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WorkFlowy Single Pane Outliner
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 3, 2012 at 11:15 AM
I find it very humorous that the developer claims that WorkFlowy is the first “organizational tool that lets you organize things the way you naturally think by breaking everything down into smaller pieces…” This is such an outlandish and demonstrably false lie that I wonder if the developer was ever a politician.
I tried WorkFlowy last year and found it intriguing, but after a week instead of “wondering how I ever got by without it,” I just stopped using it.
If they made a desktop version, I might be tempted.
Steve Z.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 3, 2012 at 11:34 AM
As for limiting ourselves with two-pane outliners, I think you may be right. Two pane outliners parse information into sections be design. The “outline” part in one pane is really just for headings, while the information goes in the editor pane. This can be very useful, but is really more of a database model, where each record is a separate item. The single-pane outline can certainly parse information, as is indicated in the WorkFlowy video, but it also feels like a single, integrated document.
I’m not suggesting the two-pane outliner can not be used successfully to created integrated documents—just see Scrivener—but that I think you are right, Daly, that it does sometimes psychologically limit us—or at least it may limit me.
Nice topic!
Steve Z.
Posted by Cassius
Sep 3, 2012 at 12:30 PM
How’s this:
Single-pane outliners are best for WRITING.
Two-pane “outliners” are best for Collecting, Categorizing, and Storing information.
Although, I admit that I have used each for the opposite function (particularly GrandView).
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 3, 2012 at 01:19 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I find it very humorous that the developer claims that WorkFlowy is the first
>“organizational tool that lets you organize things the way you naturally think by
>breaking everything down into smaller pieces…” This is such an outlandish and
>demonstrably false lie that I wonder if the developer was ever a politician.
This is a classical mistake of cybernetics, whereby people who developed the computer thought they were modelling human thought, when in fact they have instrumentalised a very unnatural way of thinking, which in turn has been used as a model for human thought. I would like to see that person who thinks in a hierarchical folder structure and saves individual thoughts into separately labelled compartments in his or her brain, ready to be retrieved by global searches…
Posted by Fredy
Sep 3, 2012 at 04:07 PM
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.
Totally false dichotomy, Cassius, which I know has been repeated endlessly in various fori, but as we know, endless repetition of false facts don’t get them true. Some people really set up rather incredible “workflow” settings, in order to separate “external” material from their own writing, when in fact, there’s that third category, self-produced intermediate “material”, by design… or, most of the time, by discarding stuff from what was originally meant as output. So all this only “enhances chaos, all the more so since with all that “third party” material, you’ll do extensive notes, etc. I very well know the need for clear distinction of third party stuff and your own stuff, among other reasons for legal reasons, and I’d certainly be willing to discuss technical means for assuring this separation, but as said, trying to have two distinct tools for that appears to be a little bit naïve since there is much too entanglement between the two, in practical work, for any such “total” separation not becoming a serious obstacle to your production very soon.
You’re perfectly right, Doctorandus, and this makes the attraction, at first sight, of tools that pretend to support or even promote “associative thinking”, like TheBrain, PersonalBrain or whatever they call it at any given moment. To clarify, when I tout fractionizing and tout outliners, and more so, relegating that fractionizing to the tree, I very well speak of “artificial”, i.e. not-thinking-like: I’m speaking of getting “law and order” into your previous associative thinking, and I say, look upon these endless French essays in order to have fine examples how reading is hampered when authors do NOT bother to sectionalize their thoughts after thinking, for the recipients’ sake.
So, nobody will get easy answers when discussing thinking, writing and reading, and if he thinks he’s got an easy answer even to partly aspects, chances are he’s mistaken even for that part. Very sorry that some things are MUCH more complicated than most people would like them to be. There’s a good term that’s come totally out of fashion, it’s prolegomena. Greater thinkers than we are KNEW, in their time, that they only could get beginnings of first elements of analysis, with hard thinking - whilst many little thinkers today think, on the contrary, that with easy thinking they’d get to ultimate depths. There’s an ancient saying, people telling the truth need a fast horse. In English: People don’t like to be reminded that their easy findings ain’t that profound, let alone final. Sorry for that.