I'm not a big fan of OO, but seems worth mentioning this important update in this forum:

https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omnioutliner-3-for-ios-is-here

Thank you for the tip. I use OO frequently on iPad, so it was worth getting the upgrade.

However on iPhone the app just does not fit the modern mode for outliners. To get started on an outline with Dynalist or others it's one or two taps and then start typing. With OO3 it's 6 or more and then you have to fiddle with the formatting so the text isn't slewed off the screen. And forget OO3 on iPhone X -- it freezes, the keyboard won't display when text is selected. It's a mess. It looks like OmniGroup has lost their way and is designing what pleases them but not what the market is looking for. No one needs an iPhone app that takes as much time to start up as a desktop app.

Luhmann wrote:

I'm not a big fan of OO, but seems worth mentioning this important
update in this forum:

https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omnioutliner-3-for-ios-is-here

How long did you try it?
I installed it today (on iPhone X) and so far no negatives.
3 taps to create new outline - UX is well thought out
No freezes - will report back if that happens

Not sure if I have the initial release - OmniGroup, to give them credit, are pretty good about patching issues regularly

Paul Korm wrote:

Thank you for the tip. I use OO frequently on iPad, so it was worth
getting the upgrade.

However on iPhone the app just does not fit the modern mode for
outliners. To get started on an outline with Dynalist or others it's
one or two taps and then start typing. With OO3 it's 6 or more and
then you have to fiddle with the formatting so the text isn't slewed off
the screen. And forget OO3 on iPhone X -- it freezes, the keyboard
won't display when text is selected. It's a mess. It looks like
OmniGroup has lost their way and is designing what pleases them but not
what the market is looking for. No one needs an iPhone app that takes
as much time to start up as a desktop app.

Luhmann wrote:
I'm not a big fan of OO, but seems worth mentioning this important
>update in this forum:
>
>https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omnioutliner-3-for-ios-is-here

I've put it on the phone's home page just to keep giving it a chance - since I use OO5 on the desktop quite a bit, I really want OO3 to work. I cannot start a document in fewer than 5 clicks. Setting lines to checkbox mode render then impossible to edit -- the checkbox is slewed to the right nearly 2/3 of the way across the screen. Yes, Omni are good at listening. But still, a new app should be tested and it should do basic things well.

One thing is sure. I cannot do outline processing on an iPad. Just seems to involve too many ways to screw up.

I really have trouble with the idea of swallowing $90 for Mac + iOS outliner apps, especially when the iOS one is in such woeful shape (and $10 more than it would have cost a few days ago if one had bought the previous version, with free upgrade). It's a shame that outliners like Tree have disappeared, apps like Opal were never updated with features after they came out, and products like Dynalist and Workflowy don't do columns (or image attachment? not sure).

So much in this cross-platform space is half-baked and overpriced, it's sad.

Yes, Outlinely and Cloud Outliner are the only two reasonably priced cross-platform outliners (in AppleWorld), although you could do worse than check out Scrivener's outlining abilities, which are actually very powerful.

I did try using Todoist as an outliner for a while (it's quite a capable outliner, as it happens), but found the various tricks required to format it/remove checkboxes just slightly too annoying in the long run. But for those with slightly more patience, it might serve - not least because it's got a very good tagging system and a powerful search function.

The new iOS version of OmniOutliner is slightly better than the old one (I only use the Essentials version, myself), but it's not a big step forward; all the real goodies are reserved for Pro users. What also strikes me as seriously strange is that OmniOutliner still hasn't made up ground on rivals like Outlinely - you can't, for example, do something as simple as strike out text; nor can you selectively add checkboxes to specific items - either all of them have a checkbox, or none (this isn't true in the desktop app, by the way; but as soon as you sync with the iOS app, your individual checkbox settings are nuked and everything is given a checkbox. Now just how professional is that? Please note I did raise this issue a few months ago; a pleasant but "neutral" response was received).

Bear does have outlining on its roadmap, apparently...

Of course there are some amusing workarounds.

Editorial for iOS is a good outliner. But you need an equivalent on the Mac to turn it into a viable cross-platform option. FoldingText will do the job very nicely. In principle, SmartDown will also do the job, but hasn't been updated for quite a while (mind you, neither has FoldingText, although there is now a variant of the latter for Atom).

Findings on the Mac is a very good outliner, although dedicated (alas, despite my efforts to persuade the developer to open it out) exclusively to science experiments. I don't think Findings for iOS is much of an outliner, however - but don't take my word for it, I haven't used it.

