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Sensational return of Cloud Outliner
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 5, 2015 at 08:56 PM
Yup, Cloud Outliner, for long an increasingly shy, embarrassed, underperforming teenager shuffling awkwardly about in the background, has suddenly evolved into a Mega-App, now entitled Cloud Outliner 2, and priced very reasonably indeed. Loads of new features, including rich text, passcode locking, multiple layers of outlining (folders + in-text outlines), ability to attach documents, all kinds of stuff. Let’s hope they all work! Oh, and compatible with iPhone and iPad (a “universal” app, ahaha).
Sadly, it’s currently only available for iOS, but I’m hopeful that a version for MacOS is in the works.
Now I must go away and play with it…
More details for those who care: http://xwavesoft.com/cloud-outliner-for-iphone-ipad-mac-os-x.html
Cheers!
“Happy CRIMPer” Bill
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 6, 2015 at 01:04 PM
You beat me to it, Bill. I would have said all that you said about Cloud Outliner, though not with the same panache. I used it yesterday for some note-taking and found it to work fine. No heavy lifting was done, however.
Steve Z.
Posted by Luhmann
Aug 6, 2015 at 11:38 PM
I’m an avid user of Workflowy who has long been disappointed by Workflowy’s refusal to make a proper iOS app. Their app seems to be little more than their mobile web interface, which is very hard to use on iOS for any serious work. For this reason I’m constantly trying and testing iOS outliners. It is also the main reason I joined this forum. For me Cloud Outliner is the best thing yet. It doesn’t seem like much - it doesn’t do much more than basic outlining - but the interface is sublime. That is “just works” in a way that feels intuitive and it never gets in your way. Having said that, however, the lack of a desktop companion is a serious problem. Right now you can sync to Evernote and I was able to make changes in Evernote which got synced back to the iOS app - but the Evernote outlining interface is even worse than than Workflowy’s iOS interface. So now I’m in a situation where I have a great iOS app and a great desktop app, but they each lack a decent companion at the other end. If you don’t care about sync you can easily copy and paste betweeen the two or import/export outlines, but I do care about sync, so this is a problem.
A few more notes:
1. Cloud Outliner depends on iCloud for sync between devices. In my experience iCloud sync is much slower and less reliable than other options, such as Dropbox or the engine that runs Simplenote.
2. There is no ability to “hoist” nodes like you can do in Workflowy. I’ve made a request for this feature to the developers and encourage others to do the same.
3. There is no support for tagging. Search works, but this is not the same as the powerful instant filtering offered by workflowy. Again, I suggest that those who value this contact the developers.
4. I personally prefer the no-checkbox approach of Workflowy. Cloud Outliner lets you hide checkboxes, but then you can’t mark things as “done.” I think a decent compromise might be a command to mark items as done even if there is no visible checkmark. Or, perhaps to mix and match items with checkboxes and items without within the same outline.
5. In both apps I would like to see better support for Markdown formatting and Markdown lists.
Posted by Luhmann
Aug 7, 2015 at 04:59 AM
I discovered a few issues with using cloud outliner:
- The outline menu hides the keyboard auto-complete options, making it harder to type
- The note field is hard to use. For instance, there is no option to enter a “return” character within one’s notes.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 13, 2015 at 08:55 AM
I agree that notes are rather restricted, but then, it’s not a super-sophisticated outliner like OmniOutliner (so you can’t apply rich text to individual words, for example). On the other hand, it does what it does rather well, and produces neat, tidy little PDFs when required.
I like it!