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Wednesday, 3 April 2002 |
Outliners were software products popular during the 1980s for planning, organizing, listing and presenting ideas. Then they seemed to disappear as standalone products, but were actually being incorporated into personal computer operating systems and applications. List View on the Macintosh and in Windows is essentially an outline, with flippable triangles that serve to disclose further information.
Microsoft Word has an outliner, although it is a very mediocre one (now that’s a surprise, not) and I find that Word’s many annoyances piss me off so much that I do not use the product at all if I can help it. Nisus Writer 6.5 has an outliner apparently, and although I quite like earlier versions of Nisus Writer I don’t yet have a licence for version 6.5.
I had a tryout of the outliner built into UserLand Frontier, way back when Frontier was free, and I could immediately see the benefits of outlining for organizing my thoughts when writing long articles. It might even be a good idea to use an outliner when writing short pieces.
Since then I have tried out the outliner side of Inspiration, a mindmapping tool, and even More 3.1, a classic outliner for the Macintosh dating from the 1980s and available free at Dave Winer’s Outliners.Com. But you really need a good outliner built in to your text editing or word processing application for the process to be fully integrated. Nisus 6.5 might be the one for me.
Meanwhile Dave Winer has begun a variation on outlining as a communications tool, and it is in beta stage for the Radio UserLand product. He is calling it Instant Outlining. At a glance it looks like a terrific solution for the kind of collaborative work across time and space I was doing when last located in Western Australia.
Email and even chat clients just do not cut it when communicating with co-workers on group projects. Instant Outliner just might. The only problem is that I do not know of anyone using Radio UserLand besides myself and who I would want to collaborate and communicate with in this way.
At USD40.00 a licence, however, it might not be too hard to persuade future colleagues to equip themselves with a copy each.
Note: Mac OS X users may want to keep an eye on progress on the Omni Group’s OmniOutliner for X. Version 2 is due out soon.
9:57:43 AM 
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I have tried this out just now and it appears to be as good as Google. And it has the same elegant and minimalist interface. Recommended!
8:35:27 AM
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In Fortune magazine’s latest version of their America’s Most Admired Companies list Apple Computer ranks third in the Computers, Office Equipment division. Microsoft comes 4th overall. Limitless greed and monopolistic conniving must impress quite a few of America’s business leaders, because it can’t be the quality of their products or their honesty!
Apple Computer has influences in ways and on areas way beyond just computers and office equipment. I was touring the aisles of the newly re-opened David Jones store in Perth the other day and was struck by how many products there have been intimately affected by Apple’s design esthetic. So many products with translucent fruit-coloured plastic! It’s like every industry is watching what Apple does, and then if they do it it is OK to apply the same thing to their own products. The copying is superficial, in most cases, however.
8:26:12 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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