Markdown vs WSYWYG

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Posted by 22111
Sep 5, 2013 at 05:56 PM

“Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 2, 2013 at 09:16 AM
I’d argue that markdown (and other markup notations such as ConnectedText’s own) is faster than WYSIWYG. The latter is only seemingly faster. Remember that you need to take your hand off the keyboard to a) highlight the text with the mouse and b) to click on the Bold icon, and c) put your hand back on the keyboard. By that time a fast typist has typed those two (or four) asterixes.”

That wasn’t you writing there, and my fault was, I made the citation from above without judging it necessary to give the author’s name, and I put “fanboys” in plural, trying to weaken the expression by not putting it directly to the author I had cited, but trying to speak more in general - I wasn’t aware I could cause others to think they were meant too in particular - sorry!

There is no bolding here, so I cite again:

“Remember that you need to take your hand off the keyboard to a) highlight the text with the mouse and b) to click on the Bold icon, and c) put your hand back on the keyboard.”

As we all know, this is simply NOT TRUE, it could even be called a big, big lie; at least control-b and such is available everywhere, even if you don’t spice up your keyboard by any macro tool.

So it’s gross tweaking reality in order to make a big, big disavantage into an alleged advantage, and that’s fanboy behavior, as when Apple fanboys explain to you why it’s an advantage to have no possbility to change the battery or to put some data in by usb stick. It is the most gross marketing speak we were accustomed to 20 years ago; most suppliers don’t even dare to continue such gross marketing speak for fear of total loss of credibility.

Which more is, why not leave such marketing lies to the respective developers, especially when they take part in this forum, as is the case for the developer here whose name I remember to have seen sometimes here. Similar for speculations why a given software doesn’t have this feature or deliberately refrains from having that other feature: It should be up to the developer to answer such questions that are perfectly legitimate in 2013, I think.

This being said, you say CT is an outliner indeed. So let’s assume I am simply wrong, and it is an outliner!

For me, the wiki concept is worthless, I just need outliners, the 2-pane variety, and it’s highly interesting that wikipedia.org is doing reflections upon the possibilies to overlay wikipedia with a big outline: Even for them, so successful with this wiki concept, the “lost in hyperspace” problem seems to have become unbearable, and in fact, the only people who really profit from the web’s being a hyperspace instead of an outline are Google, since without they couldn’t sell their expensive ads.

This being said, could anybody explain in brief if CT is an outliner in such a way I imagine it, in the way of Ultra Recall or something like (and without the latter’s additional features of course)? Or do we speak of different things here?

I think I have understood some former explanations in this way that CT is a wiki, where you create new items from their links to existing items, and this is not an outliner. Then, you can (from what I have, perhaps wrongly, understood) built up specific outlines within ranges of such “hypercards”, in order to have quicker access to those “cards”/items within that “stack”/range of items, but by no means, you’ll get a 10,000 items “tree” for your 10,000 cards, except manually, this way, “put the current item to the current tree” or something.

So, if in the end you need an outline, with CT you will be lost, since it will not deliver this outline, only partial outlines here and there where the investment of your time and effort will be justified by your ABSOLUTE need of an outline at least there, but for all the rest, you will have to live with your wiki.

You see, I’m not trying to just childishly pretend, “CT is not an outliner”, in order to childishly pretend it’s bad, but I have come to this conclusion from my (perhaps wrong) understanding of its conception.

I would be glad to hear my representation is wrong, really! (And then, I would hope the developer introduced wysiwyg asap.)

Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 5, 2013 at 06:52 PM

Hm. I can see where your confusion is coming from, and will confess that my first few encounters with CT didn’t end well. Until the latest version (shortly to be superseded, as Dr. Andus has just advised), I thought it was an immensely frustrating kludge of a program.

However, I hadn’t looked at the variety of structures you can use to view your data. The outliner and project outliner features are only a small part of it - and yes, you’re right, you have to build those manually, although that will suit some people (like me, for example) very well. In fact, your criticism of this feature is a little hard to understand - you could easily use CT to build a one-pane or two-pane outline, adding topics as you needed them. You don’t have to START with the topics and FINISH with the outline - you can reverse the process easily enough, so start with the outline and add topics as required.

But there are also other outline concepts. For example, a history (not all outliners have this, but some very good ones do; it’s a great navigation aid). More outliner-like is the topic list, which can be arranged either as a flat list, or as a navigation tree. The category list is similar - it can be flat or hierarchical, but obviously depends on the use of categories. The navigator is very outliner-like, in the sense defined elsewhere in this forum - it links topics together in a mindmap-style network, but can be adjusted to display topics as a tree, or in various other configurations.

Thing is, CT is immensely flexible, hence its value to Dr. Andus and clearly also to others in this forum. This flexibility can be viewed as excessive. It’s certainly not immediately user-friendly. But so what? CT is all about flexibility, which is why it’s so very powerful. If, as you suggest, you only want to use a simple two-pane outliner, there are plenty of excellent, user-friendly options available (The Guide springs to mind, for example, or the more sophisticated AM-Notebook). Both are easy to use and have pleasant, WYSIWYG interfaces.

But if you want to get into serious cross-referencing and linking, you might need something more like CT. One of the nice things about outliners is their sheer diversity. For example, I’ve just been playing with Gingko (gingkoapp.com). Now there’s a wonderful new way of writing and interrelating information! I do hope they produce a nice app (for various platforms) in the near future! But that’s just me - you might look at it and hate it. And that’s fine.