Agenda is an outliner, although not a multi-level one (well, not quite true - you could argue it's a two-level outliner, in that you can expand/collapse categories in the left-hand navigation bar; you can also fold notes in each project from the title line). This should be useful once Agenda for iOS appears.

It surprises me how few Markdown editors support folding: you'd have thought the slight interface tweaks necessary to view/hide headings at different levels would be fairly minor (but then IANAP). FoldingText still does this best, by the way, in that it layers folding by hierarchical heading (so top-level headings will assume second-level headings are part of the text block they should fold, until they reach the next top-level heading).

Another folding Markdown app is Write! (https://wri.tt which is rather good, but doesn't do headings as well as FoldingText. But it does fold headings! However, there isn't an iOS version (although you can use it to complement Editorial on iOS). It's a very nice app; one of the few that supports an always-on-top setting, so it's ideal for making notes on stuff (and also has a special "compact" mode for precisely this scenario). Keep-It is one of the only other apps I can think of that does always-on-top, but sadly it doesn't fold.

Finally, the latest versions of TiddlyWiki fold each Tiddler (if you switch the function on). TiddlyWiki is, of course, very broadly cross-platform, although it's best to use something like Qwine if you're running it on iOS.

Editorial/iOS does outlines well? Interesting.

If Bear gets decent outlining I'll take a second look at it. But right now, for my non-shoebox file writing, I'm pretty content with Ulysses (which I get at a slight discount for having been a current customer at the time they switched to their subscription model).

FoldingText seems both interesting and overkill for me. But I had an old version of TaskPaper and decided to see how it's progressed so the other day I paid for the upgrade and will start playing with it soon. Unfortunately, since I bought/upgraded directly from the developer I won't be able to save files directly to iCloud (and thus be able to use an iOS app like TaskMator with it).

Since OmniOutliner Essentials came out for Mac last year I've used it for some notetaking but I'm really not in love with it and so I don't want to spend the extra money on Pro. (For years before that I was using Opal, which still works but is not being updated.)

For long-form writing I purchased a license for the desktop version of Ginkgo. I like it, but its current beta-ish state has me a little concerned about stability and overall usability so I'm not migrating into it yet either.

So I'm still hunting around.

Also, desktop Gingko doesn't have a search function - d'oh!

But you can use Dropbox with Taskpaper/Taskmator - that works fine. And the latest Taskpaper is a very good outliner - it's just a shame that Taskmator doesn't yet support folding. Guess what? Editorial can act as a Taskpaper client, too, and *does* support folding!

Ain't life sweet?

Gingoko dev actually posted about this today in the community.gingkoapp.com forums, saying search is "on the list" of things to add (I wish he'd have said it was at the top of that list), and that undo/redo is an important feature he will be prioritizing.

It therefore very much feels like the 0.8x release it is, and for that reason I cannot devote much time or serious writing to it. But it's an exciting and unique product I could see myself using in time, with bugfixes and added features. I wanted to support it so I was glad to register the app.

satis wrote:

I really have trouble with the idea of swallowing $90 for Mac + iOS
outliner apps, especially when the iOS one is in such woeful shape (and
$10 more than it would have cost a few days ago if one had bought the
previous version, with free upgrade).

I just noticed that prices went up (this year?). Essentials for Mac and iOS are now $19.99 each, and the Pro version is $99.99 on the Mac (insane) and $49.99 on iOS, with no bundle pricing. (I know that Apple doesn't permit bundling, but Ulysses is able to get away with it by including full iOS access if you subscribe to the Mac app, either in the Mac App Store, or as part of the SetApp.com subscription suite.) I own OO Pro for the Mac, and was thinking of getting OO Essentials for iOS, which used to be $9.99, but the price increase stopped me. And if Omni has upgrades any time soon for the Mac app I probably won't upgrade.

It appears that Omni has decided, with little competition at the high end and with outline apps being a small market niche, that they'll milk the app's pricing while keeping it essentially in maintenance mode. Very disappointing.

I recently came across the following review of OO from an author who also uses Scrivener and Ulysses, and the review looked to see if he could integrate OO into his workflow so he could use it with Ulysses instead of using the integrated outlining in Scrivener.

https://chrisrosser.net/posts/2018/08/11/review-omnioutliner/

What surprised me most was how apparently useful the outlining mode is in Scrivener. And the conclusion to the review was that OmniOutliner (under the *old* price) was too much for what it offered.

I found this very interesting. I also own Scrivener, but have used it only a couple of times for some longer-form writing, but I may look into its outlining capabilities now.

