single pane outliners for Macs

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Posted by ndodge
Mar 12, 2008 at 04:44 PM

Related to my last two posts, I guess. I envision using a really good single pane outliner (if I can find one) so much that I would consider getting a used Mac just for that purpose. Given that, if folks can list off good single pane outliners for the Mac maybe I can play around with the applications somehow on a borrowed Mac long enough to decide if it’d be worth it to get a Mac.

Posted by Chris Thompson
Mar 12, 2008 at 09:55 PM

Here’s a list of the major single pane outliners for the Mac along with some comments about each one:

OmniOutliner
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/pro/
Probably the strongest combination of features and usability. Very good support for columns (can be used as a hierarchical spreadsheet like Ecco, but with auto-recalculating math; no Ecco-style views however, that’s slated for the next version), rich support for styles (can be used directly as a word processor to generate print output), hoisting, adjunct sections view (depth controllable by section), line comments and auto-hiding, fully programmable through AppleScript.

TAO (no relation to TAO Notes for Windows)
http://artec-software.com/products/neo/en_index.html
Most features of any single-pane outliner I’ve seen in current production. Cloning! Hoisting, filtering. A little less Mac-like than the others (lots of square buttons, Windows-style interface). Graphical document map sidebar. Not programmable yet.

Opal
http://a-sharp.com/opal/
I don’t have a lot of experience with this one, but easy to use, clean UI. Developer posts here.

Aquaminds Notetaker
http://www.aquaminds.com/product.jsp
Sister product to Circus Ponies Notebook (they shared the same code base for OS X’s predecessor, NeXT OS, and have a similar feel, though they have diverged). Uses a notebook metaphor which will be initially confusing to pure single-pane outliner users, but it definitely is a single-pane outliner (basically it adds the ability to split your single outline into sections). Tab views. Live indexes (for instance, you might use it to jump to any page of your outline that mentions a client’s name). Rudimentary database functionality. Has workgroup features for notebook sharing.

Circus Ponies Notebook
http://www.circusponies.com/
Similar user interface to Aquaminds Notetaker. About to be updated to version 3.0. Closest thing to Microsoft OneNote on OS X, but designed with an outliner structure as the fundamental building block (which in my view, makes a huge difference in usability; OneNote is not really usable as a single pane outliner for power users and writers except in a crude sense). Most of the same features as Notetaker, with a few aimed at closer integration to other OS X programs.

Those are the big ones. I rely on OmniOutliner Professional and find it generally indispensable, not only for writing, but also for a variety of other things for which I used to use Ecco. If you make a living writing books or structured documents like patents, it’s worth looking into these tools… OO for me would justify the cost of a Mac. None of these programs are particularly resource intensive or demanding.

Also worth noting, OmniOutliner 4 has started development. The developer has promised to bring in features that were developed for OmniFocus and OmniPlan, including filtering and different column sets per section of an outline, which should bring OmniOutliner almost to feature parity with Ecco on those kind of data-oriented features. As a writing tool of course it’s already superior to Ecco… once you start using the sections pane and hoisting, you’ll have a hard time finding how you lived without them.

—Chris

ndodge wrote:
>Related to my last two posts, I guess. I envision using a really good single pane
>outliner (if I can find one) so much that I would consider getting a used Mac just for
>that purpose. Given that, if folks can list off good single pane outliners for the Mac
>maybe I can play around with the applications somehow on a borrowed Mac long enough to
>decide if it’d be worth it to get a Mac.

Posted by ndodge
Mar 15, 2008 at 04:17 AM

Thanks Chris, this was very helpful. I may try out Omni on a used Mac. Thing is is that I’d need two—one for at work and one for at home - I don’t want to always lug a laptop back and forth and sometimes I need my PC laptop so I don’t want to have to lug two. I just discovered a neat use for parallel views in ecco, so for the time being ecco is keeping me entertained. But it sounds like Omni might be a great ecco replacement and more which is still being developed. Not sure I want to deal with syncing 4 computers though. Syncing two is painful enough, as syncing software just does not seem to work entirely robustly (foldershare, beinsync, powerfolder, etc). But getting two older macs used might not be as expensive as I thought, as you mentioned, Omni doesn’t seem like too demanding of an app—If I can do writing, use Omni, do a little surfing and email writing that’s all I probably need to do on the Mac.

Posted by Chris Thompson
Mar 15, 2008 at 10:03 PM

Be sure to give the others a whirl as well (especially TAO which is pretty good competition for OmniOutliner). One other program also worth mentioning is Scrivener. It’s a dual-pane outliner, but with the interesting feature that if you select multiple nodes, the display collapses them all into one and you can edit them together, which is vaguely like editing a single pane outline and quite similar to the old DOS program GrandView’s document view. Scrivener has become quite popular lately among authors. It’s also one of the few outliners which supports footnotes and marginalia directly. (You can of course define styles in OO for those things and then after exporting transform them into whatever desired output you wish when bringing your documents into a word processor for final markup.) Scrivener is here:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

One thing to also keep in mind is that modern Macs can run Windows programs in a “virtual machine” (i.e. at the same time they’re running Mac OS, with no slowdown… in fact, you can even set it up so Windows programs appear on the OS X dock (its equivalent of the taskbar) and behave basically like OS X apps), so would be possible to get away with just one laptop at work and at home, if you really found you liked the platform.

If you’re looking for a good program for cross-platform file synchronization (other than just carrying around a USB key with your documents on it and plugging it into whatever machine you’re working on at the time, or keeping all your files on a networked file server accessible via VPN), take a look at Unison:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
It’s a free piece of software developed by some academics. A lot of people swear by it.

—Chris

ndodge wrote:
>Thanks Chris, this was very helpful. I may try out Omni on a used Mac. Thing is is that I’d
>need two—one for at work and one for at home - I don’t want to always lug a laptop back and
>forth and sometimes I need my PC laptop so I don’t want to have to lug two. I just
>discovered a neat use for parallel views in ecco, so for the time being ecco is keeping
>me entertained. But it sounds like Omni might be a great ecco replacement and more
>which is still being developed. Not sure I want to deal with syncing 4 computers
>though. Syncing two is painful enough, as syncing software just does not seem to work
>entirely robustly (foldershare, beinsync, powerfolder, etc). But getting two
>older macs used might not be as expensive as I thought, as you mentioned, Omni doesn’t
>seem like too demanding of an app—If I can do writing, use Omni, do a little surfing and
>email writing that’s all I probably need to do on the Mac.

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