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A useful property of 2-pane PIMs
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 20, 2008 at 12:49 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Another possibility to consider is The Journal
>(http://www.davidrm.com), which is designed for journaling, but works well for all writing
>projects. It has a fairly sophisticated keywording system (I think the developer
>calls them “topics”) which allows you to apply a topic/keyword to specific sections
>of text.
I had looked at The Journal in the past and didn’t find it particularly attractive. However, following your suggestion I took a look at its website again. I was looking for a specific feature ...and I found it. The ability to post entries to blogs. I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed it in the past, as I’ve been looking for this kind of offline editing tool for ages. Then again, I had been looking for software specifically focused on web publishing whereas for The Journal it seems like an added feature. I’ll give it a try on this regard.
alx
Posted by Cassius
Feb 21, 2008 at 02:16 AM
DaXiong wrote:
>I’ve used TreePad (Business ed) in the past, but its aging as well, and too many flavors now. Like I’ve said before, ...
>DaXiong
In case you missed it, TreePad Business 7.4 is now available.
See the note I’m about to write in MyBase/WebCollect
-c
Posted by Jiggernaut
Feb 21, 2008 at 08:48 PM
The third approaches that Chris delineates (single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics) is exactly what I have been searching for, with no success, for quite some time. Word 2003 has this in a way with the “Document Map” pane, but I it lacking in many regards.
Does anyone now of a program that will allow you to do what Chris describes: essentially a flat-out line as the main pane and a second pain that automatically creates a table of contents/heading list on the other pane so that you can quickly jump from heading to heading within the outline?
Chris Thompson wrote:
>I’d argue the opposite of the consensus in this thread: two pane outliners tend to
>conceal information, making it harder to find. Approaches that I think are useful in
>rediscovering information:
>1) automatic embedded clustering or classifier
>algorithms - i.e. when you’re viewing an item, there’s an area of the screen that
>suggests possibly related items
>2) wiki-like manually created links between
>items
>3) single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics -
>note that this is subtly different from two pane outliners, which require you to click
>through to get to specific topics; there’s at least a chance with single pane
>outliners that you’ll find info by scrolling through it
>4) graphical views - at the
>minimum, thumbnails, though I’ve found that there’s a certain minimum size before
>thumbnails become useful in recognizing information; small icons are useless
>
>The
>only thing that’s worse at helping to discover things than two pane outliners are pure
>tag-based systems. Tag clouds help, but they have a tendency to hide the small
>things.
>
>—Chris
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 21, 2008 at 08:50 PM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>That’s just a grab bag of features I’ve found useful. I can’t think of an app that does
>all of them, though there are several that do at least two.
Chris,
I can’t argue about the usefulness of the automisation features you suggest in a web situation such as the ones you described. However I haven’t missed any such tool when dealing with information that I’ve created (or collected) myself. In the contrary I believe that any kind of program trying to suggest associations among my stuff would probably confuse me rather than help me. Unless DevonThink has some auto-learning capability.
As for wiki-like links, I’d say that their usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. I personally prefer a more structured approach, but it is obvious that wikis appeal to many people—and are very powerful indeed.
The one exception in my rather conservative approach is Brainstorm’s automatic identification of ‘namesakes’, i.e. identical entries. During my MBA studies, I put all new terms I learn in square brackets. Every once in a while Brainstorm will pop a <> sign indicating that I have already defined a term (often, to my chagrin, it will be in a different context, but still useful to know). But even then, the identification depends on my consistently inputing terms as such. I don’t think that I would appreciate it popping on every time I typed ‘marketing’ or ‘media’.
So, to summarise, I’d argue that what tools are useful, i.e. automatic associations etc vs. outline trees or whatever, will very much depend on the kind of information one is dealing with, i.e. the internet’s constant flow vs. personal initiative.
alx
Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 21, 2008 at 09:37 PM
The main program I had in mind there was OmniOutliner Pro and its “sections” pane. One especially nice feature of its implementation is that you control how deep the list of major headings to display, and the depth of displayed headings in that view can be set differently for different parts of your outline.
For example, I keep both my shopping list and my list of recipes in the same outline file, under two headings (shopping and recipes). The shopping heading has subheadings (grocery, household, etc.) but I just keep a flat list of recipes under the recipes heading. I have OmniOutliner set up to display both the headings and subheadings for the shopping list but only the headings for the recipe section. Basically I just want to be able to jump around to what I think are major sections. I keep recipes and the shopping list in the same file so that I can generate a single printout quickly to take to the store (filtering the whole document by unchecked item).
TAO (the Mac software, unrelated to “TAO Notes”) also has this kind of feature. You can kind of simulate it in Ecco.
—Chris
Jiggernaut wrote:
>
>The third approaches that Chris delineates (single pane outliners with an adjunct
>view showing major headings/topics) is exactly what I have been searching for, with
>no success, for quite some time. Word 2003 has this in a way with the “Document Map”
>pane, but I it lacking in many regards.
>
>Does anyone now of a program that will allow
>you to do what Chris describes: essentially a flat-out line as the main pane and a
>second pain that automatically creates a table of contents/heading list on the other
>pane so that you can quickly jump from heading to heading within the outline?