Neo outliner

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by jamesofford
Dec 31, 2012 at 09:25 PM

Greetings:

I have been looking at Neo as an outliner to use on my Mac. I downloaded a trial version, but the software is not very well documented. It looks powerful, but it is hard to know how to get access to all of the features. I have downloaded the manual in Neo format, thinking that would serve as a useful tutorial/model. Nope. In a couple of searches on the web, I have found almost nothing to help. There was a posting back in 2011 on this site asking a similar question(http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2509/0/guide-to-neo-or-neo-forums)but no response.

Anyone out there a Neo expert who can point me to someplace with some information?

If not, I may jump over to Omnioutliner. It’s more expensive, but there is an active user community and The Omni Group seems responsive.

Jim.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 31, 2012 at 10:06 PM

Jim,

I wish that I could offer some help, but my experience with NeO is pretty much the same as yours. It is a powerful outliner, but it has a horrible user interface. The president of the OmniGroup, which develops OmniOutliner, recently promised that version 4 would be out first quarter of 2013, if that makes you decision any easier.

Steve Z.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 31, 2012 at 10:12 PM

Here’s what the CEO of OmniGroup said about version 4:

What’s coming in OmniOutliner 4? We’ve completely rebuilt the outlining engine to support zooming text, showing and hiding columns, and we’ve improved link handling and attachments. We’ve designed a new style system which emphasizes named styles and simplifies the styles interface. And it’s built on a modern 64-bit architecture, with a fresh new look and feel. OmniOutliner 4 isn’t finished yet, but it’s getting close: it’s now at the point where I’m using it to edit all my outlines rather than OmniOutliner 3, so I anticipate we’ll be ready for public beta sometime in the first quarter.

http://www.omnigroup.com/blog/entry/omni-plans-for-2013

Posted by Hugh
Dec 31, 2012 at 11:42 PM

OmniOutliner is good, smart and “finished” with a very supportive development team, but it still lacks clones, and it appears Version 4 will do so too. Neo has one of the most complicated interfaces in the Mac software arena, but not so that it’s impossible to understand with a bit of work (and it’s actually less complicated than TAO, its immediate predecessor). It has clones, and just about everything else that you might want in an outliner of its type. For a complex outlining task with many nodes and multiple levels, I’d use Neo.

Posted by Hugh
Dec 31, 2012 at 11:51 PM

And no, sorry, I’m no expert. I just worked through the “manual”. I guess it helped that I’d grappled with TAO previously.

Back to topic list