Introduction

This evening I did tons (and I mean tons) of research on moving my OmniOutliner outlines to my Palm. You see, I want writing environment that is more portable than my Powerbook, and the Palm fits that bill. Of course, not having a keyboard for my Palm will slow me down a lot, but that's easy enough to get.

Now, the only solution I could really find is using some Applescripts to go from OmniOutliner to BrainForest. BrainForest is a pretty good outliner, for the Palm, and here's why:

1. Notes can very large (about 32K).

   This is important if you're writing anything over a page...

2. It has an Applescriptable OS X application

   I won't use this, except via Applescript. The desktop outliner really sucks as compared with OmniOutliner. However, if I didn't have it around, I wouldn't be able to do anything

So, why do I need to use two Applescripts to go from Palm and back? Because no Palm outliner tool supports OPML. OPML is the Outline Markup Language, an XML based format that ends up being a really good transfer mechanism from one outliner to another. OmniOutliner exports this, and many of the other outliners on MacOS X read this, but no Palm outliners do. With a Palm outliner that read OPML as its native format, or even could Import it, my task would be fairly easy. Not so much.

Useful Tools I ran into (but that didn't fill my need) in my research:

• Mööjelitt Palm Converter

  A dozen or so Palm outliner formats to Mac, but none of them go the other way (Mac to Palm.) I really need two way communication for my task, as I really don't want to make my Palm my primary writing tool. Using Palm as the primary would slow down the entire process 100 fold

• OmniShadow Plugin For OmniOutliner Pro and ShadowPlan

  A plug in to sync Shadow and Omnioutliner.

Decent Outliners for the Palm:

• Arranger

  Probably didn't look at this because of the import/export issues I ran into

• Buzz

  Ohh, this was so close to fitting the bill... but I run a PalmOS 3.1 device, not a PalmOS 5 one. I'm really impressed though - runs on Mac, Linux, Windows, and PocketPCs (thanks to the magic of wxPython, I guess.)

• Bonsai

  Again, so close. OPML import and everything... except the desktop program (which does the OPML importing) is only for Windows.

• Inspiration

  With a desktop client too, this almost fit the bill... except Inspiration requires PalmOS 3.5 (and 8MB of memory!!???!!!)

• ShadowPlan

  Too complex with too many widgets for my tastes. I also believe it crashed, forcing me to reset my Palm device, which was just a little scary (what if I had been in the middle of something important?)

Misc Interesting Resources:

• Writing On Your Palm: Progect v Shadow.

  Two outliners for the Palm are Progect and Shadow. I didn't check out Progect, but Shadow was waaay too complex for me.

• PalmPower: Choosing the right outlining application

  Great article that seems to sum up the entire field of Palm outliners

• The Most Complete List of PalmOS Outliners I've Seen Yet

  Lists outliners for the PocketPC too!

• SproutLiner

  A web based outliner. DHTML, Javascript, and all sorts of fun stuff here

Articles On OmniOutliner:

• MacDevCenter: Flexible OmniOutliner

  Many, many, handy uses for OmniOutliner (export to your iPod, to Word, LaTeX, and others!)

• Ditto Blog: Double Take On OmniOutliner

  One man's second look at OmniOutliner, and what he found...

Conclusion:

I finally settled on BrainForest and a OmniOutliner to Brainforest Applescript. The catcher is that I'll still have to write the BrainForest to OmniOutliner component of the script. Oh, for the day where everybody imports and exports OPML...