Amontillado wrote:

... or shift-enter to
start a top above the current entry...

I think he meant, "...or start a topic above the current entry..."

He's probably entering his dotage. I say we should forgive him the occasional typo.

I have maintained active licenses for OmniOutliner since the days it came pre-installed on Macs. I used it regularly for many years but recently came to the realization that: 1) I use the software to outline documents for export to other software (Word, Pages) and I am not making use of the extensive formatting offered with OO. In fact, the formatting palette and options are more of a hindrance than a help. 2) I'm not using the automation available with OO. I just purchased Outlinely last week and have been happy with it so far.

In my opinion, if you're not using the Applescript/Javascript engine and you're not making your documents beautiful with all of the formatting available in OO, then it's difficult to justify the (IMO) rather steep price.
Steve

Outlinely has been on my radar for a couple of years, as I like the way they reimplemented the look of Dynalist in a Mac/iOS app whose data I control. I'm not fully on-board with it because it seems to pretty much be on life-support itself, barely updated aside from a small flurry of updates in the summer of 2018.

I'm currently defaulting to OmniOutliner on the Mac, but for cross-platform sharing I use Cloud Outliner Pro, whose Mac/iOS apps I picked up for a song a couple of years ago. It's pretty basic and I do not enjoy the limited fonts and color options but it's solid.

I wish TaskPaper were more powerful.

I wish NeO had more bugfixes and had an iOS component.

I miss Tree on the Mac very much. (Especially since Gingko seems pretty much to have imploded right after splitting into stagnant separate online subscription and desktop app offerings.)

For Mac/iOS cross-platform, the main players seem to be OmniOutliner ($150 for both apps), Outlinely ($72 for lifetime subscription), Cloud Outliner Pro (just $13 total), and TaskPaper + Taskmator/Taskmator ($30-ish, though the Mac app is also part of the SetApp subscription).

@MadaboutDana, are you using the latest OmniOutliner version? I don't find it slow at all.

And @steve-rogers, when you refer to its "rather steep price"--if you don't need automation, it costs $20.

Bob

Bob,
That’s a good point. OmniOutliner Essential is ten bucks. Essential lacks other functionality besides formatting and automation, such as text folding, but it is a functional product. Wish I had examined my needs more carefully before spending money on the Pro version.
Steve

steve-rogers wrote:

Bob,
That’s a good point. OmniOutliner Essential is ten bucks.
Essential lacks other functionality besides formatting and automation,
such as text folding, but it is a functional product. Wish I had
examined my needs more carefully before spending money on the Pro
version.
Steve

Sorry, $20.

Hmmm - not sure what happened to my last post. Hopefully this isn't a duplicate.

I decided to buy Sheetplanner.

I don't see much I can do with OmniOutliner that I can't do with Sheetplanner, using Sheetplanner as an outliner. I can set styles on the levels of an outline. I can filter and hoist/unhoist. Sheetplanner doesn't have tags, but neither does OO. In both cases, that isn't a killer, since you can add columns.

As I outline, I can also get a draft timeline.

Sheetplanner will export to OPML, which Pandoc will convert to docx. Just like OO, I can go from an outline to a word processing document. The document ends up with proper heading styles, matching the levels of the outline.

Sheetplanner will also export to CSV, which Aeon Timeline will import. If I include columns for participant and observer, Aeon's grid view will end up filled out, too.

Sheetplanner's data is stored in JSON files. Easy to extract. If Sheetplanner goes away (I hope not) I can still get my data.

In the future, when Sheetplanner gains repeating tasks, I could see letting my OmniFocus subscription expire.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. I'm just starting to use Sheetplanner, but it looks very nice for my usage.

Amontillado,

Thank you. This is one hell of an endorsement and SheetPlanner is only going to get better. The roadmap is incredible.

Cheers!
Peter

Amontillado wrote:

Hmmm - not sure what happened to my last post. Hopefully this isn't a
duplicate.

I decided to buy Sheetplanner.

I don't see much I can do with OmniOutliner that I can't do with
Sheetplanner, using Sheetplanner as an outliner. I can set styles on the
levels of an outline. I can filter and hoist/unhoist. Sheetplanner
doesn't have tags, but neither does OO. In both cases, that isn't a
killer, since you can add columns.

As I outline, I can also get a draft timeline.

