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Circus Ponies suddenly ceased business
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Posted by Bob Spies
Feb 23, 2016 at 12:09 AM
I’ve sometimes thought of writing my own just so I wouldn’t have to worry about it going away!
Posted by Andy Brice
Feb 23, 2016 at 08:08 AM
Bob Spies wrote:
I’ve sometimes thought of writing my own just so I wouldn’t have to
>worry about it going away!
You would have to keep updating it just to keep it working on that latest OS. Especially for Mac, as Apple like to nuke their development ecosystem from orbit every few years.
Posted by Prion
Feb 23, 2016 at 08:17 AM
I am not sure I share the same sense of nostalgia given that some really powerful contenders are with us right now. Will they only be remembered when they have drop out of business?
1) Neo, ridiculously powerful, accessible, cheap http://d-lit.com/macosx/neo_outliner/ alas, Mac only - I have it open now and should be working
2) Tinderbox, harder to grasp, much more expensive but has some nice tricks up its sleeve. I’ll leave them to Steve Z to explain :-)
and of course
3) org mode , free, endlessly hackable. It is sometimes said that it is not for the faint-hearted, which I find inaccurate because the core functionality is not excessively hard to grasp. It is not for the easily distracted, though. orgmode requires consulting forums, manuals etc because none of it follows any kind of standard for any operating system that have all evolved long after emacs, the foundation on which orgmode is built, had been devised. It is really easy to veer off into a thick undergrowth of trying to define a function once you learn that in the dot file functions can be defined when yaddayadda….and completely lose sight of the small problem you wanted to solve.
If you have the mental strength to ignore 97% of excess functionality that was really designed to do something you don’t need and resist even finding out what its purpose is then orgmode might be all you need.
Else: 1 or 2
But doom and gloom? Not really.
Posted by Bob Spies
Feb 23, 2016 at 04:58 PM
I’ve looked at Tinderbox. Innovative, but not really what I need for day-to-day info & project management.
From time-to-time I consider trying org mode, but I’d need to leave the real world for a week to try and get it working for me—haven’t found the time for that yet.
Neo looks intriguing. Somehow I’ve managed to miss it until now. Any idea what kind of staying power it has?
Posted by Prion
Feb 23, 2016 at 07:05 PM
Bob Spies wrote:
>
>From time-to-time I consider trying org mode, but I’d need to leave the
>real world for a week to try and get it working for me—haven’t found
>the time for that yet.
Totally understand. It took me several attempts to finally get going, what really made a difference was identifying an emacs variant that looked nice and at least conformed to some standards of my operating system to ease the transition. In my case spacemacs, but your mileage may vary.
>
>Neo looks intriguing. Somehow I’ve managed to miss it until now. Any
>idea what kind of staying power it has?
I do not have any first hand knowledge but the developer seems to be very devoted to his quest. Neo has been around for a long time and its predecessor TAO before it. Neo gets regular updates especially after new OS X releases. If you are looking for something less puzzling (if not downright weird at times) than both Tinderbox or orgmode then you cannot go wrong with Neo, especially at the price. Stable as a rock and very powerful (hoisting, true cloning, even graphical representation of links that you define, etc). The manual is quite helpful BTW and can be downloaded in Neo format from the developer’s website.
I tend to do project-related note-taking in Neo often and really like it in case you haven’t noticed.
Spend some time configuring it, especially the keystrokes, and you are unlikely to hit any major obstacles, whereas both Tinderbox and orgmode, as much as I like them, require some thinking ahead to avoid the “it is probably easy but I’ll be damned if I know how I can make this thing do XYZ” syndrome.
Hope this helps
Prion