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WorkFlowy Single Pane Outliner
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 3, 2012 at 06:19 PM
Fredy wrote:
>Specifics would be welcome, Steve. We know your stance, but it would help us
>non-inliner guys if you shared your “limiting” experiences with “our”
>stuff.
I’m not sure how I can share a limiting experience with what you call “our” stuff, since I have no experience with your stuff or anyone’s by my own.
However, if you want me to explain further what I mean, here goes: A single-pane outliner forces you to focus on structure and logic; whereas with a two-pane outliner your focus can shift from structure to content and back again very easily. A single-pane outliner lends itself to focus on one project—that is, you should create a new outline for each project. A two-pane outliner is more of a filing cabinet, a collection of documents which may or may not be related and may or may not have a logical flow. The “limiting” aspect is that the two-pane outliner may not facilitate the same logical thought process that a single-pane outliner promotes.
SZ
Posted by George Entenman
Sep 4, 2012 at 03:58 AM
Fredy wrote:
>On the other end of possible structural choices, you’ll get
>French literature in the social sciences field. In fact, as anybody knows who has done
>some reading in this field, the VERY big majority of French authors present their
>thoughts in quite a different form as others (English-speaking, Scandinavian,
>German authors in those same fields) do normally: They (the French) go on for pages and
>pages, putting in dozens of disparate thoughts, do a literal explosion of different
>subjects there, and most of the time even without separating things by separate
>paragraphs, things that have nothing to do with each other, except for minuscule
>associative origin in the minds of the writers.
First, you will like this video of Noam Chomsky criticizing the French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqTE_bPh7M. I agree with most of it.
I agree that French academic style can be awful. Unfortunately, it influenced the areas of US academia that like “theory”. But I’m not sure I agree that the problem with their writing has much to do with organization of paragraphs and pages. I think it has more to do with fuzzy thinking (viz Chomsky) and a lack of interest in explaining anything: everyone wants to start their books and articles “in the middle of the conversation”, i.e., without any kind of introduction for anyone who is not immersed in the field.
>... Some of yours will have read - or put an eye into -
>Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and so they will know that nobody else, for depth
>of “findings” in such quantitiy, this “endless flow of putting anything you want
>together”, was taken to even lesser summits coming a little bit close even.
For the sake of anyone here who might be thinking of reading Proust, let me say that you are mistaken in assuming that Proust is not a magnificent writer. “Rememberance of Time Past” is a highly structured work that holds together well. There are problem areas caused by the way he wrote and revised, requiring other people to piece together thousands of pieces of paper in the right order, etc, but the final work, especially the current Tadié edition, is magnificent and coherent.
I don’t know if the following sentence is meant as a kind of parody of a Proustian French sentence, but it makes little sense to me. Proust’s style, while difficult to follow, is unsurpassed. I recommend looking at the appendices of Joshua Landy’s book on Proust (“Philosophy as Fiction”), where he turns some of Proust’s sentences into outline form and then explains what he sees in them. Each sentence is like a little poem, especially in French.
>Which
>makes me muse if Proust has taken this, then pre-existing, “art” of mixing up things to
>new - and never re-atteined afterward - heights, or if it’s simply the other way round,
>with Proust having introduced a completely new (and awful) style, which then has
>impressed French writers (I’m not speaking of belles lettres here, and Proust
>himself was a minor novelist, but the greatest essayist of “all” time, or among them)
>so much that they feel, in such number, obliged to ape the unattainable example (about
>10,000 pages or not much less anyway) in their little 200 page products - and I’m not
>even speaking of avarage sentence length here, or let my just say that in Proust, many a
>sentence flew over a page, almost a page or even more than a page, and here again, French
>authors LOVE to try the same, but not as exceedingly as they ape the great master’s
>muddling up 101 different subjects without doing the slightest paragraph break, let
>alone sub-headings.
>(If it’s Proust worship or just “French style” even before him,
>check by looking at social sciences text of the 19th Century.) And here you see that the
>second concept can be led as easily ad absurbum - and is, frequently, in the French
>culture - as the first one.
Posted by Fredy
Sep 5, 2012 at 12:02 AM
George, the first part of your interjection is interesting; I hadn’t been aware that this “French social sciences style” has reached the U.S. As for the second part, I see you like Proust a lot, as a novelist, and have knowledge there that go beyond reading him and reading Painter’s bio (which is rather old now as we know), which is my restricted knowledge of “Proustiana”. My point was, this unstoppable associative thinking in belles lettres seems to have begun with Proust, and it seems he never was topped since, and so it would be interesting to know if French théoréticiens ape him, or if Proust got this style from somebody else; a theory that Proust invented this, AND that French writers do the same now for totally different reasons, doesn’t really convince me since the Proust way is too particular for such a connection - continuity?! - to be inexistant.
