http://smallpicture.com/outlinerHowto.html

Dave Winer's project - javascript outliner.

Just released today:

Little Outliner

http://littleoutliner.com/

(This comes out of Dave Winer's Small Picture project)

With all due respect to the father of computerized outliners, his work since GrandView/ThinkTank/More 3 hasn't been as great. Dude, just give us an updated GrandView for Windows -- similar (perhaps) to UV Outliner except -- with all that programmer genius he brings to the table. Like adding the flexibility of switching between single/dual panes, cork boards, mind maps, & with tagging and column support. Throw in an easy web page import and perhaps PIM like features of calendar/email/reminders; make the whole thing globally search and replaceable with export abilities. Maybe add some relational capabilities useful to novelists/screenwriters and others; add screenwriter templates/formatting in addition to the usual .rtf text/graphic/tables features. Instant greatest program ever.

Kind of a full circle on his career AND kind of a watermark for the computer age. If he needs the money, he could even charge for it and have folks lined up around the world to buy/invest. There aren't many programs that I pay for without long consideration but a modern GrandView with the promise of most of the features I mentioned? I sure would.

As far as I understand, Dave Winer has nothing to do with GrandView http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer though he is the creator of ThinkTank and More.

I actually believe that Winer is very consistent in his endeavours, as documented by the Wikipedia entry above: from the outset he was an outliner software evangelist, and he soon combined this with the web, giving us Frontier, Radio Userland and RSS, in short the predecessors to modern Content Management Systems. After creating OPML he launched the OPML editor which I personally find far from intuitive but which remains useful software. His launching a similar tool in HTML5 seems quite a natural step in the present situation; HTML5 offers a powerful rich web publishing platform beyond proprietary systems like Flash or semi open ones like Java, and I'm sure Winer likes this.

I wish his new outliner, ideally improved further by others too, gradually becomes an optional online editor in webwares ranging from Gmail to social publishing platforms; we might then see better structured texts circulating...

John Friend wrote GrandView. I telephoned him once and we spoke about it. Unfortunately, he had moved on to other things, and he had just moved and had no idea in which packing box his GV materials were.

-cassius

So I went and took a look at this. Along the way, I saw a link to Workflowy, which I somehow missed when it came out.

At this point, I use iOS, Windows, Linux and Android. And suddenly finding a couple of elegantly designed (simple and deep user interfaces) single pane outliners that run in the browser seems ... encouraging. Both tools, for the writing I would hope to do with them, lack some significant features (word count and spell-check, to name the most basic). But so many of the applications I read about on this forum seem to get sucked into the wormhole of additional features. Little Outliner and Workflowy are easily learned and make it that much easier to slip the power of outlining back into my life.

At any rate, thanks for the link.

Lucas wrote:

Just released today:

Little Outliner

http://littleoutliner.com/

(This comes out of Dave Winer's Small Picture project)

I haven't quite figured out what I could use Little Outliner for (in addition to the outliners I already have), but apparently it's now compatible (meaning "copy and paste") with Workflowy (h/t Taking Note blog):

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/april/workflowyAndLittleOutliner

Fargo (just launched today) makes slightly more sense to me, as the outline can now be saved to Dropbox. But I'm still struggling to see what I would use this for (given all the other faster and more sophisticated tools around). Maybe this is targeted at other developers/services, rather than end-users?

http://smallpicture.com/fargoDocs.html

Beware: once you click on the Fargo link proper, it will force you to link the app to your Dropbox account first.

http://fargo.io/

I just spent a little time with Fargo today. It's seems an incremental step up from Little Outliner: a small one pane outliner with a small set of features. It does the absolute essentials of outlining, and i suppose the idea is that having it up and running in a browser gives one a dashboard to plan a day, dash off a blog post, or keep a running journal. It's still missing a lot of the things most of the folks here would consider important. But it's been kind of fun to see Dave Winer back in the outliner game.

In the 1980's I was working as a programmer on the IBM mainframes. I had an 8 bit Zenith computer at home. My best guess is that I downloaded PC-Outline from Compuserve. I was incredibly impressed with PCO. The outline functionality fit my obsessive-compulsive nature very well. The PCO user interface was the most elegant I had seen up to that time. The program was extremely efficient, and very, very fast. Later, I would see programming software which provided templates for creating menus like those in PCO. I have always been curious about the PCO program. Does anyone know if it was written in assembly language or whether it was programmed with a higher level language? Its speed always suggested assembly level programming to me. But my background was with clunky compilers on a big mainframe, so I really don't know. PCO still has an elegance that I don't find in other software.

Al Whealton


Cassius wrote:

John Friend wrote GrandView. I telephoned him once and we spoke about
it. Unfortunately, he had moved on to other things, and he had just
moved and had no idea in which packing box his GV materials were.

-cassius