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Cloud Outliner 2 for OS X
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Posted by Luhmann
Jan 19, 2016 at 10:20 AM
Good question. I used OmniOutliner years ago (before there was an app store) and found it very clunky with lots of non-outliner features (it seemed more like a spreadsheet program). A few years ago I looked at it again but didn’t buy it at the time because there was no sync solution. I don’t know what the situation is now. I see they just released a new version, but it is very expensive and there are quite a lot of negative reviews for such a costly program. What are people’s experiences with it on this forum? How is sync? How is it for simple outlining on the the iPad or iPhone?
Posted by Luhmann
Jan 19, 2016 at 10:28 AM
According to the reviews for the OS X version of Omni Outliner it is very crash prone, so it doesn’t sound like spending all that money would solve the crashing problems I’m facing with Cloud Outliner.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 19, 2016 at 10:59 AM
Luhmann wrote:
> How is it for simple outlining on the the
>iPad or iPhone?
For simple outlining on iOS you could try CarbonFin (http://carbonfin.com/index.html). It doesn’t have a desktop app, but it syncs with a web app (https://cfoutliner.appspot.com/) that you can access via a browser (and download the files as OPML). Apparently its files can also be accessed by desktop outliners via Dropbox as OPML.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 19, 2016 at 10:59 AM
I have OmniOutliner installed on both my MacBooks and on my iPad Air. I can’t say that I use it extensively, but I do use it. I haven’t experienced any crashes, but my outlines are not big, sprawling things. Building a simple outline on the iPad is pretty standard. It’s when you want to make use of the columns that it starts to feel a bit clunky, though I’m not sure there’s a way around that on a device like the iPad.
To me the main drawback is that they encourage you to use their proprietary sync-service, OmniSync. This is free, but it isn’t as simple as Dropbox or even iCloud. They say their service is better because the others are not set up to handle the package files used by OmniOutliner (and their other apps, OmniFocus, etc.).
All in all, I haven’t found it overly inviting to use OO, though I do for some specific outlines, where the features of OO are required, and it is perfectly functional for those purposes. For example, planning the events lined up for the historic site where I volunteer. The columns and inline notes are helpful for planning. Then, once the schedule is set, I can create a good-looking PDF of the schedule for distribution.
Steve Z.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 19, 2016 at 11:46 AM
There’s still a dearth of really good outliners for MacOS and iOS. There are excellent outliners for one or the other, but very few for both. Cloud Outliner 2 is okay, but clearly giving some people problems. OmniOutliner isn’t as good as it purports to be: I’ve found that it slows down drastically as outlines become longer, especially on iOS. The fact that Carbonfin Outliner is still one of the more capable products is a bit bloody sad.
There are excellent cross-platform writing and note-taking apps (effectively two/three-pane outliners) that are extremely capable; I won’t bother to list them here because there are so many. But none of them are outliners in the sense of one-pane, folding outliners like Workflowy (which would be wonderful if it wasn’t web-bound).
There are also difficult-to-categorise notebook managers like OneNote, Outline+ and Growly Notes that are not really outliners (well, okay, the desktop version of OneNote is a folding outliner, but none of the iOS versions does folding) but are still powerful.
Funnily enough, the most capable outliners are currently task managers. The new version of Todoist is an extremely capable outliner - although it’s optimised for task management, it could, at a pinch, serve as an outliner (complete with tags etc.) Two others worth mentioning are The Hit List (now available on iPad as well as iPhone, plus Mac OS; uses tags and contexts, as well as folders, folding etc.) and Pagico. Oh, and OmniFocus, I suppose, although I find it seriously clunky on iOS. In some ways, it’s amusing: for a long time there was much moaning about the fact that task managers weren’t exploiting the benefits of folding - now they’re the leading exponent of the model.
So come on, Robin! When are we going to see OutlineEdit as an iOS app? For that matter, when are we going to see the spectacular Tree 2 or Outlinely as iOS apps? (Having said that, Glam Development, developers of Outlinely, appear to have disappeared). Ah well, we can but hope…