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EccoPro: Why has nobody developed a clone so far?
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Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 31, 2007 at 06:42 PM
Yes, that’s all I mean, nesting as you say. These are actually, I admit, pretty minor embellishments or variants of Hoist or Focus. (Double hoist can be emulated by splitting windows, if the outliner allows it. (Actually, not many do.)
More interesting, perhaps, are combined operations, using collapse/expand; hoist; fold; and maybe hide as potential elements. One such combined operation that I think is particularly useful (it is actually the operating mode of BrainStorm) is to hoist and then collapse from the new second level. Combining the basic elements into patterns that are practically useful or part of a structured way of using the software - this may me more fruitful than inventing new filters.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 31, 2007 at 07:52 PM
I and others touched on this earlier, but I think it bears repeating with emphasis, and it also relates to focusing on specific material in the outline or seeing the material in its full context. That is, the ability to create content for a heading that is not in itself a heading. For example, your heading might be “Marvin Gaye.” Under this heading, you might have a short biography of Mr. Gaye, thusly:
Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye was an R&B singer popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His best work was recorded as duets with Tammy Terrell. Mr. Gaye was killed by his father.
Now, you may want to view the content of this heading along with the heading and in context of the other related material. Or you may want to just focus in on the content of the heading so you can concentrate on expanding it. Or you may want to hide the content and just view the heading, so you can concentrate on the structure of your overall piece.
This may yet be another type of focus in an outline.
Steve Z.
Posted by David Dunham
Sep 1, 2007 at 01:09 AM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>the ability to create content for a heading that is not in
>itself a heading.
Right—I think MORE called this “notes,” and I think a number of other outliners have this as well. (I think in some early outliners, topics could only be one line, so notes were the only way to get multiple lines of text in a topic).
Opal does not (since in my opinion shrinking multi-line topics to the first line gives you very similar functionality), so I forgot about it.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 1, 2007 at 07:25 PM
That was my first thought in when I read Steve Zeoli’s post: it is a variant of Folding or Shrinking, with approximately equivalent functionality. Personally, I have preferred the “Notes” approach, but is this only because my Word/More “early software experience” (on the pre-X Mac)?
“Notes” and Folding/Shrinking are close to functionally identical, and including both probably only makes practical sense (as opposed to marketing sense) if, like MS Word, you allow “Notes” to be folded to the first line of each paragraph.
Elegance of design surely involves avoiding functional redundancies, dictating or at least encouraging a choice between Folding and Notes, as opposed to including both features. What are the arguments for one choice or the other? To me, traditional Folding/Shrinking is arbitrary. Who cares what’s on the first line of the paragraph? Maybe the important information is on the third. Of course, you can engineer your first line so that what appears is a viable heading. This is really a workaround, though, it seems to me. It restricts the size of headings to one line, or at least requires that useful information occur in the first line. The workaround, in other words, does not completely eliminate the arbitrariness of requirement.
Does the Folding approach have compensating virtues?
David Dunham wrote:
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>
>>the ability to create content for a heading that is not in
>
>>itself a heading.
>
>Right—I think MORE called this “notes,” and I think a number of
>other outliners have this as well. (I think in some early outliners, topics could only
>be one line, so notes were the only way to get multiple lines of text in a topic).
>
>Opal
>does not (since in my opinion shrinking multi-line topics to the first line gives you
>very similar functionality), so I forgot about it.
Posted by sracer
Sep 1, 2007 at 08:25 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>That was my first thought in when I read Steve Zeoli’s post: it is a variant of Folding or
>Shrinking, with approximately equivalent functionality. Personally, I have
>preferred the “Notes” approach, but is this only because my Word/More “early
>software experience” (on the pre-X Mac)?
>
>“Notes” and Folding/Shrinking are close
>to functionally identical, and including both probably only makes practical sense
>(as opposed to marketing sense) if, like MS Word, you allow “Notes” to be folded to the
>first line of each paragraph.
>
>Elegance of design surely involves avoiding
>functional redundancies, dictating or at least encouraging a choice between
>Folding and Notes, as opposed to including both features. What are the arguments for
>one choice or the other? To me, traditional Folding/Shrinking is arbitrary. Who
>cares what’s on the first line of the paragraph? Maybe the important information is on
>the third. Of course, you can engineer your first line so that what appears is a viable
>heading. This is really a workaround, though, it seems to me. It restricts the size of
>headings to one line, or at least requires that useful information occur in the first
>line. The workaround, in other words, does not completely eliminate the
>arbitrariness of requirement.
>
>Does the Folding approach have compensating
>virtues?
In using an outliner for its intended purpose (as the skeleton for the eventual document), BOTH folding AND notes are required. (unless I’m misunderstanding the use of the term “note”) When an outline entry is folded, only the “Note” for that entry should be displayed…. when expanded, the “note” should be hidden.
When I initially create an outline, each entry is a “note” that will NOT appear in the final document… or they become/tweaked to become the “heading” for that section.
Using this approach, an “expand all” function will hide the underlying outline and simply display the document, while a “contract/fold all” function will reveal the outline structure.
If you are talking about outlines as data organizing/PIM functionality, then feel free to disregard what I’ve written.