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Celtx -- Anyone aware of this program?
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Posted by Gary Carson
Oct 13, 2012 at 02:42 PM
Outliner 4D is basically a combination of a traditional outliner with an index card view. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t work that well in practice. The outliner’s OK, but the index card view is unreadable because the program tries to cram everything together to fit onto the screen. What you end up with are a lot of very thin vertical lines of text that only contain the first few words of a scene description. It’s almost impossible to read vertical text. You can expand the index card view, zooming in on particular cards, but there’s no way to get a universal overview of the entire outline. That’s a deal-killer as far as I’m concerned and it boggles my mind that the designers would make such a goofy design decision.
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 13, 2012 at 05:06 PM
I’ve watched the Outline 4D tutorial videos and installed the software (only could run it in XP mode), and my initial impression is quite good. It does feel a bit like a combination of Inspiration (the outliner), Storybook (the tracking of properties, plot lines), and TreeSheets (the Timeline View).
I may not want to write my entire dissertation in it, but it might be better than Storybook for organising the “plot lines” and developing a detailed sentence outline. It’s part of a very small club of outliners that can do inline notes (UV Outliner, Inspiration and ??), so it might be good for adding some flesh onto an initial outline developed in a more basic outliner (perhaps even imported as RTF).
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 13, 2012 at 10:44 PM
I’ve been putting Outline 4D through its paces (they only give you 5 days to trial it). In many ways I’m really impressed with it. The ability to add inline text in the outliner alone makes it stand out (alongside UV Outliner and Inspiration), and it has multiple sophisticated views yo go with it (headings only, headings and inline text, only inline text, or custom views).
The ability to colour the outline in by hierarchical levels is also a unique feature (I only know of Natara Bonsai, and perhaps BrainStorm, sort of, that can do it). The timeline or index card view is nothing short of revolutionary in my view, especially the Scale Tool. Yes, the vertical rendering that kicks in when you zoom out may not be ideal, but the overall concept is still very cool.
I haven’t yet tested the Tracking feature but the ability to tag the index cards and then display the linkages to the tags along a horizontal view under the “timeline” view is also ingenious.
BUT I have to agree with Gary that while in theory all this sounds great, there is something about the execution that gets in the way of focusing on the writing. Despite the various zooming and scaling tools, I just found I spent too much time trying to get the view right, rather than working on the actual outline. With this much effort I could just as well construct a perfectly viewable cork board in TreeSheets and I could view it simultaneously with the outline, rather than having to switch back and forth.
Also, Outline 4D has problems running in Win7. I need to run it in XP mode, and even then I had a few crashes when I changed some settings and then wanted to switch from outline to timeline view, with scary messages like this one:
“Exception thrown in destructor
(f:\dd\vctools\vc71 ibs\ship\atlmfc\src\mfc\winfrm.cpp:14 2)
Encountered an improper argument.”
Plus, it’s rather expensive for what it is. The cheapest price I found was USD79 (and it’s USD94.99 on their own website).
So I’m really torn. While I’d be interested in giving it a go, I’m not sure I am willing to entrust all my dissertation outlining to a software that gives you these sorts of error messages a few hours into the trial.
This whole experience made me download Inspiration 9 for the n-th time, to see whether I could put up with its font rendering after all, as I really need an outliner with inline notes that is stable enough. Then I could just replicate Outline 4D’s timeline view in TreeSheets.
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 14, 2012 at 01:16 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>The ability to colour the outline in by
>hierarchical levels is also a unique feature (I only know of Natara Bonsai, and
>perhaps BrainStorm, sort of, that can do it).
I’m not sure how I missed this before but Inspiration can also do different hierarchy levels in different coloured font, just like Bonsai (in Outline 4D it’s the background of the hierarchy level that can be coloured).
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 14, 2012 at 04:19 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>[Outline 4D is] part of a very small club of
>outliners that can do inline notes (UV Outliner, Inspiration and ??), so it might be
>good for adding some flesh onto an initial outline developed in a more basic outliner
>(perhaps even imported as RTF).
Probably the most notorious such software is Notemap http://www.casesoft.com/notemap/index.asp It’s no longer developed, but it’s stable as far as I know, though I have not tried it under Windows 7. I believe Cassius has had a nasty experience with Notemap using note text, so regular backing up is strongly recommended.
Another software that can handle big chunks of text and complex hierarchies is Maxthink http://www.maxthink.org Like Brainstorm, its roots are in DOS and this shows a bit. It defaults to a two level view like Brainstorm’s but can show more if you want it to. It does not support clones (namesakes) but it does have many ways to reorganise entries, making it too a powerful tool for bringing order to chaotic notes. One of its strong points is the very good export to Word.
Disclaimer: I’m posting the info above mostly for reference.