Forum Posts Feed
Cataloguing the Different Ways the Mind Associates Itself with the Outliner Presented Screen
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Foolness
Sep 10, 2012 at 08:03 AM
For that idea to hold true to majority of potential lessons, there would have been a vast learning curve difference between those who try out demo versions of software to those who simply read the tutorial.
In fact, any person can easily see that when it comes to a more complicated task like say…learning a Linux distro… neither the example (a Live CD) nor the tutorial helps the learner nor does the learner who want to try a Linux immediately care for a Live CD.
In terms of pure mob demand, it is even possible to say that the words “Ubuntu” have more power in making Linux users want to try Linux first than the availability of examples.
The theory of a hammer is an interesting statement. Not just because what you say is true but of how it relates to outliners.
Have you considered that the reason for the lack of interest might be due to the mass availability of such an item and the equally as vast application of the hammer?
You say people buy tools to use as tools but that is a natural cognitive dissonance that occurs in an abundance mindset. No different than to have the view that people buy rice to eat without the historical context of say frankenfoods. Especially among poor people. The ones who have to acquire any food at the cheapest and most abundant amount possible in order to survive.
In fact in many areas, the idea of rice is still not an economic item but a way for parents to guilt children into eating them because they are “wasting the hard work of their fellow human farmers”.
...but wait a minute, there’s a thought. Rice in all it’s abundance is not bought as a tool for survival at all. In fact most foods aren’t. Why, I thought people buy tools to use as tools? Surely food is merely a tool for sustenance. Or isn’t it?
Outliners as tools are neither rice nor hammer. Construction wise, the philosophy is still very unstable if not a vastly ignored subject at all. Ease of production wise, only those who can code can create outliners and among those coders, it takes an even higher level of talent and dedication to even continue caring about the output of the software beyond simple outlines. Finally, among those only a few are brave enough to drop a flawed software they have already developed.
Users’ limited time are irrelevant compared to such general technological adoption barriers. These are the stuff usability guides, coding designs and mass marketing are constantly theory crash testing.
A person who have a limited time may stop to help an old lady cross the street or may drop their jobs altogether to open up more time for something more worthwhile. Even in reverse wherein we witness a person not wasting their limited time on someone, there are situations where culture forces them to do so in a certain manner.
The same can be said for forums, blogs, social networks…each have a certain behavioural effect on how a user would determine their contribution. It’s not a case of limited time nor is it a case of whether an outliner/PIM can achieve everything.
In fact this is another attitude exacerbated by online forums: if a situation where one extreme may not apply, the opposite extreme is most likely assumed to be the logical defense. It is so easy to miss the possible role of community collaborative teaching or mentor-newbie co-discovery learning. In forums, even someone with a PHD, would more likely yield to the process of “if the problem cannot be solved, the problem shouldn’t be solved at all”. The only exceptions are on where a certain stake is on the table be it a forum instructor who would teach a newbie but insist to do their steps only and then completely leave the slow pokes behind or be it a software designer/fan of software design proposing the usage of such software without even doing the simple process of differentiating which problematic aspect needs a screwdriver and which problematic aspect needs a hammer. The mere existence of the sentence is enough.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 10, 2012 at 01:50 PM
It seems to me that outliner and overall information management software development has been as much influenced by ICT capabilities as by theoretical models and approaches. E.g. the fact that Microsoft and others at some point released a hierarchical tree control is probably the reason that so many two pane outliners are out there, with trees with identical capabilities and limitations (e.g. no styling and metadata).
Another example, in respect to #5 The Pacer (The Foot Soldier), is Trello http://trello.com/ You could say that it is rooted in Kanban, but it is so much powerful than any Kanban board implementation than I’ve seen, precisely because it has departed from the original paradigm. Was this done on purpose or along the way? No idea.
Do users suggest features based on some mind set and mental model, or simply because they miss something in everyday practice (and which they might not even be able to describe)? Do ideas stem from a broader background or are they disconnected from any common underlying concept? Again, no idea.
Sideline: it would interest me to know who are the outliner ‘experts’ that you expect to take up this challenge. As far as I remember, only one person in this forum has called himself an expert, and that was in a recent thread. I believe that the majority of contributors here refer to themselves as ‘power users’, which is something completely different.
Posted by Foolness
Sep 10, 2012 at 07:20 PM
Yes, there have been web services that have been simulating Kanban but I’d be careful in claiming they are superior.
Trello and Flow.IO are the most popular as far as I know but I didn’t mention them by name because they aren’t that superior in concept except in technical features. At the same time, I wanted to avoid an argument on this because, as I said, I’m no Kanban user.
My hinted evidence as to why they are flawed can be found in this image:
http://www.infoq.com/resource/articles/agile-kanban-boards/en/resources/Fig1_task-board.jpg
This will not scale in either services and yet we aren’t even in depth Kanban theory conversation here. Merely a basic sticky notes corkboard based around a non-personal information intended usage.
This is the tricky thing about Kanban. It’s not about the board alone. In fact, the board is limited by design in order to promote Agile movement.
For further evidence as to why such powerful services are unable to simulate the true Kanban experience in anything but name and web collaborative features, check out both Pigeonhole Organizer and TreeSheets and compare their power to both services.
Even if the argument is that web services are supposed to be inferior to desktop software, I’d bet my money that if an experienced Kanban group would be forced to use these web services alone using the Kanban process, they’d get more practical work done signing up for a single user account of Teux Deux than they’d get from something like Trello. This doesn’t mean Trello does not provide an important and special one of a kind web service. Far from it. It’s very good. Good is different from comparative though. It would be on the level of putting a turtle shell of features on an agile method and calling it a superior agile method because it goes away from the agile paradigm.
In fact as far as web services go, Google Calendar is much better at recreating and unconsciously motivating it’s users to experience the Kanban style of thinking without them needing to know or realize it because it mimics a work style much closer to the paradigm rather than going away from it.
As for who I consider outliner experts, it would have to be those that consider themselves an outliner expert. Redundant, I know, but let us not forget that the user who claimed to be an expert in that recent thread did not cite only him but threw the claim out that one blog poster is trying to protect his stake as the resident expert in this forum and also cited a Kant professor whom he obviously considered an expert. I too thought that there were only power users here but if people are willing to consider themselves as experts then it’s high time to make a thread that helps them establish their credibility as experts. It would be better for them in the future and it would be better for the community as a whole to understand why they may be infatuated with the more mundane and lengthy subjects of theory.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 10, 2012 at 08:10 PM
So, you are referring to people who themselves have not purported to be outline experts, but someone else called them so derogatively speaking, and now you want to challenge the title they themselves have not claimed? And of course this will be done in your own preferred field of opus-long multi-topic posts, rather than the field of (to the best of intentions) focused threads that have been taking place over the course of 8+ years (the bits I’ve followed)?
As long as you have the time to spend in it (I don’t) it doesn’t sound like a very difficult job.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 10, 2012 at 08:30 PM
If you want to read some well-written, thoughtful articles about outliners, then I suggest searching up Ted Goranson’s series called “About This Particular Outliner,” which was published in the now defunct e-magazine called “About This Particular Mac.”
Here’s a link to one of the articles: http://www.atpm.com/10.02/atpo.shtml
Steve Z.