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The Yahoo group backup site and GrandView
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Posted by Cassius
Dec 14, 2007 at 02:48 AM
First, a bit of history:
This forum began at http://www.outliners.com. This Web site was begun by Dave Winer, developer of More for the MAC and, I believe, developer of OPML. He originally hosted outliners.com on his company’s servers, but due to illness and possibly other reasons, he left the company and shortly later, the new management killed the outliners.com site. Winer went to Harvard, and managed to put the site up on a Harvard server. However, there were continuing problems, possibly due to excessive use of the server by students or faculty.
We ALL owe Dave Winer a debt of gratitude for all the effort he put into outliners.com and the other outliner development and work he did.
To maintain some continuity, in case outliners.com completely disappeared, one member, Steve Cohen, set up a “backup” Yahoo group which outliners.com members could join. The idea was for the Yahoo group to act as a successor to outliners.com, should it entirely disappear.
Later, one kind member, Chris Murtland, offered to create a new outliner Web site—the one you currently are in. We also owe Chris a big THANK-YOU!!!. Chris seems to have disappeared from recent postings, so I fervently hope all is well with him.
So, if the unthinkable happens and this site disappears, you might wish to go to
.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/outliners-pims/
.
and sign up as a member. I think membership approval by Steve (or co-moderators) is needed because the group was being heavily spammed. Steve occasionally visits the site to post a message so that Yahoo doesn’t declare it to be dead. Thus, if you try to sign up now as a member, it may be a few months before Steve sees your membership request and approves it.
Now, what does this have to do with GrandView?
Some time ago, an outliners-pims member placed the GV program in the Files section of the Group. It was removed, probably because of copyright concerns, but it appears that the poster obtained GV from one of the Web sites that archive moribund software. I expect that some Googling around might find the program. Of course, the program may be loaded with spyware, malware, viruses, etc. (By the way, a free, slightly crippled version of PC Tools Spyware doctor is available in the Google Pack.)
As to using GV: It was a full-featured outliner, a calendar, and had columns like Ecco. It also had a more friendly, alternate view to the columns, had keyboard macros and the ability to reassign functions to other key combinations. It also had special keys not on the menus:
To access the menus you must press ALT-F1 and the first letter of the desired menu. To access HELP, press ALT-/ .
To access the special keys: ALT-F1, S, K, S
To close, use ALT-Q.
The program took me some time to learn (20 years ago), but should be less effort for someone already familiar with GV. It works best in DOS, Win3.1 and Win 98. Additional info has been posted here in earlier messages. You can try Googling for them too. NOTHING in the Windows world comes close to GV.
-c
Posted by Chris Murtland
Dec 14, 2007 at 04:12 AM
Cassius wrote:
>Later, one kind
>member, Chris Murtland, offered to create a new outliner Web site—the one you
>currently are in. We also owe Chris a big THANK-YOU!!!. Chris seems to have
>disappeared from recent postings, so I fervently hope all is well with him.
Thanks - I’m still here and read every post with interest. I just haven’t had much to add lately!
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 14, 2007 at 02:11 PM
Actually, I don’t believe you need to have moderator approval to join the Yahoo group. As one of the co-moderators, I’ve been deleting the occassional spam message that works its way onto the site and deleting the member who sent it.
On another the other topic, all the recent talk about GrandView prompted me to pull my old floppy disks out of storage, plug in my floppy drive and install GV onto my desktop. It runs pretty well even under Windows XP. The one problem I’ve found is that I can’t get it to run in a window… it always goes to a full-screen… even though I’ve set it to run in a window in the properties dialog box of the Windows shortcut. The reason that matters is that I was hoping to pull some screen shots to illustrate what I am talking about when I talk about the inline text capabilities of the program. I can’t do this, because leaving GV to go back to Windows minimizes GV and makes it impossible for me to activate my primitive screen capture program when I could actually capture the GV screen. Oh, well.
Nevertheless, running GV again was a pleasure. Its interface is so intuitive I was using it proficiently within a couple of minutes even though I haven’t used it seriously in over 10 years. Yes, it was a great program and, no, nothing in Windows comes close to matching it.
Steve Z.
Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 14, 2007 at 05:40 PM
> The one problem I’ve found is that I can’t get it to run in a window…
I can confirm that it does work in a window. You need to make sure that you are not still using a left-over WIN98 pif file instead of an XP one (that was a problem I initially had, as I recall). I can send you my pif, if you like. It should work with some mods to the path details.
I have tried using TameDOS [http://www.tamedos.com/] to improve GV’s running, but found that it was better not bothering. This could well be that I haven’t had sufficient patience to tinker with Tame’s myriad options, however.
Some time ago I also downloaded some extra DOS fonts that improved usage a lot. I can now run GV in a DOS box that is almost full-screen - much better than the native full-screen view that takes over the whole display and has awful fonts (at least on my Thinkpad).
As you mentioned, document view is reached by F5. Documents are made simply by pressing
when in the outline view, and typing. They can then be hidden or revealed via F5. I’ve sent Pierre some screenshots of the menu-system, so I’ll send him a couple of the document feature.
Curiously - or stupidly :-) - I have never made much use of the document feature in all my years of using Grandview. In part this was because it is so easy to delete huge “documents” by accident - e.g., by joining ajdacent heads or sub-heads. (I recall that this is a problem with NoteMap’s “comments” feature.) What ever else that says about my usage, it is a tribute to the power and flexibility built into GV that there is actually no need to use the document feature for many purposes. GV’s heads and sub-heads can contain as much text as one wants without having to spill over into the document feature; and the powerful expand, collapse and hoist features of GV enable one to produce as sparse or detailed a view of the outline as one wants.
I agree so much with your conclusions about GV. It’s as a complete writing environment as I have ever found, and its features - and not some pared-down version of them - could provide a basis for a moder writing environment to rival that of Scrivener. think of a Zoot+Grandview hybrid. Maybe SQLNotes can achieve this!
Derek
Posted by Cassius
Dec 14, 2007 at 05:47 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>...The one problem I’ve found is that I can’t get it [GV] to run in a
>window… it always goes to a full-screen… even though I’ve set it to run in a window in the properties dialog box of the Windows shortcut.
If not running Tame, open GV and then press ALT-Enter. When not running full-screen, you can right-click the top “GrandView” bar to access some useful functions.