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

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.

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.

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.

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!

The more I use Cloud Outliner 2, the more frustrated I am by its limitations. Looking around I found Listacular which is much closer to what I'd like, but it hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Unlike CO2 it supports merging items by hitting delete at the start of an item and splitting items by hitting carriage return (CO2 doesn't even have a CR button). Also very useful, the iOS keyboard's autocomplete menu is visible when editing items, as well as a dedicated formatting bar. It supports some basic markdown formatting, tags(!), and allows you to mix checklist and text items. All this is much better for me when compared with CO2. However, listacular doesn't support the iOS "open in" dialog, it doesn't export as OPML, doesn't allow you to collapse/expand or zoom the outline (CO2 doesn't support zooming either), and doesn't allow selecting multiple elements. Comparing the strengths and limitations of each app, it seems to me that Listacular is much closer to what I want. I can even work around the missing "open in" command by opening the file in any app that supports Dropbox, such as the official Dropbox app or Editorial. I also tested pasting a Listacular list into Workflowy on the desktop and it worked without a hitch. I just worry that it isn't being actively developed any more...