Outlinely in action

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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2017 at 09:33 AM

Well, Outlinely is gradually taking over from Bear as my everyday to-do manager. Currently I store lists of stuff to do in Bear, then put the most urgent stuff into an outline in Outlinely.

But the redundancy means I’m gradually moving over to the latter exclusively.

I love Bear for its sheer elegance, plus the many thoughtful details like the outstanding hybrid preview, highlighting of search results in previews AND body text - the list goes on.

But Outlinely has two hugely useful features for task management: proper outlining/folding, plus the extreme ease with which you can move each section of text using a simple drag-and-drop panel on the right-hand side of the editor window. The first feature makes subtasks a piece of cake. The second feature means you can easily move completed tasks down to the bottom of the pile as soon as you’ve finished them.

Unlike Bear, you do have to explicitly tell Outlinely to save changes to files. But I can put up with that. Synchronisation between platforms is fast in both apps.

Outlinely for iOS still doesn’t handle tags properly (although the desktop version does). Conversely, Outlinely does have folders, which Bear doesn’t. Personally, I like having both, and prefer the Outlinely for Mac approach to handling tags over the Ulysses approach (you can simply click a tag in Outlinely to see all relevant entries - in Ulysses, you have to define a filter).

Them’s my thoughts to date!

All the best,
Bill

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 18, 2017 at 06:10 PM

I knew I’d forgotten to mention the other feature that makes Outlinely a genuine competitor to Ulysses and Bear. You can open more than one window on your database, which is extremely convenient if you’re managing tasks (easy to shift stuff around from one folder to another).

Once the tagging is up to par (ideally by using a Quiver-a-like system with folders on one tab and tags on another), Outlinely will be seriously formidable.

Posted by Luhmann
Jan 19, 2017 at 10:31 PM

I find that tagging in Outlinely and Bear work very differently: In Outlinely tagging works to separate out individual outline items from within a single document and it gives you the ability to quickly filter out those elements. (As does Workflowy.) Bear, on the other hand, lets you use in-text tags to identify documents and lets you quickly filter out all documents which share certain tags. Bear also lets you create sub-tags and highlight documents which share the same root-level tags. For this reason, and others, I find it useful to use both Outlinely and Bear. I use bear for long-form writing and quick notes, while I use Outlinely for brainstorming, lists, and organizing large chunks of text (such as reading notes) which need to be given structure. The one thing I really like about outlinely which I which Bear would support is the ability to quickly highlight text (using the ::text:: format). Unfortunately the Bear developers seem uninterested in adding any kind of highlighting features.

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