Sheetplanner will export to OPML, which Pandoc will convert to docx.
Just like OO, I can go from an outline to a word processing document.
The document ends up with proper heading styles, matching the levels of
the outline.

Sheetplanner will also export to CSV, which Aeon Timeline will import.
If I include columns for participant and observer, Aeon's grid view will
end up filled out, too.

Sheetplanner's data is stored in JSON files. Easy to extract. If
Sheetplanner goes away (I hope not) I can still get my data.

In the future, when Sheetplanner gains repeating tasks, I could see
letting my OmniFocus subscription expire.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. I'm just starting to use
Sheetplanner, but it looks very nice for my usage.

Is it possible to turn off the checkboxes in SheetPlanner? If so, I can't figure it out.

Drewster,
Yes. Click in a topic cell, open the inspector and there is a setting under column for checkbox, pie or hidden.
Thanks,
Peter


Drewster wrote:

Is it possible to turn off the checkboxes in SheetPlanner? If so, I
can't figure it out.

SheetPlanner wrote:

Drewster,
Yes. Click in a topic cell, open the inspector and there is a setting
under column for checkbox, pie or hidden.

Thank you! I'm embarrassed I missed that.

Drewster,
Thanks for being a customer.
Peter

Drewster wrote:

SheetPlanner wrote:

>Drewster,
>Yes. Click in a topic cell, open the inspector and there is a setting
>under column for checkbox, pie or hidden.


Thank you! I'm embarrassed I missed that.

Looks like not only Omni Outliner is on Life support but the whole Omni Group company.

They have fired 10 developers. Explains their huge price increase.


https://inessential.com/2020/03/31/looking_for_work

I doubt the correlation. The U.S. (and global) economy is heading straight down; unemployment in the U.S. increased 6 million in one week, and some predict it might reach 30% within months. Not the best environment for selling discretionary software.

Lothar Scholz wrote:

Looks like not only Omni Outliner is on Life support but the whole Omni
Group company.

They have fired 10 developers. Explains their huge price increase.


https://inessential.com/2020/03/31/looking_for_work

I also doubt there is a correlation between the price increase and the trouble they are currently going through. However, is that trouble caused, in part, by the current global economic situation?

I am not convinced that would need to be the case. I could also see things going the other way around: most knowledge workers find themselves working from home, a vast majority of them are still employed, and find themselves in a situation, where they need to be even more organized in order not to loose their sanity, and they turn to OmniFocus in greater numbers, because what is $50 to a knowledge worker, if that makes you more productive and helps you keep your sanity?

‑Alex

Paul Korm wrote:

I doubt the correlation. The U.S. (and global) economy is heading
straight down; unemployment in the U.S. increased 6 million in one week,
and some predict it might reach 30% within months. Not the best
environment for selling discretionary software.

I fear the Omni Group has run out of steam in recent years.

Listen, I hate to say that. I love small, independent developers, and being able to use OmniOutliner was one of the things I most looked forward to when switching over to Apple.

But OmniFocus and OmniOutliner aren’t the glowing testaments to developer ingenuity they used to be. Instead, they’re increasingly looking like outmoded, clunky legacy apps. Which is a real shame. I reluctantly abandoned OmniFocus when they did the last major update, because I couldn’t believe they’d made the iOS version as clunky as it is. More recently, they’ve jacked their prices up to truly Adobe-worthy levels, which consoled me for abandoning OmniFocus.

I’ve never felt ready to shell out the significant amount of cash required for other apps like OmniGraffle or OmniPlanner; it would be interesting to know where they stand under the onslaught of so many recent alternatives.

It’s a shame. They showed the way for an awful lot of developers, but then appeared to lose the spark themselves.

Cheers,
Bill

Adobe-worth prices? No, I don't think so yet. I've probably spent maybe $150 on OmniFocus base and upgrades over the last 10 years. No where near the cost of my minimalist "photographers" subscriptions to Adobe.

Anyway, I have quit and divorced OmniFocus in favor of some shiny thing many times. OF --> Todist --> OF --> Things --> Ayoa/Dropbox --> OF --> Back to Todoist --> OF.

And on and on. Besides the slog of migrating between planners, I just keep finding OF features such as perspectives, forecast view, and the revamped tags (formerly contexts) really hard to replicate elsewhere. I hate the iOS/iPad OS/WatchOS apps -- but their ubiquity is useful. Although the OF web app is a total joke and already seems to be abandonware.

