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Outline 4D (formerly known as Storyview 2.0)
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Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 10, 2012 at 04:02 PM
I see that Outline 4D is on sale at USD75.00 on the Write Bros website:
http://www.screenplay.com/p-77-outline-4d.aspx
They must have picked up on the fact that some online retailers were undercutting them for some time now.
I am still learning O4D but for now it’s my favourite single-pane outliner with inline notes. I use it to add flesh in the form of inline notes onto a pre-existing Bonsai outline, and afterwards I export it into Scrivener for final writing up.
The interface does show its age in some respects, but if you can get over that fact, there are some truly unique features under the hood, such as the ability to view items at a particular hierarchy level only (e.g. only level 4 and exclude all the other levels, from 1 to 3, and 5-6), not to mention the Timeline View, which is a very special kind of a corkboard.
I’m still working through the manual to master the Timeline View, but I can already see that it can have uses beyond just simply viewing your outline in another view. E.g. I could see it work as a qualitative analysis tool, by starting with empirical examples with “index cards” at level 5 of an outline, and then gradually develop the contents of the subsequent higher levels of the text (which are larger cards that enclose the cards at the lower level) by extracting and abstracting content from the lower levels. It’s basically a pyramidal structure, with abstraction rising through the ranks.
Finally, the third main feature is the plotting tool, the “Tracking Feature,” which allows you to track anything (story lines, characters, objects, concepts) across the index cards in the Timeline View. It can also be enabled to do that automatically, by setting a keyword.
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 10, 2012 at 04:25 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>I see that Outline 4D is on sale at USD75.00 on the Write Bros
>website:
>http://www.screenplay.com/p-77-outline-4d.aspx
Actually the download-only price is USD65.00.
Posted by MenAgerie
Nov 22, 2012 at 08:44 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>my favourite single-pane
>outliner with inline notes. I use it to add flesh in the form of inline
>notes onto a pre-existing Bonsai outline,
Can people identify any other outliners that have this feature?
Cheers
Jeff
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 22, 2012 at 10:07 PM
For Windows I’m only aware of the following single-pane outliners with inline notes:
- Maxthink
- LexisNexis Notemap 2
- Inspiration
- UV Outliner
- Outline 4D
Out of these only Inspiration and UV Outliner seem to be actively developed.
I tried them all and settled on O4D. However I had to turn off UAC in Win7 to be able to run it properly. But otherwise I’m happy as Larry.
Notemap has been reported to occasionally lose content with large notes. Otherwise I would have selected it, as it looks very good for this sort of outlining.
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 22, 2012 at 10:15 PM
P.S. There is nothing particularly wrong with Inspiration or UV Outliner, I just find them too fiddly to use after having gotten used to the ease of outlining in Bonsai.
As for Maxthink, it looks very interesting, but O4D fits my needs better, e.g. one can use different colours and fonts for different levels of the hierarchy (and then there are the timeview and plot tracking features, though for now I’m only using it as an inline outliner).