As for views on typing - they vary, again, according to individual preferences. As a touch typist, I’m highly keyboard-oriented, but I also enjoy taking my hands off the keyboard and using a mouse. Unlike some of my colleagues, who get very grumpy without their keyboard shortcuts. So I suggest the best thing is to enjoy the diversity, rather than criticize the fact that some people are immensely fond of one particular application. As I hope the above brief sketch indicates, your lack of familiarity with their beloved application may be causing you to overlook some of its most exciting features!

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 5, 2013 at 11:16 PM

See http://www.connectedtext.com/screenshots.php - check out the “Outliner” image.

It might be more accurate to say ConnectedText *includes* an outliner rather than ConnectedText *is* an outliner.

Of course, that’s only if you’re considering the feature in CT explicitly titled “outliner.” If you consider any hierarchy or nested list to be an outline, then CT may indeed *be* an outliner.

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 5, 2013 at 11:32 PM

22111 wrote:
>I think I have understood some former explanations in this way that CT
>is a wiki, where you create new items from their links to existing
>items, and this is not an outliner. Then, you can (from what I have,
>perhaps wrongly, understood) built up specific outlines within ranges of
>such “hypercards”, in order to have quicker access to those
>“cards”/items within that “stack”/range of items, but by no means,
>you’ll get a 10,000 items “tree” for your 10,000 cards, except manually,
>this way, “put the current item to the current tree” or something.
> >So, if in the end you need an outline, with CT you will be lost, since
>it will not deliver this outline, only partial outlines here and there
>where the investment of your time and effort will be justified by your
>ABSOLUTE need of an outline at least there, but for all the rest, you
>will have to live with your wiki.

I think I see what you’re saying… CT is never a “complete” outliner (unless you build it manually, as you say) in the sense that every single item is necessarily represented in one canonical outline as in a traditional two-pane outliner. However, in real life, CT’s approach seems to be a feature rather than a flaw. Having multiple, arbitrary outlines representing a network of information solves a lot of issues related to trying to represent reality with a single tree.

For one thing, you can create any number of *limited* outlines that represent a view/snapshot that may be temporal, contextual, etc., while not modifying the underlying data. In other words, CT allows superimposing an arbitrary number of outlines over a data store that is not inherently hierarchical.

But if you insist that reality is a tree rather than a graph, you will probably be forever frustrated with CT.

Posted by 22111
Sep 10, 2013 at 07:57 PM

Thank you both very much, Chris Murtland and MadAboutDana. I think your explanations are really helpful and shed a good light on ingenious software; I understand better now why in the Kühn blog, it’s so “over-celebrated” as I might say.

If I understand well, you don’t even need the wiki, you can treat it as an outliner, or let’s say you have some item, but which in fact is sort of a “main topic”, from which then its own, partial outline emerges, by your creating children, grand-children, and so on, from there, and in that particular outline.

Coming from Ultra Recall, I have never seen any real solution, in UR, to the problem that that one outline tree grows bigger and bigger; kinook, the developer, offers hoisting to other tabs, but then, any work you will do there, in that subtree (renames / moves of items, but also expanding/collapsing subtrees further down within the hierarchy, are replicated, real-time, within your first, “complete”, “overall” tree.

Don’t get me wrong, of course this replication of the overall tree is necessary, and UR is technically faultless here (as with most other things; just search brings problems, sometimes), but the problem here, this endless instant replicating, also to that DISPLAYED “full tree”, makes that in UR, there is no such thing as an “overview”: As soon as you have such hoisted sub-trees, you will LOOSE your “content tree” by this very move: There is no possibility in UR to have a “general view”, and a detailed view, let alone more than one detailed view, at the same time: No way to have some tree just with the first- and second-level-indented main topics, and other trees showing details in some part of this big tree.

So this is a very important problem, discussed in their forum for years, and which has never even been considered to be problem by kinook, let alone for them to search for a solution (which would consist in a virtual representation of the big tree, but independent of it, display-wise, and in which you only could select items to hoist from there, and select items to expand or recollapse; ideally, this special “JUST LOOK AND CHOOSE FROM TREE” would be in an additional pane, but technically, it could also be realized in just another tab (perhaps differently colored or such for better distinction)).

But as said, in UR, there is no such thing (not speaking of other outliner I tried: none does it or something similar).

So from what you both say, it seems CT has found another, but a real solution to this problem no (other) outliner of my knowledge is aware of.

1) Is this wishful thinking of mine, or am I right to say, then, that in CT you could have a pane with a topics list, and then you could click on it, and the corresponding outline (sub-tree of that topic; it’s understood that sub-outline must exist of course, in order to be opened here) will open within another pane? (I’ve seen screenshots for CT showing one pane to the left, the “text” / content pane in the middle, and a second pane to the right.)

2) And if this is so, does CT have any import routines allowing for importing EXISTANT trees/subtrees, from a program like UR, into such a compound (even one by one, not speaking of the overall tree here in one single import move)? The “import of existing structes is almost impossible” problem is there in “The Brain”, so most people with existing databases will not make the move; here, it could be the very same problem, I fear.

3) But if this is possible (not necessarily from UR, but perhaps from a third program), that old question arises what CT is doing about its 1985 markup scheme. (And for people wanting to do the move even now, without wysiwyg, the question arises if in import, rtf (which is lost here) is correctly translated into CT markup.)

This being said, I would think CT is a very ingenious outliner which has fully its place in this forum!

Thank you very much again for your explanations.

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