I have in general dumped omni. The prices were getting too ridiculous. I have version 3 of OO, but this will be my last version. I do all my outlining now on Dynalist, I also use Dynalist (very effectively, I might add) as an omnifocus replacement. I’m on a slow consolidation of all the apps I use.

The hardest subscription to tackle will be setapp!

Scrivener is awesome. The companion Scapple is a great example of how creative simplicity can sometime surpass complexity. It doesn't have many features, but it's a great tool for shotgunning ideas.

I don't use either at the moment, but I'm probably a fool not to. They are great tools.

Ulysses was my favorite editor for a long time, but the one-library-to-rule-them-all concept bugs me. I like to have a per-project dumpster, either a folder or a Devonthink database, rather than one huge overstuffed hall closet. Ulysses on the iPad is very close to the same as on the Mac. They did an outstanding job of porting the desktop to the iPad.

The linked article didn't mention my favorite Scrivener feature, which I think is called locked outline mode. Put the left hand editor window in outline mode and the right window in document mode, and click the lock icon (I think it's a lock) to turn on locked outlining.

The left window will display text and synopsis, and the right window will follow what you click on the left side, accessing the related document.

You can save that setup as a stored layout, so it's just a click or two to bring it back.

I wish I could make some changes in the way Scrivener works. I wouldn't sacrifice a single capability, but there are different ways to get the same results. Ulysses always fascinated me because so much of Scrivener's power was there even if it didn't appear to be.

Unfortunately, if I could mold Scrivener to my fondest wishes, the Scrivener faithful would want to lynch me. Probably not a bad thing I'm not calling the shots at L&L.

Actually, I think I'll have another go with Scrivener.

I recently came across the following review of OO from an author who
also uses Scrivener and Ulysses, and the review looked to see if he
could integrate OO into his workflow so he could use it with Ulysses
instead of using the integrated outlining in Scrivener.

https://chrisrosser.net/posts/2018/08/11/review-omnioutliner/

What surprised me most was how apparently useful the outlining mode is
in Scrivener. And the conclusion to the review was that OmniOutliner
(under the *old* price) was too much for what it offered.

I found this very interesting. I also own Scrivener, but have used it
only a couple of times for some longer-form writing, but I may look into
its outlining capabilities now.

Well, I started to comment about OO, and got sidetracked.

Boiled down to save space, I've always found it to be a powerful tool, but with rough edges.

For instance, reading that article, I tried a pop-up column for character POV. It works, but barks back a little.

You can easily manage to get the cursor in the pop-up field without getting the gray triangle to access the pop-up choices. The cure is to click on a different line and then click back in the pop-up field.

You can add a new pop-up choice by typing whatever you want. Init a menu with Larry, Moe, and Curly, and you can add Shep on the fly. That's nice, but if you type "Moe" by hand, it's a different Moe than the defined Moe from the inspector's value. Now you have two Moe's in the popup menu.

Things like that have always plagued OO. I currently use it as both an outliner and a lightweight, per project checklist. I like it because entry is fast, but wish the rough edges would get fixed.

Amontillado wrote:

Scrivener is awesome.

If you look at Omni's development schedule, releases, and topic on its podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-omni-show/id1308555146 virtually all the company's attention is on OmniFocus, with most of the rest on OmniPlan. After that probably comes OmniGraffle. That's where the money is, so I don't begrudge them for focusing on products that sell best, but so little attention is given to OO that it frustrates.

As a devoted outliner who uses OO on the Mac (albeit not with delight) I still look back fondly at Dave Winer's MORE, written for pre-OSX Macs in Pascal in the 80s, and which was bombproof and rocket-fast. I am still gobsmacked that decades later no current outliners today implement MORE's use of dynamic copies ("clones") of outline nodes.

satis wrote:

I am still
gobsmacked that decades later no current outliners today implement
MORE's use of dynamic copies ("clones") of outline nodes.

satis, I share your gobsmackedness. Been suggesting clones in OO in various forums, including Omni's, for years.

I seem to remember that one of the virtues of Brainstorm, which had quite a fanbase on this forum at one time, was that it featured clones. (Windows, I think).

Not, I hasten to add, that it's still available (as far as I know).

In fact, Brainstorm is still available:

http://brainstormsw.com/buy.php

I don't think it has received an update since the new "owner" took it over. I spoke with him a couple of times many years ago. He had some ideas for it, but I think health problems derailed them.

The more useful piece of software available on that site is the Diary Generator, which creates a hierarchical plain text file of the days of any year you tell it to. It's free, but is only for Windows.

Steve Z.

Thanks, Steve. If I were still using Windows, I'd have conducted a more thorough search.