It's all situational isn't it? OF is tolerable for me, bad for Bill, etc. etc.

Omni updated its roadmap today, and as with the last roadmap post it neglected to mention OmniOutliner once. OO is so neglected that to the posed question "With major new upgrades to your apps on the way, should I buy them today?" the answer, "If you just want to get work done rather than worrying about timing, your best option might be to purchase a subscription!" ignores the fact that OO is not a subscription app.

It's clear where the company's focus is, especially as they've essentially stopped OO development after increasing pricing to $150 for unlocked the unlocked version offering Mac/iOS file sync/sharing.

Sadly, as a user of OO and Mac/iOS there's no better alternative right now, but the evident abandonment does not make me comfortable.

https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omni-roadmap-2020-july-update

OmniOutliner has got some great features, but I’d put a couple of other apps ahead at the present time.

Outlinely would be one – except, alas, that it appears to have gone moribund. But Workflowy and Dynalist are two others; once the mobile Workflowy apps have caught up with the web/desktop developments (columns), they’ll blow OO right out of the water.

But I wouldn’t care to have to transfer a lot of OO files to another platform – I feel for you there!

I dropped using all Omni apps a while ago when the prices went through the roof. I had OO when it came free with my mac and it was my everything app. I paid for upgrades, but over the years they killed it in how they developed it. The styling caused many users hours of frustration and in the end I stopped using it because of that. I now use Scrivener on macOS and iOS. It's not the same, but does what I need to to rather well, as does Bear.

I have owned alll Omni apps for both Mac and iOs at some point, but stopped upgrading them when they started reaching stratospheric prices, like others have mentioned here.
I’m very happy now with TickTick as my OF replacement, but the thing that makes me stay with OO is the column feature, which is quite unique as far as I know.

Skywatcher wrote:

the thing that makes me stay with OO is the column feature, which is quite
unique as far as I know.

Those columns are handy. I haven't done it in a real project yet - and may not ever - but it's easy to go from OO to an Aeon Timeline. Add columns for start, end, participant, and observer, export to CSV, then import the CSV to Aeon. The grid of people-to-events gets filled out automatically.

I still like OO but I've stopped using it. I tend to put too many levels in outlines, because I'll think of a detail or sidelight.

My current fixation with Curio solves that. When I want to write an outline, I use Curio. The Organizer (the hierarchical navigation pane on the left) and the main edit window, what Curio calls an idea space, make a workable two pane outliner for me. An outline entry ends up being a few notes flying in close formation and I don't need all those levels.

Naturally, you can do other things with Curio, too.

If I could figure out a good replacement for OmniFocus, I'd probably move away from it. App-specific cloud syncing kind of bugs me. It shouldn't, I guess, but it does.

Simon wrote:

I dropped using all Omni apps a while ago when the prices went through
the roof.

They did some sort of cost/benefit analysis of their non-core apps ( everything but OmniFocus, and to a lesser extent OmniGraffle) that resulted in the decision to dramatically increase prices (and reduce sales, and support, and development)... and then this March they let go of a significant minority of employees.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/03/31/omni-group-layoffs/

Amontillado wrote:

Skywatcher wrote:
>the thing that makes me stay with OO is the column feature, which is
quite
>unique as far as I know.

Those columns are handy.

Agreed. Unique, powerful feature. Lots of clunkiness elsewhere (like theming), but overall it's a polished app and I do a lot of writing inside it to this day. But I worry about continued support, let alone advancement.

I was going through my old files and found a MACWORLD pdf from 1993 which had an ad from Inspiration, showing off its outliner-to-mindmap-and-back feature and I'm still a little shocked that all these years later we never got this in a modern app. Or ever got cloning copied from Dave winer's MORE implementation of it form 1986. (Well, that dev did put it in Frontier years later, but he never properly marketed that app, which wasn't a real outliner anyway.)

Mutter. Mutter.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but the one Omni app that I have become absolutely dependent upon is OmniGraffle. I use it extensively to assemble figures for publication and diagramming. I can find good alternatives for OO, but haven’t yet for OG. Does anyone have a good, MacOS alternative (leaves Visio out) for this purpose?