifetime). Amazing
machines, even now, and with some impressive software. Mind you, I still have an old
NEC MobileNote Pro (Windows CE) and the machine my handle is based on, the AlphaSmart
Dana running PalmOS 3.0 (I believe). Occasionally I dig out one or the other of these
fine old machines and weep gently into my tea. But times have moved on, and I wouldn't
exchange today's thrillingly interlinked environment for those oldies, even if I
could. Yes, it's flawed - no, not all the solutions exist (yet!), but there's so much
excitement out there, especially for us CRIMPers!

If we're onto nostalgia as a topic, I still haven't managed to ditch my Palm T|X, although I use iPod Touch for my calendar now. I still use the Palm for contacts (TealPhone), passwords (Passwords Plus), and as a back up alarm clock... I also use the dictionary sometimes (PocketLingo). I can't believe Palm is no more... Those were the days, my friend...

MadaboutDana wrote:

Oh, and for those who like to synchronise Android with Windows
(easily); avoid nasty SimpleNote (okay, not nasty, but if you've got Dropbox, why
bother?).

Speaking for myself (a) to avoid having to think about filenames and versions and (b) I've had quite a few issues with Dropbox on the Android.

Use something like EMA Personal Wiki instead (free on Google Play and for
Windows)

Unfortunately, not available for my version of Android (2.1). Sideline: Android is the fastest older-versions-becoming-obsolete OS, which of course is not a technical issue, but rather related to Google's strategy --come on Google, slow down and take it easy!

or use Epistle to create Markdown documents and then use MarkdownPad or
Gonzo or WriteMonkey to edit the files on Windows after synching through Dropbox.

WriteMonkey's Markdown support is indeed great; the good news for me is that ResophNotes, the Simplenotes Windows client I use, also supports Markdown.