Steve, I see what you mean.

For me, I use a lot of bullet points and what one'd call, I guess, internal outlines or lists.

To a far greater extent than in PC programs, I found some of the Mac programs used fairly primitive approaches to making these kinds of outlines. In at least one of the programs, I had to actually play around with the little do-hickeys on the ruler to get what I wanted. Not impressive.

I wonder if in both the Mac and PC worlds there's an issue with software developers not always listening to the end users.

Daly

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

We all know there is no perfect application -- that holy grail of PIMs we are all
searching for. There are certainly valid criticisms that can be made of DevonThink.
But if I could have an exact version of DT on my PC, I'd take it in a second over any other
Windows application. And I say that as a fan of MyInfo and Zoot and OneNote. This is not
to say that it does everything better than those applications. But all in all it is, in
my opinion of course, a fuller, more useful application. AND, it uses a pretty
standard word processing engine, unlike any of the three Windows apps I've just
mentioned. Try doing extended selection in any of those applications and you'll get
three different responses. Do it in DevonThink and it behaves just like almost every
other Mac Application and most dedicated word processors for Windows.

I know I've
sounded this drum many times in the past, but I believe it is an important point,
especially for anyone doing any extensive writing in these programs. The editors
should behave in a standard way. Like it or not, the standard way has been set by Word
(for the record, I think it is a pretty good standard). If I have to stop and think about
how I use extended selection -- or if any kind of extended selection is even supported
-- it breaks my concentration on my work. As an example, say you've written a paragraph
and decide that the third sentence is really a better lead than the original, so you
want to move it. With standard extended selection, you just double click on the first
word of the sentence you want to move and drag to the end of that sentence -- the editor
scoops up words in full. Now just cut and paste it where you want it to go. Without
extended selection (and the way in which MyInfo and OneNote work), you have to
carefully place the cursor in front of the first word -- oh, but don't get that leading
space -- then drag to the end. Of course, this isn't the worst thing in the world, but I
find that when I have to do this, it pulls me right out of my thinking process, because
I've got to concentrate on placing that cursor in just the correct spot. It's annoying
and really unnecessary.

One of the benefits of my Mac book is that almost all of the
applications use the same editor. So writing in DevonThink or Scrivener or VoodooPad
or MacJournal feels exactly the same. Perhaps this isn't the most powerful of word
processors, but in making notes and first drafts, I don't need a powerful word
processor. I just need something that's easy to use. I can always export to Pages or
Mellel for final primping of the text if need be.

Steve