I concede that for these developments on all sorts of things, Proust is one of the very, very big writers; it would be foolish to deny this. On the other hand, exactly this makes him, as a novelist, more or less “unreadable”, i.e. any “action”, if there is any, is effilochée, broken down, defibered / defiberized, disintegrated, torn apart, chopped up.
So, this is my personal reading experience, your experience varies. Proust is best-selling. Proust’s works are, among all these standard canonical books any bourgeois or “intellectual” or gauchecaviar French owns, the second-least read, right after bound encyclopedias -
and there are TWO reasons for it:
- As a novelist, Proust really and seriously thinks that his reader will support all this, endless devastating of the fil narrateur, for the benefit of his deep (but very often irrelevant) thoughts; unfortunately, people are not ready to submit to illusion wrecking at this point, and so, after the first two tomes (édition de poche) at the latest, most would-be Proust readers will have given up - people like to read good novels, but then, not une histoire saccagée.
- As an essayist, Proust is splendid, as said, but here, we’ve got a multiple accessibility problem: Without third party reference material - or endless lists of handwritten notes - you’ll never find again this incredible thought of his on that subject, nor that other so appropriate description of the human condition, since you don’t get even back to any marking pole which for lesser writers would be some kind of action, at least the page before or the page after - no, with Proust, you’ll get 5 or 6 pages of such deep thinking in a row, and even before or after, there is no action of any importance you might remember; this for the macro search; as for the micro search, without any paragraph distinction over 20, 200 or 2,000 lines (I’m exaggerating, but not much), either you learn Proust by heart, or you give up. (Would be a wunderful subject for putting it into a database, but the intermediate-final versions coming out regularly, in order to uphold Gallimard’s rights, who would like to have electronic access to éditions bâclées and outdated since more than half a century? Non-cognoscienti here must know that Proust literally wrote up to his dernier soupir (to the last gasp), and his faithful servant and other good-willing people had their say in the rearrangement, etc. of his innumerable sheets of paper.)
This learning Proust by heart, this Proust reading some three other reference books at hand, some people do this; it’s a joy for them to “get it straight” (thousands of places and acting persons, millions of cross-references (I’m exaggerating again, or am I?), all this ask for a very robust database), just as it is for others to do big crosswords in just minutes.
This being said, yes, George, on almost every page, there are tournures (figures of speech) that make you bouche bée - your mouth standing wide open: wow, and wow, and wow again - and then, on clapping shut, what was it encore, and what encore?
That’s Proust. A genius. And five minutes later, you don’t know anymore what he had been speaking of (madeleines don’t count). That’s why most people though, including most people who own their Proust, prefer lesser writers, for more pleasant and durable reading.
Posted by Foolness
Sep 5, 2012 at 08:38 PM
This is inaccurate.
I’m not a fan of workflowy myself but saying workflowy is purely an outliner would be akin to saying PersonalBrain and MindManager are the same.
In fact, workflowy’s weakest features are it’s in-line notes and outline. A dedicated forum like this should be much keen to the nuances of services like this.
Trying reorganizing Workflowy’s outline and you’ll be met with an annoying mouse click drag that belies the ease of the keyboards for the rest of the service. Trying creating sub-trees and you’ll be forced to play tab as a branch line is not a pure line but is a slave to the previous branch. The notes feature is also very confused. They did it well enough that now only the first line of a note is showing but they also annoyed many users who want full notes shown but if you allow that, mass note takers are punished because the notes eat up a whole lot of space.
Workflowy’s uniqueness lies in it being a foldable outliner, fast speed and pure text export mixed with it’s auto-detecting and auto-converting of text tags into clickable tags.
What this means is that while Checkvist can also be sub-clicked, Workflowy smoothly transitions into a sub-branch at a touch of a button in such a way that it’s more comparable to TiddlyWiki than Checkvist despite the initial similarity.
The text tag conversations is two fold. Someone mentioned a software on the Mac. Well that’s the thing. It’s only on a Mac. Fail to back up that software or switch to another OS then it’s not cross platform.
Workflowy on the other hand has a triple backup feature. The web service. The e-mail mentioning the history. Finally any basic text editor where you paste the entire outliner into a basic text editor/barebones Windows Notepad.
Since it’s basically a text editor on the web, the formatting is exactly as it looks as you typed it in the web service except when exporting in formatted form. It’s not an auto-export but by far it has one of the simplest ctrl + c export methods among free services including non-cloud services.
The other power is the quick search. The search is much much faster than even gmail making it one of the fastest web service for filtering. This means that setting aside a fancy calendar ui, typing March on the search, will outpace finding your appointment on either GCal, Coolendar or Gmail. It’s really all in the tags.
Is it better than dedicated to-do lists? No. But speed per speed, it scales better than something like RTM or Evernote who also rely on tagging systems to filter through dates, priorities, etc.
It’s really like combining a barebones plain txt editor with PersonalBrain and last I checked, PersonalBrain is not essentially a mind map software either.